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By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city's most storied high schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind-part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three schools reflect some of the city's most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E. L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists-more than any other high school in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country's top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students. This spring and summer, however, more than a third of the school's social-studies department-eight of the twenty teachers-announced they wouldn't be returning for the 2011 school year. Their departure came after similar exoduses in other departments. In 2009, it was math; before that, English. In 2010, nearly a quarter of the teachers at Bronx Science had less than three years of experience; the corresponding numbers at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech were 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The reason for the seismic upheaval, virtually everyone agrees, is Valerie Reidy.

Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan: "Who here wants to be a teacher?" Out of a class of 15, two hands went up - one a little reluctantly. "In my country, that would be 25 percent of people," Dr. Sahlberg said. "And," he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, "it would be more like this."

This was written by Fred Smith, a retired New York City Board of Education senior analyst who worked for the city public school system in test research and development. In this post he writes about New York state's standardized testing program for students. Though his comments are specific to New York, the same types of problems are prevalent in other states as well.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy today outlined six broad principles that he says will guide the debate on education reform next year, including "intensive interventions" by the state in troubled school systems and a lighter bureaucratic touch at successful ones. In a two-page letter addressed to legislators and stakeholders, Malloy hinted at a willingness to take up the politically charged issue of tenure and pay reform, saying teachers and principals should be valued for "skill and effectiveness" over "seniority and tenure."

...this year's crop of seniors is the third-to-last that will ever graduate from Columbus. The school is in the process of being closed because of its low performance, despite valiant efforts to fend off the city's decision that included hearings, lawsuits, and two attempts at charter school conversion. This year, no new ninth-graders enrolled, and Columbus is scheduled to graduate its last students in 2014. It is now just one of seven schools sharing space in the four-story stone building that once housed it alone.

Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, addressed teachers at the National Council for the Social Studies national conference on December 2, 2011.  She agreed to be interviewed for HNN the following week.

New York is on notice: The feds are threatening to yank nearly $1 billion in education funding unless the state adopts a new teacher evaluation system. Senior members of U.S. Education Secretary Arnie Duncan's office warned Gov. Cuomo's team Friday that New York would lose the staggering sum - at least $300 million more than previously thought - if the state made no progress on a system to grade teachers, a source with direct knowledge of the discussions said.

State officials have instead chosen to use one English test to assess every high school student in the state, which has caused another fairly gigantic problem: How do you create a single graduation exam for 200,000 seniors when some are heading to the Ivy League and others to pump gas? If the standard is set too high, so many will fail - including children with special education needs and students for whom English is a second language - that there will be a public outcry. But if the standard is set too low, the result is a diploma that has little meaning. So far, officials have opted to dumb down the state tests.

Last spring, when I was teaching at a small school in the Bronx, I caused an unnecessary ruckus by posting my thoughts about a presentation my staff received on the looming impacts of PARCC and Common Core implementation. The post was shared by Gotham Schools, in the Digest for Grassroots Education, and was disseminated to many UFT chapter leaders. I discovered soon afterward that my words were seriously concerning to a number of senior DOE employees, including, apparently, Chancellor Walcott and Deputy Chancellor Suransky.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Listen as Diane Ravitch dismantle Rhee's proxy, Tim Melton, on issues of teacher tenure, seniority, testing, and teacher evaluation.

"No one knows who I am," exclaimed a senior in a high-poverty, predominantly minority and low-performing high school in the Austin area. She explained, "I have been at this school four years and had four principals and six algebra I teachers." Elsewhere in Texas, the first school to be closed by the state for low performance was Johnston High School, which was led by 13 principals in the 11 years preceding closure. The school also had a teacher turnover rate greater than 25 percent for almost all of the years and greater than 30 percent for 7 of the years. While the above examples are rather extreme cases, they do underscore two interconnected issues - teacher and principal turnover - that often plague low-performing schools and, in the case of principal turnover, afflict a wide range of schools regardless of performance or school demographics. In recent years, those seeking to improve schooling through efforts to increase teacher effectiveness and build teacher capacity have quickly realized that such efforts rely heavily on principal capacity and stability.

"The question of what to do with bad teachers has stymied America's education system of late, sparking chaotic protests in state capitals and vitriolic debate in a recent congressional hearing. It has also stoked the movement known as 'education reform,' which has zeroed in on teacher quality by urging school districts to sort the star teachers from the duds, and reward or punish them accordingly. The idea is that America's schools would be able to increase their students' test scores if only they had better teachers. Since 2007, this wave of education reformers -- in particular Democrats for Education Reform, a group backed by President Barack Obama and hedge fund donors -- has clashed with teachers unions in their pursuit of making the field of education as discerning in its personnel choices as, say, that of finance. Good teachers should be promoted and retained, reformers contend, instead of being treated like identical pieces on an assembly line, who are rewarded with tenure for their staying power or seniority. But what to do with the underperformers?"

"I received the following description of the appearance of Michelle Rhee and her husband at the University of Hawaii, where they lectured on "Ethics and Education." Rhee paused briefly from her national campaign to raise $1 billion to remove teachers' collective bargaining rights, to strip them of tenure and seniority, and to promote vouchers and charters, to share her wisdom about American education."

New York City voters strongly disapprove of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's handling of the public schools, and are much more likely to trust the teachers' union than the mayor to advocate for students, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday morning. But voters also support many of Mr. Bloomberg's most recent education proposals, even though they have been opposed or questioned by the United Federation of Teachers. The poll found, for example, that voters support the mayor's desire to use teacher performance, not seniority, as the key factor when layoffs are required. They also favor his proposals to increase salaries for the highest-performing teachers and to make it easier to remove teachers who are chronically underperforming.

District 15 parents, legal advocates and other supporters from the community held a press conference outside of 284 Baltic Street, between Court and Smith Streets, Wednesday morning to announce their intention to sue founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools Eva Moskowitz, Brooklyn Success Academy III Trustees and the DOE over the alleged unlawful authorization of the charter school. The impassioned speeches were as chilly as the temperature on the sidewalk. "The Success Charter Network and Eva Moskowitz with the participation of the SUNY Board of Trustees have unlawfully co-located in this building in violation of the school's charter and charter law," said Sabrina Tann, senior staff counsel for Advocates for Justice.

For a short while yesterday - more than I would have liked to - I followed the circus of testimony and tweets about proposed education reform legislation in Connecticut. The reform legislation - SB 24 - includes the usual reformy elements of teacher tenure reform, ending seniority preferences, expanding and promoting charter schooling, etc. etc. etc. And the reformy circus had twitpics of of eager undergrads (SFER) & charter school students (as young as Kindergarten?) shipped in and carrying signs saying CHARTER=PUBLIC (despite a body of case law to the contrary, and repeated arguments, some lost in state courts [oh], by charter operators that they need not comply with open records/meetings laws or disclose employee contracts), and tweeting reformy platitudes and links to stuff they called research supporting the reformy platform (Much of it tweeted as "fact checking" by the ever-so-credible ConnCAN). Ignored in all of this theatre-of-the-absurd was any actual substantive, knowledgeable conversation about the state of public education in Connecticut, the nature of the CT achievement gap and the more likely causes of it, and other problems/failures of Connecticut education policy.

One common strain of modern education reform has a direct, yet familiar logic: An education crisis persists despite more spending, smaller classes, or curricular changes. We have ignored the major cause of student achievement: teacher quality. Seniority and tenure have diluted the pool of talented teachers and impeded student learning. Reformers such as Michelle Rhee have acted on this assumption, implementing test-based accountability measures, merit pay, and lesser job protections. Unfortunately, the current educational reform movement shares its logic with the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement, which in efforts to improve our gene pool, wrote a horrific chapter in our history. In suggesting this provocative comparison, I hope to guide readers through three shared errors. Both eugenics and modern school reform view education too deterministically, share a faith in standardized tests, and exaggerate the fixedness of traits.

Gov. Jindal has submitted a legislative proposal that would offer vouchers to more than half the students in the state; vastly expand the number of privately managed charter schools by giving the state board of education the power to create up to 40 new charter authorizing agencies; introduce academic standards and letter grades for pre-schoolers; and end seniority and tenure for teachers. Under his plan, the local superintendent could immediately fire any teacher-tenured or not-who was rated "ineffective" by the state evaluation program. If the teacher re-applied to teach, she would have to be rated "highly effective" for five years in a row to regain tenure. Tenure, needless to say, becomes a meaningless term, since due process no longer is required for termination. The bill is as punitive as possible with respect to public education and teachers. It says nothing about helping to improve or support them. It's all about enabling students to leave public schools and creating the tools to intimidate and fire teachers. This "reform" is not conservative. I would say it is radical and reactionary. But it is in no way unique to Louisiana.