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It's an argument that seems to bubble up cyclically. It doesn't matter what the hot policy idea du jour is, someone is bound to assert: What we're doing right now does not serve the needs of the gifted!

As 2011 draws to a close, we can confidently declare that one of the biggest debates over education is - mercifully - resolved. We may not have addressed all the huge challenges facing our schools, but we finally have empirical data ruling out apocryphal theories and exposing the fundamental problem.

How much is a good school system worth? The Virginia Beach, Va., school district believes its own system is worth about $1.53 for every $1 spent from the 70,000-student district's operating fund.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week that if it were up to him, he'd double class size and fire the 50 percent of teachers who are in the bottom half of effectiveness ratings:  "doubl[ing] the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students." Bloomberg, in his inimitable way, breezily insulted 80,000 teachers to make a point unsubstantiated by any social-science evidence.

Each day this week I have presented a response to different parts of Governor McDonnell's "Opportunity to Learn" education agenda. On Monday, I gave an introduction and talked about the goal of advancing literacy in the early grades. On Tuesday, I wrote about implications for repealing the unpopular Kings Dominion Law. On Wednesday, I talked about proceeding thoughtfully and carefully with expanding choice in the Commonwealth. On Thursday, I discussed evaluating principals and teachers. This concluding post brings me to the end and back to the place where I started in the first post of this series: Money.

As someone who has famously proclaimed, "I am the government," Gov. Andrew Cuomo must find the governor's limited role in the state's schools particularly galling. So, for the last two weeks, Cuomo has made it clear he no longer will stand on the sidelines while others run education here. In his State of the State speech and in comments on Martin Luther King Day, Cuomo plunged into the school wars and poised himself to take on the state's teachers unions. He is expected to continue this campaign in his budget address today. If the governor, who has a relatively skimpy record on education, gets more involved in schools, what exactly will he do? Who will benefit? And who will lose?

Michigan is ending the year with an estimated $1.2 billion budget surplus. But T-Party Gov. Rick Snyder is sitting on the money rather than funding the state's cash-starved public schools and rehiring laid-off teachers.

The answer to the often-debated question - Does money matter in providing a quality education? - is yes, according to a new report that reviewed research on the subject.

This policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn't make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.

It's easy to cut public education funding when your kids go to private school. Just ask Christie and Emanuel

This is the first post in a five-part series by Rachel Levy commenting on Virginia Governor McDonnell's 2012 education agenda, as announced last week.

School funding in Texas is in turmoil. State lawmakers slashed more than $4 billion from education this school year - one of the largest cuts in state history - and more than 12,000 teachers and support staff have been laid off. Academic programs and transportation have been cut to the bone. Promising reforms are on hold or on the chopping block. Next year, the cuts could go even deeper.

Governor Cuomo's commission on education has an opportunity to change the direction of school reform.

Growing up in New York City nearly half a century ago, I watched my parents try to get help for my developmentally disabled brother. There was very little available and my parents were told, on multiple occasions, by education and psychiatric professionals, to dispose of their defective child in an institution. They refused, embarking instead on a long and expensive struggle. I'm not sure how much less agonizing and lonely it is today for the parents of children with special needs--last August, a woman in Maryland killed her autistic son and herself out of despair about his school situation--but I do know that there are many public resources now that were not available when our family could have desperately used them.

State school officials are proposing changes in the evaluations of thousands of students with disabilities on Long Island and elsewhere that they say would save money for hard-pressed school districts.

Let me start by pointing out that Mathematica Policy Research, in my view, is an exceptional research organization. They have good people. They do good work and have done much to inform public policy in what I believe are positive ways. That's why I found it so depressing when I started digging through the recent report on Charter CMOs - a report which as framed, was intended to explore the differences in effectiveness, practices and resources of charter schools operated by various Charter Management Organizations.

Some of the $100 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated last year to help Newark Public Schools has now been spent, and you may be surprised to see where it is going.

According to the survey, three quarters of elementary schools, 61 percent of middle schools and 59 percent of high schools had increased class sizes. Slightly less than half of schools across the board reported having fewer teachers than in the previous year, with one quarter of those schools maintaining or increasing their student population.

Julia Steiny speaks with education technology leader Angela Maiers about the promise and future of ed tech - and how we integrate it into our classrooms.

This report presents data from the School District Finance Survey (F-33) of the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system for school year (SY) 2008-09 (fiscal year [FY] 2009). The F-33 is a district-level financial survey that consists of data submitted annually to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau (Census) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.