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A recent lengthy post from the Shanker Blog by Matt DiCarlo got my attention just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday entitled "The Uncertain Future of Charter School Proliferation." The post, and the blog as a whole, are no fan of charter schools, and casts doubt on charters in general on a national scale. Two areas of charter success in the country, the post acknowledges are Boston and New York City, as certain studies show. One factor, Mr. DiCarlo suggests, is that the "market share" of charter schools in these cities is small, so they they can "get a larger share" of "finite sources," presumably private funding. Count me skeptical on that one. Mr. DiCarlo also acknowledges more credibly that successful charter schools devote much greater time teaching and tutoring than district schools, which contribute to the higher charter results in Boston and New York City.

Sunday's newspaper featured a story about full-time public virtual schools, a new model of education that's growing fast even though critics say there's scant evidence that it is an effective way to teach kids. The story focused on Herndon-based K12 Inc., the nation's largest operator of virtual schools. Its schools (which educate about 95,000 students in 29 states and the District) tend to have lower state test scores and graduation rates than brick and mortar schools.

This was written by Joanne Yatvin, a longtime public school educator, author and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She teachers part-time at Portland State University and is writing a book on good teaching in high poverty schools.

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum - a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan's experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises.

The departure of half the core teaching staff at an elite Upper West Side elementary school has roiled parents who worry test prep is destroying the school's creative spirit. In July, close to half of the parents at the Special Music School signed a letter decrying the "apparent shift in school culture" and the new principal's leadership.  "This is not the same place it was three years ago," said a 3rd-grade parent, who like most interviewed, asked to remain anonymous for fear of negative repercussions for their children. "There's a lot of talk about data and test prep, and I didn't used to hear that." The school, which until recently was a program at PS 199, provides an almost private-school like experience for musically gifted students who must audition in kindergarten and again in 5th grade for middle school.

Here in NYC, while expanding the bureaucracy, increasing spending on education by 50 percent and raising teacher salaries by 40 percent, Bloomberg has also managed to eliminate thousands of teaching positions.  Class sizes this year in the early grades are the largest they have been in eleven years. The result?  Student achievement has stagnated.

It's generally true that the more that parents are involved in their children's education, the more academically successful their children will be and the more effective the teachers will (at least appear to) be. I largely agree with Thomas Friedman's take on this.

Video of panel discussion and links to resources. This briefing was sponsored by the Office of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in partnership with the Coalition for Teaching Quality.

It's hard to tell whether cloud computing is "the next big thing" or just another buzz word, but, according to a recent survey of 5,300 organizations in 38 countries, change is already taking place: "the promises of reduced cost, improved performance and greater scalability" are driving interest in "moving to cloud." But what does cloud computing mean to those of us who care about education, teaching and learning?

A Palo Alto-based charter school network recognized for its innovative teaching of low-income students won approval late tonight to open 20 additional K-5 schools in the San Jose area within five years. Culminating a seven-hour meeting at which dozens of public speakers were sharply divided, the Santa Clara County Board of Education voted 5-2 to approve Rocketship Education's dramatic expansion. The decision positions the not-for-profit to become one of California's largest charter school operators. Speakers included San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who was in favor of the expansion, and several school district superintendents, who were not.

Amid the debates about our public schools and the need for education reform, the impact of poverty on student learning outcomes seems to be missing. Research has established a clear link between poverty and student performance. Yet many critics of public schools deride the poverty-achievement link as an excuse for poor teaching. What do the data show about the relationship between student poverty levels and schools' performance?

When the National Research Council published the results of a decade-long study on the effects of standardized testing on student learning this summer, critics who have long opposed the use of exams as a teaching incentive rejoiced. But Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist who is influential in education research, now says the "told you so" knee-jerk reaction was unwarranted: In an article released Monday by Harvard University's journal Education Next, Hanushek argues that the report misrepresents its own findings, unjustifiably amplifying the perspective of those who don't believe in testing. His article has even caused some authors of the NRC report to express concerns with its conclusions.

If 2010 was the year of the bombshell in research in the three "major areas" of market-based education reform - charter schools, performance pay, and value-added in evaluations - then 2011 was the year of the slow, sustained march. Last year, the landmark Race to the Top program was accompanied by a set of extremely consequential research reports, ranging from the policy-related importance of the first experimental study of teacher-level performance pay (the POINT program in Nashville) and the preliminary report of the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching project, to the political controversy of the Los Angeles Times' release of teachers' scores from their commissioned analysis of Los Angeles testing data. In 2011, on the other hand, as new schools opened and states and districts went about the hard work of designing and implementing new evaluations compensation systems, the research almost seemed to adapt to the situation. There were few (if any) "milestones," but rather a steady flow of papers and reports focused on the finer-grained details of actual policy.

In Wisconsin, there has been a bigger push to adopt merit pay ever since Scott Walker limited the collective bargaining rights for teacher unions.  Merit pay sounds like a good idea in concept, especially to those in the business world, but most teachers know that it is a crock.  In theory, merit pay, would work in a way that you determine the quality of the teacher and reward them based on that quality.  This brings about many problems.  The biggest of which is how do you determine the quality of teachers? This has been a widely debated topic in many of the recent educational reform debates.  Should we measure based solely on standardized tests? This would result in more teaching to the tests, a narrowing of curriculum, and most likely cheating to ensure the bonuses as we have seen in Atlanta and DC.

The Mayor's statement that teachers represent the "bottom 20%" of our society  is so outrageous, so disdainful and so demonizing of teachers and the teaching profession as to merit a defamation suit.  And the policies which have been generated by these beliefs so destructive and demoralizing to those teachers, to our children, to our schools and to our communities as to merit a recall. 

A paradox of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society's cutting edge.

In his recent State of the State address, Governor Cuomo said he wants to be an advocate for children. Let him lobby to protect their natural curiosity and love of learning from the onslaught of anti-intellectual, ends-oriented teaching practices forced on our educators by over-emphasis on standardized tests.

Haven't heard of Yolie Flores? You will soon. And if you've been fighting for teacher quality but need more allies, she might be your new best friend. The educator who helped revolutionize Los Angeles's sprawling school system has just launched a national organization to ratchet up the conversation around teacher quality by, among other things, getting parents seriously involved in school reform efforts. Called Communities for Teaching Excellence (C4TE), Flores's new organization is a Gates Foundation-funded advocacy group whose initial focus will be the four "deep dive" Gates districts-Memphis, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Hillsborough County (Florida)-which were awarded $335 million to overhaul teacher evaluation and support. If Flores's past accomplishments are any indication, C4TE won't be content to put out reports and hold polite press conferences: Flores's four-year stint on the LAUSD board included pushing through a controversial process that gives teachers and outside nonprofits a chance to help fix the district's most challenged schools each year.

In this weeks' program we look at the attempt by education reformers to impose value added measures on teacher evaluation as an example of how neoliberal forces have used the economic crisis to blackmail schools into practices that do not serve teaching and learning, but do serve the corporate profiteers as they work to privatize public education and limit the goals of education to vocational training for corporate hegemony. These processes constrict possibilities for educational experiences that are critical, relational and transformative. We see that in naming these processes and taking risks both individually and collectively we can begin to speak back to and overcome these forces. In this program we speak with Sean Feeney, principal from Long Island New York, about the stance he and other principals have taken against the imposition of value added measures in the new Annual Professional Performance Review in New York State. We also speak with Celia Oyler, professor of education at Teachers College Columbia University, and Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, about the impact of value added measures on teacher education and the corporate powers behind these measures.

Perhaps you've seen the wonderful film, Precious Knowledge, about the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson. One of the teachers featured is Curtis Acosta, along with his remarkable students. In the letter below, which Acosta allowed Rethinking Schools to reprint here, he offers a perspective on the curricular repression that teachers and students are confronting in Tucson. For a flavor of what knowledge is outlawed by the new law, take a look at the essay assignment Acosta gave students about Ana Castillo's novel So Far From God, excerpted below, and the changes that school district authorities demanded.