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"John King recently resigned as New York state's education commissioner after a tumultuous tenure in which he helped create and implement a controversial education evaluation system and rushed the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and aligned testing. (He is now going to work as a top assistant to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who apparently thought the controversy that King created was just fine.)  That evaluation system, known as APPR, required that 20 percent of an educator's evaluation be based on student standardized test scores. Now, New York Schools Chancellor Merryl Tisch wants to make new changes. What are they and why would they take a flawed evaluation system from bad to worse? This post explains."

Though Colorado is more than a year away from implementing its new teacher-evaluation system, doubts have surfaced about the state's ability to launch such a sweeping initiative on time and with adequate resources for professional development. Educators from some of the 27 districts piloting all or part of the new system say that effort has turned out to be a complex and time-consuming task heaped upon demands of other education reforms.

Michigan sometimes gets short shrift in school reform news, what with all of the publicity given this year to Wisconsin - where some Democratic legislators left the state to avoid a vote on Gov. Scott Walker's efforts to restrict collective bargaining rights of teachers - and to Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich just saw voters repeal his effort to curb collective bargaining for public sector workers. But it shouldn't. Michigan's legislature this year has been considered a host of Republican-sponsored bills that public school advocates see as attacks on schools and teachers.

"In a conversation about the intractable problems of the Middle East, one of David Grossman's characters in his compelling novel, "To the End of the Land," says, "Who could possibly come up with a new, decisive argument that hasn't been heard?" An equal sense of frustration must lurk in the efforts to construct a reasonable, fair way to assess the performances of public school teachers."

After scoring a legislative win with a recently-enacted state law limiting teacher tenure and strike rights, the well-heeled education advocacy group Stand for Children is turning its attention to issues specific to Chicago-including school turnarounds. On Wednesday, the group announced that it is launching a radio campaign to "educate Chicagoans about the value of public turnaround schools." Group leaders also plan to host "telephone town hall meetings" where CPS officials and community leaders can discuss with residents of the South and West sides the "need for quality schools."

The education debate in New Jersey is increasingly becoming a debate about local control of schools. Governor Christie and ACTING Education Commissioner Cerf's emphasis on standardized testing, charter schools, and tenure reform are top-down policy edicts that take more and more authority away from local districts and put it into the hands of Trenton. What's emerged over the last year in response is a true grassroots resistance to the imposition of corporate "reform." Boards of education, parents, teachers, and concerned citizens are coming together in an effort to stop the destruction of New Jersey's outstanding public school system through state-wide fiat.

The White House has announced its plan to grant waivers of the provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to states that agree to put in place the education reforms favored by the administration. Thus states that agree, for example, to adopt the Common Core state standards for what students should learn and to evaluate teachers for tenure based on student test gains will be freed from the consequences facing schools that fail to meet adequate yearly progress goals under NCLB. The reforms the administration seeks as a condition of granting waivers are the same that it put forward in its Blueprint for reauthorizing NCLB, and that it advanced in its Race to the Top competition using the $5 billion in discretionary funds made available to it by Congress under the Stimulus Act.

A fund called The Michael R. Bloomberg Revocable Trust, of which the principal trustee is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, donated $100,000 to a Baton Rouge-based political action committee just days before a pivotal Louisiana election that decided the make-up of the state's main K-12 board of education. The PAC in question, Alliance for Better Classrooms, spent at least $300,000 in contributions on behalf of generally pro-charter, anti-teacher-tenure and anti-union candidates running for positions on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

It is an almost universal tribute offered about Michelle Rhee's 3 1/2 -year tenure of the Washington D.C. school district - that if she accomplished one thing, it was to instill a sense of urgency in the city about the need to fix broken schools that had failed children for decades. Actually, it was Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who hired Rhee and gave her carte blanche, who made school reform the city's top priority. Rhee got all the attention because Fenty wanted it that way.

Governor Chris Christie, after proclaiming 2011 the "year of education reform" in January, is running out of time to make good on overhauling New Jersey's school system before lawmakers wrap up the current session. Christie, 49, a first-term Republican, said during a Nov. 18 speech at the University of Notre Dame that the teachers' union has a "$130 million political slush fund" to thwart his plans. He said the New Jersey Education Association uses it "to help their friends and punish their enemies."

Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies on education reform are considering an unprecedented, statewide expansion of private school vouchers and steps to more closely link teachers' job security with performance, according to two officials who have consulted with the governor's office on proposals for this year's session at the Louisiana Legislature.

"This was written by Carol Burris and Harry Leonadartos. Burris is the principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York.  Leonadartos is the principal of Clarkstown High School North in Rockland County, New York. Carol is the co-author and Harry is an active supporter of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student scores."

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.

On Oct. 1, 650 people attended the 4th annual Northwest Teachers for Social Justice conference in Seattle.  Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp gave a well-received talk on "Challenging Corporate Ed Reform." He ended on an uplifting note with " 10 hopeful, tangible signs of organizing resistance and alternatives to the corporate reform agenda."    The following is an excerpt from that presentation.

Dan Malloy is saying - you better get your legislators to cave in and vote for my version of the bill because if they don't your towns don't get the money.  If your towns don't get the money, you either don't provide the education services or you have to raise your local property taxes to meet those costs.. $40 million dollars to help 200,000 kids in return in return for what I want (or you get nothing).

"Lindsay Wagner is an excellent journalist at NC Policy Watch. She covers the legislature. Here is her summary of the slash-and-burn policies that the legislature applied to public education"

"Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and soon-to-be acting Education Commissioner Elizabeth Berlin offered a host of proposals that would dramatically change education policy in New York state in a 20-page letter released Wednesday."