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Video of Commissioner King's presentation at the NYSCOSS Fall Conference on Superintendent Leadership and the Regents Reform Agenda.

Last month, students at Great Neck North High School were accused of paying an Emory University student to take the SAT exam for them. A new report now says the investigation is expanding to two other Long Island School districts and a private school, and officials say they have identified at least one more student who may have impersonated students and taken SATs for payments. SchoolBook invited student journalists at city high schools to write about the cheating scandal. Students from Stuyvesant High School submitted a news article and an editorial from The Spectator, the Stuyvesant High School newspaper.

Presentation to NYS School Superintendents.

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.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other state authorities are pushing a plan to evaluate all kindergartners as they enter school, to determine their readiness for the classroom. The proposed new requirement, which would take effect in the 2014-15 school year, aims in part at helping the state win an estimated $100 million in grants offered by the Obama administration to upgrade early-childhood education.

Released in August, the U.S. Department of Education study mapping state proficiency standards onto the National Assessment of Educational Progress scales produced a remarkable statement from Joanne Weiss, the chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. According to an article in the Aug. 24 issue of Education Week, Weiss said the practice of permitting each state to set its own proficiency standards amounts to "lying to parents, lying to children, lying to teachers and principals about the work they're doing." Her intemperate outburst crosses the line, not only by the standards of what passes for civil discourse in Washington these days, but also for what it says about the assessment itself. Indeed, a plausible case can be made that when it comes to telling fibs about proficiency, NAEP has a nose that annually grows longer, for its definition of proficiency is seriously flawed.

...as Democrats Abroad France wrote recently in a proposal submitted to the Democratic Party Platform Committee: "We cannot improve education by quick fixes, by handing over our public schools to entrepreneurs, by driving out experienced professionals replacing them with enthusiastic amateurs, or by closing them and firing ... entire staffs. No country in the world follows such strategies."

As I predicted, there was no miracle in DC under Michelle Rhee's reign. At least not one you can see on the NAEP scores for fourth or eighth grade students in reading and math.

Imagine you're a parent of a seven-year-old who has just come home from school with her end-of-year report card. And the report card provides marks for only two subjects, and for children who are in grade-levels different from hers. Furthermore, there's nothing on the report card to indicate how well these children have been progressing throughout the year. There are no teacher comments, like "great participation in class" or "needs to turn in homework on time." And to top it off, the report gives a far harsher assessment of academic performance than reports you've gotten from other sources. That's just the sort of "report card" that was handed to America yesterday in the form of the National Assessment of Education Progress. And while the NAEP is all well and good for what it is -- a biennial norm-referenced, diagnostic assessment of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading -- the results of the NAEP invariably get distorted into all kinds of completely unfounded "conclusions" about the state of America's public education system.

If you follow education research - or quantitative work in any field - you'll often hear the term "significant effect." For example, you will frequently read research papers saying that a given intervention, such as charter school attendance or participation in a tutoring program, had "significant effects," positive or negative, on achievement outcomes. This term by itself is usually sufficient to get people who support the policy in question extremely excited, and to compel them to announce boldly that their policy "works." They're often overinterpreting the results, but there's a good reason for this. The problem is that "significant effect" is a statistical term, and it doesn't always mean what it appears to mean. As most people understand the words, "significant effects" are often neither significant nor necessarily effects. Let's very quickly clear this up, one word at a time, working backwards.

"There is growing evidence that the corporate-sponsored education reform project is on its last legs. The crazy patchwork of half-assed solutions on offer for the past decade have one by one failed to deliver, and one by one they are falling. Can the edifice survive once its pillars of support have crumbled?"

"On July 28, 2014, following the  BAT Rally outside the US Department of Education, a delegation of BATS went up to  the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights to share some of the main issues that BATS had with  Department Policy."

"But the biggest thing to keep in mind about these results is that most of the important lessons cannot be gleaned from the results alone. Perhaps the most important considerations is how teachers and other stakeholders (e.g., principals) respond to the system. For example, do teachers change their classroom practice based on the scores or feedback from observations? Do the ratings and feedback influence teachers' decisions to stay in the profession (or in their school/district)? How do these outcomes vary between districts using different measures or scoring? These are also questions that really matter, and they are not answerable in the short-term, and they certainly cannot be addressed looking at highly aggregate distributions across rating categories and imposing one's pre-existing beliefs on how they should turn out."

"Here is an open letter to Alexander and his committee about the NCLB rewrite that was written by an award-winning principal, Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York."

"Justice in education---the idea that schools distribute opportunity to all children---must be systemic. A public education system like ours in the United States---publicly funded, universally available, and accountable to the public---is the best way I know to balance the needs of each particular child with society's responsibility to protect the rights of all children. While there are some excellent charter schools, I believe the growing charter school movement threatens our system of public education."

"This is a life-or-death time for the American Federation of Teachers. The July 12-14, 2014, convention reflected both positive movement, and continuing obstacles, for our union. As we take on the challenges we all face with the opening of schools, we AFT members will face both from our union. Much will depend on how successfully we get our union to respond."

"The biggest threat to education today is the corporate education reform movement-what many of us call "Ed Deform." It is also the biggest threat to teachers' working conditions."

"I first heard of Doug Christensen back in 2008, when he was still serving as Commissioner of Education in Nebraska. He was forced to resign because the locally-based assessment system he had developed there did not meet the mandates of No Child Left Behind - as described in this interview here. I connected with Christensen again a couple of years later, and we discussed the importance of local initiative and self determination. This week, I caught up with him again, as he has been on Capitol Hill, sharing his views with lawmakers wrestling with the reauthorization of ESEA. Here is what he has to say."