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"Attending the SOS conference this past weekend got me thinking about the roots of the debate over public education once again. I often think that there is an inherent difference between the way many of us think about the way we should organize ourselves that is not being dealt with. I think it has to do with whether you think of humanity mostly as one thing with common interests OR about 7 billion different things with about 7 billion different interests. About eight months ago I wrote about how I think this ideological divide creeps into our debate over charter schools without us even realizing it for Learning Matters. Here are my thoughts below. What do you think? Am I being overly simplistic?"

The Think Tank Review Project provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think-tank publications. Reviewers for the Think Tank Review Project apply academic peer review standards to reports from think tanks and write brief reviews for the project web site. They are asked to examine the reports for the validity of assumptions, methodology, results, and strength of links between results and policy recommendations. The reviews, written in non-academic language, are intended to help policy makers, reporters, and others assess the merits of the reviewed reports.

""This is one of the big insights for me. I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn't seem to work in a choice environment for education. I've studied competitive markets for much of my career. That's my academic focus for my work. And it's [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn't work. I think it's not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed. Frankly parents have not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we've had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. I think we need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools, but I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.""

While the bullying can be witnessed in the discourse coming from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former-chancellor Michelle Rhee, and billionaire-reformer Bill Gates, one of the most corrosive and powerful dynamics embracing bully politics is the rise of self-appointed think-tank entities claiming to evaluate and rank teacher education programs. A key player in bully politics is the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). NCTQ represents, first, the rise of think tanks and the ability of those think tanks to mask their ideologies while receiving disproportionate and unchallenged support from the media. Think tanks have adopted the format and pose of scholarship, producing well crafted documents filled with citations and language that frame ideology as "fair and balanced" conclusions drawn from the evidence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The New Republic has published a provocative profile of Diane Ravitch by my friend Kevin Carey, and it serves as a useful companion to the profile of Ravitch I wrote in June. Kevin, who works for the standards and accountability think tank Education Sector, is unsurprisingly more harshly critical of Ravitch than I was. He focuses a great deal of attention on her shortcomings as a historian, and while I think it's fair to point out that an ideological, polemical writing style has colored all of Ravitch's work, it's also the case that many celebrated, serious historians have held ideological worldviews, from Charles Beard to David Hofstadter to the Schlesingers. Gordon Wood's The Idea of America contains a lot of interesting thinking on the contributions and limitations of history colored by contemporary political concerns, and I think Ravitch's style follows the politically-engaged example set by the progressive historians in particular.

Tragically, our nation is in the midst of a mass extinction that threatens our future and this catastrophe will devastate our nation's ability to compete in the 21st century. America is in the process of systematically wiping out higher level thinking skills. Ironically, when I say "systematically" I am referring to our educational system. The skills needed for tomorrow (creative thinking, critical thinking, and problem solving) are being driven out of our children. Tragically this occurs during the process of becoming "educated." Unfortunately, we are equipping students for yesterday, not tomorrow.

"Can America Make It?" is the headline on the cover of the December issue of The American Prospect. The lead article is written by an old friend, Harold Meyerson, who argues that, "with the right trade and industrial policies," we can be a nation with a strong middle-class majority. It's a fascinating piece and makes me think that the debates we're having about school reform have so distracted us that we forget that a good education system depends on a strong society. There's no point in scaring 5-year-olds into thinking if you don't work hard, you won't get a good job-when in fact virtually no one (well-educated or not) is going to have a good job in the future. Except the 1 percent-or maybe it's 5 to 10 percent? Meyerson's vision is not going to be realized through reforming our schools, although they have a role to play. But it depends on whether we think having such an America is what we want to do-for all sorts of reasons. So our own grandchildren will earn decent livings, for example. So that we can sustain democracy, which in turn rests on a certain level of economic wellbeing and security.

If you listened just to news about public education or read some of the briefs coming out from the U.S. Department of Education, you could be forgiven for thinking that that the country is overrun by "dropout factories" and "failing schools," and that we are inundated by schools that need a dramatic "turnaround" or even a "takeover." You would be justified in thinking that the state of our nation's schools was in total decline and that there was little reason for cheer. Actually, the truth is very different.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, has issued a report calling for more charter schools as a key solution to what they think ails US schools. But a review of the report by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, calls the report "a dangerous guide for those  policymakers looking to turn around struggling schools."

I have been hanging around charter school operators for the past few days, and the experience has left me with some complicated - and perhaps contradictory - thoughts about a movement that I have been following since 1988. I love the energy, intelligence and dedication of the people I spent time with, but I left the annual meeting of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Minneapolis with some concerns. I think they need to do a better job of choosing their friends and of refining their message, among other issues. For what it's worth, here's my thinking.

"And in schools all over America, students are forced to "learn" in a way that befits deficit model thinking. We make sure that students are doubled and tripled up in the subjects they are worst at. Schools are reducing the amount of time students have music and phys-ed and even science so that kids have more time to raise their test scores. It is as if the sole purpose of schooling for many kids is just to make sure that they are slightly less bad at the things they are worst at. We have created a schooling environment where the sole purpose seems to be to ameliorate the worst of abilities our students have, rather than nurture the best of who they are. We have created a public environment where "reforms" label schools as failing without ever stepping foot in them on the basis of one metric."

The 2012 "Education Reformers" - They bully, they're arrogant and they appear to believe that the law applies to others but not them. As Michelle Rhee and the other out-of-state "Education Reformers" pour into Connecticut to join their allies in the effort to Governor Malloy's ill-conceived "Education Reform" bill you'd think they'd recognize the importance of following Connecticut's laws. But apparently these "Education Reformers" either believe they are above the law on simply don't care if they get fined for violating the lobbyist rules we have in place.

Students across the state are still scratching their heads over an absurd state test question about a talking pineapple. The puzzler on the eighth-grade reading exam stumped even educators and has critics saying the tests, which are becoming more high stakes, are flawed. "I think it's weird that they put such a silly question on a state test. What were they thinking?" said Bruce Turley, 14, an eighth-grader at Lower Manhattan Community Middle School. "I thought it was a little strange, but I just answered it as best as I could," said his classmate Tyree Furman, 14. "You just have to give it your best answer. These are important tests."

In its report, The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticizes local urban governance structures and presents the decentralized, charter-school-driven Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans as a successful model for fiscal and academic performance. Reviewing the report for the Think Twice think tank review project, Kristen Buras of Georgia State University writes that the report ignores the distinctive history of New Orleans and fails to provide evidence for its claims. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

You know what one of my great pet peeves is? When prominent people, who are granted a prominent place in our society's discourse, cite "research" without telling us what that research is. Case in point: Newark Superintendent of Schools Cami Anderson: Research shows that effective teachers put students on an entirely different life trajectory - toward college, a higher salary, even a more stable family life. I am committed to ensuring that we have a strong teacher in every classroom and great leader in every school. Based on my 20-plus years in education, I know we must significantly change how we recruit, select, develop and retain our educators. [...] Some research shows that we lose our best teachers to charter schools and other professions because they feel they are not growing and they become disheartened seeing students in ineffective classrooms. After multiple poor ratings validated by several people, we should presume that these few teachers are ineffective and partner with the union to manage them out - efficiently. [emphasis mine] I would dearly love to see this "research." I would love to evaluate it for myself and decide whether it's think-tanky nonsense or serious work done by serious people. But I can't, can I? Because Anderson won't tell me what it is, and the Star-Ledger thinks it's enough for her to cite it without checking it for themselves.

Three of Connecticut's "Big City" mayors had a commentary piece published in today's CTNewsjunkie.  They should have remembered the quote "It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" before they put their names on to today's piece entitled "Small Investment, Big Payoff".   (also linked below as well) Unless of course what they are referring to the price whoever wrote this piece paid to get them to sign it. It would be far better to believe that this piece was ghost written by the charter school lobbyists and the mayors didn't read it before they signed it than to think they would ever be so dismissive and insulting to the needs of their constituents.

As a parent who used to be in the classroom, I sometimes struggle with which perspective to think from: from that of a parent or from that of a teacher. Becoming a parent made me a much better and more understanding teacher. Conversely, strategies I used in teaching and things I learned there about human nature and interacting with children have proven invaluable to me as a parent. Interacting with other people's children, of course, is not the same thing as interacting with my own. My own children can tick me off in ways my students never could; I can have a hard time getting to that calm, clinical space with my own kids, even as I know I'd make fewer mistakes if I could get there. So sometimes I feel conflicted when it comes to advocacy and opinions. Watching my own children develop has taught me a lot about how people learn and has challenged some of my old (teacher's) thinking.

The Fordham Institute's Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction, an advocacy document outlining a vision for how technology might transform the teaching profession, provides little or no empirical research evidence to support its central claim that digital age technologies will improve the education system, according to a new review. The report was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by Luis Huerta of Teachers College at Columbia University. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

If there's an education crisis, it's one of at least 50 years duration. By the best national assessment we have available, it appears that the math skills of American fourth- and eighth-graders have been going up slowly but steadily for decades. Reading scores are also a tad better, although pretty flat. We need to do much better, and the fight over what to do next is mainly between people who think the big problem is a lack of resources and those who think it's all about accountability and standards and tests. Romney is definitely way over in camp two.

A reader posted a comment that I think is profound. The more that people begin to see education as a consumer choice, the more they will be unwilling to pay for other people's children. And if they have no children in school, then they have no reason to underwrite other people's private choices. The basic compact that public education creates is this: The public is responsible for the education of the children of the state, the district, the community. We all benefit when other people's children are educated. It is our responsibility as citizens to support a high-quality public education, even if we don't have children in the public schools. But once the concept of private choice becomes dominant, then the sense of communal responsibility is dissolved. Each of us is then given permission to think of what is best for me, not what is best for we.