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Thanks to Darren Marelli, here are highlights from the hearing that occurred on Tuesday about the controversial proposal to co-locate another branch of the Success Academy charter chain in Cobble Hill, District 15, in Brooklyn.  Passionate and articulate parents, teachers, elected officials, students and community members spoke out against this damaging, deceptive and most probably illegal proposal, and pointed out how the co-location will likely wreck the schools that now inhabit the building, one of which is in transformation, by overcrowding them, forcing them to increase class size and lose valuable programs.  Does the DOE care?  You be the judge.

For 10 years Mayor Bloomberg and his aides have been playing a numbers game with the people of New York. When he took over the school system, things were to be magically transformed. Social promotion would be eliminated. Test scores would go up. High school graduation rates would go up. The 1.1 million schoolchildren would be in a better place. Well, it hasn't happened.

Ever since the Finland-Alberta partnership was launched in Edmonton last March at an international symposium titled Informed Transformation from the Inside Out: International Perspectives on the Fourth Way in Action, the partnership has been guided by the view that school development emanates from the inside out. In short, the partnership is based on the hypothesis that the real work of reform and the locus of influence for positively achieving educational development are the school, not the system.

The charter school movement is gaining in popularity and maturity two decades after the passage of the state law authorizing the schools. Charter backers had hoped the creation of publicly financed, privately managed schools would reinvent and transform public education. Charters clearly have fostered change within the system. But education experts and even some of those in on the ground floor of the charter movement say the broader goal has not been achieved.

This transformation of the New Orleans educational system may turn out to be the most significant national development in education since desegregation. Desegregation righted the morality of government in schooling. New Orleans may well right the role of government in schooling.

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.

There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from the NYC Department of Education's last minute walk out of negotiations over a teacher evaluation system for 33 schools placed in the Transformation and Restart models: it was always Tweed's intention to refuse to enter into an agreement for teacher evaluations.

Mulgrew expressed hope that Governor Cuomo's call to school districts to adopt new evaluation systems for teachers or risk losing a portion of their state funding would put pressure on the mayor and the DOE to return to the bargaining table and negotiate an evaluation system for 33 restart and transformation schools.

The UFT has filed legal papers with the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to declare impasse in the negotiations between the UFT and the NYC Department of Education (DOE) over a teacher evaluation system for schools that had been placed in the Transformation and Restart models of school improvement. We have charged the DOE with walking away from the negotiations that they were required to complete in good faith by the agreement they had signed with the UFT last June. Further, since the DOE has explicitly refused to negotiate an appeals system, with repeated statements to the UFT in negotiations that they would never overturn a supervisor's rating on an issue of substance - a stance confirmed by the 99.5% rate at which they currently turn down U rating appeals - they are in direct violation of state education law which requires a substantive appeals process. If PERB declares impasse, as we have reason to believe they will, the NYC DOE will be forced back to the negotiations table to complete the process they agreed to undertake last June.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered his first State of the City address in 2002, to a wounded city still shaken by the death and destruction of a terrorist attack, he vowed to rebuild Lower Manhattan, but he also trained his focus on the city's much-maligned school system. "We must strengthen teacher evaluation and training," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We must improve teacher retention by focusing compensation on those educators just starting their careers." Ten years later, having wrested control of the sprawling system and transformed it into a national laboratory for reform, Mr. Bloomberg devoted most of his penultimate State of the City speech on Thursday to education, which he hopes will form the cornerstone of his legacy.

The UFT and the Department of Education have been in intensive negotiations for the past two months over the details of a new teacher evaluation system for schools designated for the "restart" and "transformation" federal intervention models only. With a Dec. 31 deadline looming for finalizing an agreement, both sides are meeting in subcommittees and going back and forth on key issues.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan plays school with scantrons. Those lovely lead-filled bubbles help him sort the wheat from the chaff in classrooms all over America. He and other market-based reformers claim there is now "scientific evidence" to sort the ineffective teacher from the strong.  And after the weak contributors to scantron scores are found, we can fire our way to excellence.  We will drill and drill our students and raise the bar so high, every child will walk under it.  The caring teachers who spark creativity and joy will disappear. She will be replaced by those who cower in fear of their number score.  My colleagues are already seeing the transformation. The rich conversations about teaching and learning that used to occur after observations are being replaced by timid voices asking, "What is my number?" But do not worry, as we Race to the Top, Mr. Duncan has a plan of 'best practices' in place to increase educational productivity.

I am a teacher at ...... one of the PLA schools. .... has been a "Transformation School" since September 2010. I have been a Social Studies teacher at this school since September 1990. Yesterday, we were summoned to the auditorium for a special faculty meeting. Our very well-liked principal, . . . conveyed the information he'd received from his superiors: the City intended to change our school to a Turnaround Model. The implications were not completely clear, but it almost certainly meant that we teachers and our supervisors would have to re-apply for our positions to come back in September 2012, and around half of us would not be re-employed.

An Indianapolis-based nonprofit organization has crafted a sweeping plan for reworking the 33,000-student Indianapolis school system that would place the district under the control of the city's mayor, pare down the money spent in central administration, and give principals broad authority to hire and fire teachers. The reform plan created by the Mind Trust organization would transform the district's schools into what the report calls "Opportunity Schools," which would be given "unprecedented freedom over staffing, budgets, curriculum, and culture," as long as they continued to meet high standards. Those schools would compete for students who live within the district's boundaries.

My hard-working, middle-class parents, like millions of American families, depended on their neighborhood public schools to provide quality education for their children, and rightfully so. Certainly, all parents in the U.S. should be able to choose the educational option that works best for them and their children. Most important, in this nation, every family in every community should have access to good schools. The only difference among schools should be perhaps each having a different focus. No parent anywhere in these United States should have to move or risk arrest in order to secure quality education for her/his child(ren).   How is it then, that millions of American children live in neighborhoods with schools chronically neglected by the same political/educational system that now wants to condemn them as "failing"?  In such settings, it is hypocritical and cruel to use the illusion of "choice" and "free-market competition" to justify closing or taking even more resources from those same schools; sending parents scurrying for scarce or non-existent schooling options. 

Today, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation will head out to an "island" resort on the coast of Florida to a unique "education academy" sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There will be no students or teachers. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations will meet behind closed doors to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise.

Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, indoctrination, conformity, and imagination. What do you think of the current educational system? What practical things can be transformed in today's systems?

At the very least, I have to rethink my views of Darling-Hammond and the ill-considered labels thrown around in school policy battles, because I know the Hillsdale story is real. I attended Hillsdale and have visited often since graduating. Former Hillsdale principal Don Leydig, one of the most influential participants in its changes, has been my friend since third grade.

One of the signature issues of the Obama administration's education reform strategy is "turning around" low-performing schools. We have been led to believe that schools with low test scores can be dramatically changed by firing the principal, replacing half or all the staff, closing the school or turning the school over to private management. Part of the corporate reformers' message is that turning around a school may be painful but that it can produce transformational results, such as a graduation rate of 100 percent or a startling rise in test scores. The turnaround approach assumes that it is bad principals and bad teachers who stand in the way of school improvement. Any mention of poverty or other social and economic conditions that might affect students' motivation and academic performance is dismissed as excuse-making by the proponents of "No Excuses." Today there is a burgeoning industry of private-sector consultants devoted to "turnarounds." One of the leading turnaround specialists is a company called Mass Insight. I recently received an email in which Mass Insight hailed several schools that had turned around. The stories seemed too good to be true.

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke at the first ever "Digital Learning Day" this Wednesday and pushed schools to get digital textbooks in students' hands within five years, it marked a vital recognition that technology can help us re-imagine teaching and learning. But during Super Bowl week it's equally important to admit that, as nifty (and lightweight) as digital textbooks may sound, when it comes to realizing the potential of education technology to lift student achievement, we're still on our own 5 yard line. The digital textbook push is a positive step and a meaningful sign of change, but it risks being an incremental move in a field that urgently needs transformative improvement.