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New York City voters trust the teachers union more than Mayor Michael Bloomberg to protect the interests of public-school students, according to a new poll that gives the union a jolt of credibility as it negotiates over a new teacher-evaluation system. The poll, released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University, found that 56% of city voters said they trust United Federation of Teachers while 31% trust the mayor. Parents of public-school students preferred the union by an even wider margin, with 69% telling pollsters that the UFT can be better trusted to do what's best for their children. By a margin of 47% to 39%, voters said they believe the teachers union is playing a positive role in improving the city's education system.

What effective CMOs do rely on heavily is trust, relationships, and clear communication. In well-run charters, there is a common belief about teaching and learning, and teachers are hired and retained based on whether they share that belief. Teachers know they are getting ongoing feedback and no surprises. They know that the principal doing their observations and evaluations is a master teacher operating on the same definition of good instruction as they are. They know that every other teacher in the building is a potential collaborator. In other words, they trust their coworkers and operate in a culture of common understanding and mutual respect. Evaluation is understood to be more about organizational improvement than about passing judgment on an individual. In fact, some CMOs have tried and dumped merit pay because they felt it disrupted this collaborative culture.

As the poor get poorer, and college tuitions keep rising, the media declare that no one without a B.A. qualifies for a living wage. Something's rotten in this proposition. It isn't that way in Finland, for example. Finland didn't do it overnight, but they built their education system around critical democratic habits: competence and trust. They didn't trade off one for the other. Looking for a trust-proof solution is the fragile error. David Remnick says it well in the March 12th New Yorker: Democracy, he writes: "At best, it's an ambition, a state of becoming," and "the fragility of democratic aspiration is a brutal fact of history." Every time we try an end-run around it we at best distract ourselves from useful next steps, and more often undermine our own aspirations.

"Current debate about education policy is dominated by several zombie ideas. One idea that should have been dead, but keeps coming back to life is the "government is the problem"-inspired commitment to public disinvestment. The other better left for idea is to distrust educators, but trust tests and markets to improve education. There is a better, third way to improve education: invest and trust."

This post is about a for-profit charter management organization, Imagine Schools, and real estate/facilities. I'm using the dataset ImagineSchools posted here. Imagine is one of the largest charter operators in the country. The company currently operates 70-something schools. A common challenge for charter schools is access to facilities. Some districts give charters access to entire schools, some allow district schools and charter schools to operate out of the same building ("co-location"), and some charters secure facilities through non-profit or for-profit organization in the private sector. To the best of my knowledge, Imagine does not have any schools in district facilities. Instead, Imagine either owns the schools through the company's real estate arm, SchoolHouse Finance, LLC, or partners with one of two real estate investment trusts ("REITs"), Entertainment Properties Trust and Inland Public Properties Development. As of right now, EPT owns 27 facilities used by Imagine and IPPD owns seven facilities used by Imagine. To gather financial information I collected data from IRS 990 forms for the years 2008 through 20101. I pulled the following information

Right-wing think-tankers at the Fordham Institute are looking for answers and I'm sure they'll find them. You see, it's all in how you pose the question. Their latest quest has to do with charter schools. Fordham, which doubles as a charter school lobbying and support group in Ohio, and their business-minded partners, Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), are getting together to ponder whether or not so-called charter incubators can "can solve the problem of too many mediocre charter schools."

The results from the recent Gallup/PDK education survey found that 71 percent of surveyed Americans "have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in public schools." Although this finding received a fair amount of media attention, it is not at all surprising. Polls have long indicated that teachers are among the most trusted professions in the U.S., up there with doctors, nurses and firefighters.

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).

"In a recent paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Education Finance and Policy, coauthors Cassandra Guarino (Indiana University - Bloomington), Mark Reckase (Michigan State University), and Jeffrey Wooldridge (Michigan State University) ask and then answer the following question: "Can Value-Added Measures of Teacher Performance Be Trusted?""

Federal school "turnaround" strategies that call for firing teachers, replacing managers, or closing troubled public schools or converting them into charter schools often meet with understandable skepticism, resistance and even anger among the parents whose children attend those schools. How should policymakers react? According to a recent study from the think tank Public Agenda, the answer is to treat the harsh realities caused by turnarounds as a public relations problem. That's the conclusion of a review released today of What's Trust Got to Do With It? A Communications and Engagement Guide for School Leaders Tackling the Problem of Persistently Failing Schools.

"Pity the new district superintendent. Like any responsible educational leader, he'd like to be sure that his district's curricular materials and interventions are grounded in solid scientific research. But no sooner does he start talking with his staff, his teachers, and various and sundry "experts" than he finds that everything is "research-based," including approaches that are clearly very different from those employed by his teachers. Should he let well enough alone, or should he introduce programs that seemed to work fine in the last district he was in? Neither. Instead, he should go read Dan Willingham's ingenious new book, When Can You Trust the Experts? The book won't tell him which programs to use, but it will help him think through -- and, in some cases, see through -- the claims their creators make on their behalf. An accomplished cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of the must-read Why Don't Students Like School? (as well as an NCTQ advisory board member), Willingham aims to make district superintendents, principals, teachers and parents into educated consumers of education research."

"Dear parents: As you may have probably heard, the new state test scores were released to the press and they are disastrous. Only 31% of students in New York State passed the new Common Core exams in reading and math. More than one third -- or 36% -- of 3rd graders throughout the state got a level I in English; which means they essentially flunked.  In NYC, only 26 percent of students passed the exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math - meaning they had a level 3 or 4.  Only 5% of students in Rochester passed.  Though children's individual scores won't be available to parents until late August, I urge you not to panic when you see them.  My advice is not to believe a word of any of this.  The new Common Core exams and test scores are politically motivated, and are based neither on reason or evidence.  They were pre-ordained to fit the ideological goals of Commissioner King and the other educrats who are intent on imposing damaging policies on our schools.  Here are five reasons not to trust the new scores"

"This research has important implications for the way we educate our children. For one thing, we should replace high-stakes, one-shot tests with the kind of unobtrusive and ongoing assessments that give teachers and parents a more accurate sense of children's true abilities. We should also put in place techniques for reducing anxiety and building self-confidence that take advantage of our social natures. And we should ensure that the social climate at our children's schools is one of warmth and trust, not competition and exclusion."

There's a time and place for "show me the data"! "What's the 'evidence'?" is one of our five hallowed habits of mind at Mission Hill and Central Park East. But "evidence" comes in many forms, and the trade-offs involved are part of the data, too-if we pay equal attention to them. Maybe "At what price?" should be the 6th "habit of mind." As I've said before, we're entering an era reminiscent of bad science fiction where everyone is wondering "Who's following me? Who's collecting the data on me? Is there no place to hide?"

Charter schools were created to change things. A bold and controversial concept when they came to New York City in 1999, charter schools have had remarkable success in creating choices for families, raising students' academic achievement, and experimenting with innovative ideas for education. Today, New York City's charter school sector is higher-performing and more vibrant than any in the United States, and has grown from two schools in 1999 to 136 schools educating 47,000 students today. The accomplishments reflect the hard work of dedicated school founders and educators, the support of public officials, and, of course, the commitment and trust of the families who have chosen to enroll in these independent and autonomous public schools.

On occasion, students and reporters ask me what makes me trust or distrust folks who claim to be education researchers, and it's a harder question to answer than one might think. As an historian with some quantitative training, I am eclectic on methods-I have no purity test other than "the evidence and reasoning have to fit the conclusion." It's not the existence of error: even great researchers make occasional errors, and it's a good thing in the long run for researchers to take intellectual risks (which imply likely error/failure). Further, we all have the various myside biases cognitive psychologists write about. But when I come across something like the following produced by the Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson and displayed by Matthew Ladner twice on Jay Greene's blog (including on Thursday), I start to wonder.

In confronting any other national security threat, the U.S. wouldn't trust unreliable and unproven solutions. We would go with what works. Why, then, do some in the education sector insist we gamble on the privatization of our public schools? A new report from the Council on Foreign Relations, written by Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, rightly identifies a problem in our nation's education system, namely, that we are not educating our students well enough to maintain our country's economic vitality, international competitiveness or vibrant democracy. The report argues that this, in turn, poses a national security risk. But simply encouraging more competition, choice, and privatization within our nation's schools, as Klein and Rice advocate, does not constitute the systemic, scalable or sustainable solution that our country needs or that the report claims to present. The dissenting opinions included with the report criticize the authors' policy recommendations for promoting a reform agenda that is based on inconclusive evidence and that fails to address the serious issue of inequity in education funding and opportunity.

Ms. Moskowitz is a brigadier in the charter school wars that could define the next mayoral election. Armies mass on either side. The teachers' union, parent groups and the organization New York Communities for Change oppose charter expansion. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has sent a trusted aide, Micah C. Lasher, to work with the hedge-fund-backed group StudentsFirstNY to push expansion. Ms. Moskowitz embraces life in wartime. She yearns not only to compete, but also to drive the teachers' union and some public schools into the East River. In e-mails several years ago to the chancellor at the time, Joel I. Klein, obtained by the columnist Juan Gonzalez of The Daily News, Ms. Moskowitz made clear her views. "We need," she wrote, "to quickly and decisively distinguish the good guys from the bad."

The Center For American Progress has published another report justifying the firing of teachers today, based on statistical models that may some day become valid. "Designing High Quality Evaluation Systems," by John Tyler, recounts the standard reasons why of educators do not trust high-stakes test-driven algorithms, and even contributes a couple of new insights into problems that are unique to high school test scores. An urban teacher reading Tyler's evidence would likely conclude that he has written an ironclad indictment of value-added models for high-stakes purposes. But, as is usually true of CAP's researchers, he concludes that the work of economists in improving value-added models is so impressive that education will benefit from their experiments if educators don't blow it.

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.