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A year substituting in Chicago's public schools made me a radical/"reformer" from Day One. I saw the teachers' union as a force for good-including the individual good. For example, two of my 'children' became teachers and both have had to protect themselves via union-enforced due process at some point in their careers. In the absence of due process, none of us is safe from unjust bosses or benign rulers. (It's one reason I'm also such a fan of the Association for Union Democracy, which protects union members and staff from injustices by their "union bosses.") Perhaps the dividing line on reform has something to do today with our gut reaction to calls for solidarity with our peers-our identification with the powerless. And thus our devotion to due process: "There but for the grace of God goes me." The tension between individualism and solidarity even interacts with a puzzle I've been concerned with of late re. neighborhood schools vs. "schools of choice." Can choice sometimes be good for an individual and bad for the larger community, and if so ...?

"Earlier this year at a roundtable discussion in Colorado, Mitt Romney was talking about education-extolling the virtues of private schools and vouchers, and criticizing public schools and teachers unions. When a teacher participating in the discussion tried to offer her perspective, Romney shot back: "I didn't ask you a question." But teachers, like many other Americans, have questions about Romney's policies and proposals. They worry about their impact on the education that kids receive, because he advocates slashing education funding and privatizing public education. They question his taking credit for educational success in Massachusetts that was spurred by reforms instituted a decade before he became governor, and wonder why as a presidential candidate he is proposing entirely different, discredited education policies. They are incredulous that he says he would preserve the U.S. Department of Education only so he'd have a club to go after teachers unions, when most teachers in Massachusetts and other high-performing states are unionized. They doubt his pledges to middle-income voters because, according to numerous independent analyses, the math doesn't add up for his tax and job creation proposals. This presidential election presents a choice between starkly different visions for the future of our country."

A national teachers union leader joined faculty at a Los Angeles middle school Friday to criticize a major school-improvement initiative within the L.A. Unified School District. Under the strategy, called Public School Choice, groups inside and outside the school system can bid for control of new and low-performing campuses. The meeting between teachers and Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, took place at Cochran Middle School in Arlington Heights, one of the campuses affected.

Even amid a surge of pro-voucher laws around the country, a number of educational and political forces are likely to complicate and possibly impede the future growth of private school choice, a leading supporter of those policies predicts in a new essay. Teachers' unions, and Democrats, like the Obama administration, typically are held up as the chief enemies of voucher expansion, writes Chester E. Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which backs private school choice. And their opposition to vouchers is not in doubt. But a number of other complex factors are likely to skew and possibly undermine the private school choice landscape going forward, writes Finn, a former Reagan administration official and widely published author.

Mitt Romney is turning the discussion to education this week, positing a vision for improving schools that might seem counter-intuitive: the push for smaller class sizes, he says, is basically a scheme by unionized teachers to pad their membership. Smaller classes does not make a better education, Romney says. Better teachers and school choice programs like voucher systems do.

"Milwaukee's program has long been a model for other cities and state programs, from Cleveland, to New Orleans, Florida, and Indiana. Beginning in 1990 with 300 students in seven non-sectarian schools, by 2012 vouchers had expanded to almost 23,000 students in more than 100 private schools, most of them religious-based. In size, the voucher program now rivals Wisconsin's largest school districts, but with minimal public accountability or oversight. For more than twenty years, supporters of vouchers for private schools have had a chance to prove their assertion that the marketplace and parental choice are the bedrocks of educational success, that unions and government bureaucracy are the enemies of reform, and that vouchers will lead to increased academic achievement. After two decades and more than $1.27 billion in public funding, however, the Milwaukee voucher program's enticing promises have not materialized."

"Last month, a NewsWorks New Jersey post from public education blogger Laura Waters raised the ire of the daughter of the late Albert Shanker, the fiery education reformer and teachers union president. Waters thinks Shanker, whom she praised repeatedly in her piece, would support today's charter school movement. Not so, replied Jennie Shanker, a local artist and the union leader's daughter"

In 'Class Warfare' lawyer Steven Brill demonstrates his litigation skills as he lays out his case against teachers' unions and the so-called anti-reformers.  His argument is clear, concise, and compelling.  As prosecutor, he calls mainly on the witnesses that will strengthen his case, skillfully cross examining them and shrewdly striking from the record almost anything that might introduce a reasonable doubt. Brill's argument can be summarized in four main points, which I'll first enumerate  and then challenge one by one.

Mission Statement To build a bi-partisan, volunteer-led, grassroots and grass-tops team throughout Texas in order to pass and defend Universal Educational Choice legislation.

Abstract: The expansion of charter schools-publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools-has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student achievement, comparatively little is known about demand for the policy itself. Using election returns from three consecutive referenda on charter schools in Washington State, we weigh the relative importance of school quality, community and school demographics, and partisanship in explaining voter support for greater school choice. We find that low school quality-as measured by standardized tests-is a consistent and modestly strong predictor of support for charters. However, variation in performance between school districts is more predictive of charter support than variation within them. At the local precinct level, school resources, union membership, student heterogeneity, and the Republican vote share are often stronger predictors of charter support than standardized test results.

ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Chris Cerf recently invoked Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers union leader, in supporting Cerf's expansion of charter schools

Over the objections of teachers' unions and many Democrats, Louisiana's Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families' access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure.

We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while Democrats are squeezed between superintendents, school boards and teachers' unions that want money with no strings, and activists with little patience for concerns about federal overreach. When it comes to education policy, the two of us represent different schools of thought. One of us, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an education school professor who advised the Obama administration's transition team; the other, Rick Hess, has been a critic of school districts and schools of education. We disagree on much, including big issues like merit pay for teachers and the best strategies for school choice. We agree, though, on what the federal government can do well. It should not micromanage schools, but should focus on the four functions it alone can perform.

"The question of what to do with bad teachers has stymied America's education system of late, sparking chaotic protests in state capitals and vitriolic debate in a recent congressional hearing. It has also stoked the movement known as 'education reform,' which has zeroed in on teacher quality by urging school districts to sort the star teachers from the duds, and reward or punish them accordingly. The idea is that America's schools would be able to increase their students' test scores if only they had better teachers. Since 2007, this wave of education reformers -- in particular Democrats for Education Reform, a group backed by President Barack Obama and hedge fund donors -- has clashed with teachers unions in their pursuit of making the field of education as discerning in its personnel choices as, say, that of finance. Good teachers should be promoted and retained, reformers contend, instead of being treated like identical pieces on an assembly line, who are rewarded with tenure for their staying power or seniority. But what to do with the underperformers?"

"In the most simplistic portrayal of the education policy landscape, one of the "sides" is a group of people who are referred to as "reformers." Though far from monolithic, these people tend to advocate for test-based accountability, charters/choice, overhauling teacher personnel rules, and other related policies, with a particular focus on high expectations, competition and measurement. They also frequently see themselves as in opposition to teachers' unions. Most of the "reformers" I have met and spoken with are not quite so easy to categorize. They are also thoughtful and open to dialogue, even when we disagree. And, at least in my experience, there is far more common ground than one might expect. Nevertheless, I believe that this "movement" (to whatever degree you can characterize it in those terms) may be doomed to stall out in the long run, not because their ideas are all bad, and certainly not because they lack the political skills and resources to get their policies enacted. Rather, they risk failure for a simple reason: They too often make promises that they cannot keep."

If teachers approve a tentative three-year pact, the district would no longer hand over campuses to charters or other outside nonprofits.

Education reform does not suffer from lack of energy or activity. Everywhere you look-Congress, state legislatures, local school boards, wherever-scores of eager-beavers are filing bills, proposing solutions, calling for change, and otherwise trying to "push the ball forward." Yet for all the effort, for all the pain, we see little gain. What gives? The conventional answer, in most reform circles, comes down to: "the opposition of special interests." Teachers unions, school administrators, colleges of education, textbook publishers, and other defenders (and beneficiaries) of the status quo fight change at every step and guard their selfish prerogatives jealously. That may all be true, but our challenges are much more fundamental. It's not that the wrong people are in charge. It's that there are so many cooks in the education kitchen that nobody is really in charge. And that is a consequence of an antiquated governance structure that practically forces all those cooks to enter and remain in the kitchen.

"In our education system we have nothing nearly so clear as prices to help piece together the various bits of knowledge and experience, desires and frustrations that comprise the system as a whole. Our education system is not a market and, even if Milton Friedman's vision of universal school choice were someday realized, would still not be a market, really, because there is nothing for sale and nothing produced save well-educated young minds."

TERRY MOE MADE his name in the early 1990s when, with John Chubb, he co-authored a much-discussed book arguing for a system of publicly-funded private school vouchers. The central thesis of Politics, Markets and America's Schools was that "direct democratic control" of public education was "incompatible with effective schooling." Chubb and Moe argued that private school vouchers would create efficient markets in education, and that "choice is a panacea."