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As the Chicago Public Schools begin what are certain to be contentious contract talks with the Chicago Teachers Union, Mayor Rahm Emanuel emerged as the star of a new online video criticizing the union and promoting charter schools, whose teachers mostly are not unionized. An interview with Mr. Emanuel is a highlight of the 35-minute video, produced by the Michigan-based Education Action Group Foundation and the Fox News political analyst Juan Williams. Mr. Williams narrates the video, saying the union is "radically politicized" and is "repeatedly providing terrible examples for Chicago's schoolchildren."

The narrative surrounding Khan Academy has, it seems, gotten a bit out of hand. It's not Sal's fault. He didn't set out to become one of the biggest celebrities in education but simply to help his cousins with their math homework. But Ann Doerr, wife of venture capitalist John Doerr, picked up on it. Then Bill Gates. Then the San Jose Mercury, 60 Minutes, the New York Times ... and all of a sudden Khan Academy, a collection of low-res videos offering step-by-step instructions for how to solve math problems, was being hailed as the Next Big Thing in education. And big it is: Khan Academy boasts almost 3,300 videos that have been viewed over 160 million times. That's a heroic achievement. But there's a problem: the videos aren't very good.

The most famous teacher in the United States right now is Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy.  Khan Academy is a collection of nearly 3,000 online youtube tutorials mainly about math and science.  Bill Gates watches the videos with his kids, and has made Khan a household name.  Because of Khan, a new buzz-word in education is the 'flipped' classroom where kids are expected to watch videos the night before and then do their 'homework' in class, supervised by the teacher.

Earlier this month, ninth and tenth graders at the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation filmed a video inspired by Mr. Cuomo's declaration in his State of the State address that he intended to take a second job as a lobbyist for public school students. A nonprofit group that supports charter schools, the New York City Charter School Center, saw the video and was impressed. With a few tweaks to make it television-ready, and a modest outlay by the charter center, the clip has been playing this week as a 30-second commercial on NY1, the New York City cable news channel.

Two rapping teachers with a microphone tell it like it is: A  must see/must hear video!  They ask Obama to fire Duncan and appoint Diane Ravitch as Education Secretary.

"The video below is a short preview of the 34-minute video "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias."  Private schools receiving funding through "school choice" programs are using A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and other Protestant fundamentalist curricula.  The textbooks in these series teach that dinosaurs lived on earth with humans; deny global warming; promote hostility toward other religions and other sectors of Christianity (particularly Roman Catholicism); provide a biased and often factually incorrect version of history; and teach extreme laissez-faire economics, claimed to be biblically-based."

Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Bill Bennett tell CNN's Christine Romans what they think of high stakes testing.

Andrea Mitchell's interview with Finland's Ed Minister Sahlberg. Transcript available by clicking button under the video.

One of my hopes is that our spirits can be sustained in the tough months ahead by revisiting some of the inspirational words we heard this weekend. In that spirit, I am doing my best to collect videos from the Save Our Schools rally and post them here.

The principals of New York State are amazing. When the State Education Department began creating its "educator evaluation system," it called together the principals and showed them what it was up to. It showed them a video of guys building a plane while it was flying. This was called, in self-congratulatory parlance, "building a plane in mid-air." A few principals noticed that the guys building the exterior of the plane were wearing parachutes, but the passengers didn't have parachutes. The principals realized that they, their staff, and their students were the passengers. The ones with the parachutes were the overseers at the New York State Education Department. For them, it was a lark, but the evaluation system they created was do-or-die for the hapless passengers. The principals rose up in revolt, led by Carol Burris and Sean Feeney.

In a brilliant presentation Stuyvesant HS teacher Gary Rubinstein uses statistics to punch holes in the high stakes testing standardized testing program. He also finds evidence in the stats that charter schools cream better students. Then he addresses the reason why Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee opposed the release of data scores --- they knew people like Gary would be able to show how irrelevant they really were. "It's like in trying to measure temperature, you count the number of people wearing hats." Then he addresses the issue of why a union agreed to any of this, even 20% given that under the current system almost everyone potentially can be rated ineffective. He offered the union his help to salvage the other 20% but has not heard back yet. There's supposed to be this evil union only about the adults but they really aren't doing a good job at that.

Check out Darren Marelli's brilliant video below, using clips from the press conference before the Feb. 9 PEP meeting.

The Bloomberg administration and the charter school operators always claim that in the rapid proliferation of charter schools across the city, they are merely responding to parent "demand" but this ignores the aggressive recruiting methods they use to build up their "waiting lists."  Eva Moskowitz has hired paid recruiters to "poach" students for her Success Academy charters, as in the video below, outside PS 261 in Brooklyn.  Not to mention her extensive and expensive advertising campaigns, in which she spent $1.6 million dollars on marketing efforts alone in 2009-2010, amounting to $1,300 per incoming student. This year, there is evidence that Harlem in particular has become so oversaturated with charters, that they have been forced to go far afield to solicit applications.  Parents as far away as lower Manhattan have receiving mailings from Democracy Prep and Harlem Link. 

Video of panel discussion on teacher evaluations.

The two teachers systematically dissect the video, noting a variety of missteps. There are a few unquestionable errors of mathematics: Khan uses incorrect terminology at a couple of points. Khan is also inconsistent in his language about positive and negative numbers (using plus when he means positive, or minus when he means negative), which is perhaps a lesser sin, but poor practice and misleading for students. He's also inconsistent in his use of symbols, sometimes writing "+4", sometimes writing "4", never explaining why he does or doesn't. He making the kind of mistakes that would reduce his score on the Mathematical Quality of Instruction observational instrument, used in the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

One pervasive reformy argument is that our entire education system may be instantly transformed to be more productive and efficient by instantly adopting untested reformy policies and/or untested solutions of sectors other than education. Further, that we must take these bold leaps of faith because the public education system itself is too corrupt, too bloated, too inefficient to provide any useful lessons! Perhaps the whole system can be replaced with you-tube videos. Or perhaps we can just fire all of the teachers with more than 10 years experience and pay the rest based on the test scores they produce! Or perhaps some other lessons of industry can cure the (unsubstantiated) ills of American public schooling!

Videos of the speakers.

Courtesy Kyle Hughes of NYSNYS, here's a montage of footage from the debates over Gov. Andrew Cuomo's bill codifying the release of teachers evaluations

Just who does Representative Tom McMillin (R-Rochester, MI) work for?  That was the question the Rochester Citizen asked last spring. In response to whether or not he was a member of ALEC, the GOP legislator snidely responded: "It doesn't matter."  You can catch the video on YouTube. But, in a year when the GOP has engaged in warfare on workers, the unemployed, and public sector unions, it does matter. It seems that not only is Tom McMillin, the GOP's most conservative jester, a card carrying member of ALEC, but he also takes orders from Michigan's Mackinac Center. It seems that McMillin and the Mackinac Center (who claims that it does not engage in lobbying) have been conspiring to annihilate Michigan's largest teachers union, the Michigan Education Association.