A cornerstone of the Cuomo administration's self-declared tower of accomplishments was marked for demolition last week. It can't be blown up high enough or fast enough. The governor's beloved 2 percent tax cap was challenged in a lawsuit filed by the New York State United Teachers union in state Supreme Court in Albany. The suit offers multiple arguments why the tax cap is unconstitutional, asserting that it locks in unequal funding between have- and have-not school districts across the state, ''while pushing many school districts to the brink of educational and financial insolvency,'' in the words of NYSUT President Dick Iannuzzi.

The second largest school district in the nation, Los Angeles Unified, is in the midst of what must surely be the costliest school board race ever. This month we have seen report after report of billionaire donations rolling in, totaling almost $3 million. First we learned that Eli Broad and former Univision head Jerrold Perenchio had each pitched in $250,000. Then New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg dropped a cool million into the effort. Most recently, Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst lobby has added in their own quarter million. The billionaire's money is being spent to pay for what the usually staid Los Angeles Times calls "junk ads," and "serious exaggeration and distortion." The big concern among these "reformers," is apparently that the pace of charter school expansion might be slowed. They are also very focused on eliminating or weakening due process and seniority protections for teachers. And most of all, they want board members who will offer strong support to Superintendent John Deasy, a favorite of the Gates Foundation.

"Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, explains her concerns about the Common Core. She previously wrote a book about how to implement the standards and now wishes she could retract it."

"I have thought long and hard about the Common Core standards. I have decided that I cannot support them. In this post, I will explain why."

"This brief reviews the history and current status of Parent Trigger legislation, presents a critique of the legislation, and suggests alternative ways to meet the stated goals of a Parent Trigger."

"We've all now had a few days to digest the findings of the most recent KIPP middle school mega-study. I actually do have some quibbles with the analyses themselves and the presentation of them, one of which I'll address below, but others I'll set aside for now.  It is the big picture lessons that are perhaps most interesting."

At a time when government budgets at all levels are under enormous strain, families and businesses are struggling and federal agencies are facing dramatic across-the-board spending cuts, you would think lawmakers would be careful about spending public money. So it may surprise you to learn that in a growing number of states, legislators are setting aside public money to pay for private school tuition - and rich people are benefiting.

Documents expose the flow of money and influence from corporations that stand to profit from state leaders' efforts to expand and deregulate digital education.

In public policy circles, crises are called "focusing events" - bringing to light a particular failing in government policy.  They require government agencies to switch rapidly into crisis mode to implement solutions. Creating the crisis itself is more novel. The right-wing, free market vision of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman informed the blueprint for the rapid privatization of municipal services throughout the world due in no small part to what author Naomi Klein calls "Disaster Capitalism." Friedman wrote in his 1982 treatise Capitalism and Freedom, "When [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around" In Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, she explains how immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Friedman used the decimation of New Orleans' infrastructure to push for charter schools, a market-based policy preference of Friedman acolytes. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools at the time, and later described Hurricane Katrina as "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Duncan is of the liberal wing of the free market project and a major supporter of charter schools. There aren't any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder? They create a crisis.

Are some charter schools functioning in a parasitic way in relationship to the school systems that host them? This is the provocative analysis offered this week by Bruce Baker at his School Finance 101 blog.

Getting rid of ineffective teachers is pretty much the focus of school reform these days but pinpointing who really should go isn't as easy as it seems. Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, looks at the issue here. He writes the Sociological Eye on Education blog - where this post first appeared - for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.

Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed on December 10, 1948, and ratified by the United States, declares that, "Everyone has the right to education" and declares higher education "shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit." The purpose of education is broader than creating workers for big business; it is to "be directed to the full development of the human personality." Unfortunately, rather than treating education as a right, the United States has moved in the opposite direction to treat it as a commodity."

"critical pedagogy "…draws attention to questions concerning who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge, values, and skills, and it illuminates how knowledge, identities, and authority are constructed within particular sets of social relations""

"High school teachers in Seattle are saying no to the spread of high-stakes standardized tests. On January 10, the staff of Garfield High School voted unanimously to refuse to administer the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to their ninth-grade students. For two weeks they've held firm, even as the superintendent of schools has threatened them with a 10-day unpaid suspension, and teachers at other schools have joined their boycott."

"Today institutions of higher education, public and private, remain largely segregated by race, religion and economic condition. White colleges and universities remain primarily white, Black institutions remain primarily black, and denominational institutions remain even more religiously identifiable. Such segregation is sanctified with tons of federal and state money in the forms of tuition vouchers, tax credits and government subsidized loans. The Obama administration has been largely foreclosed from remedying the situation for fear of offending powerful political forces representing the investors and private institutions. The higher education voucher/loan dilemma portends a probable scenario for the future of tuition vouchers and charter schools at the primary and secondary levels. Stiglitz quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who said that the main element of the "peculiar genius of American society" is "self-interest properly understood." The last two words, "properly understood," are the key, says Stiglitz. According to Stiglitz, everyone possesses self-interest in the "narrow sense." This "narrow sense" with regard to educational choice is usually exercised for reasons other than educational quality, the chief reasons being race, religion, economic and social status, and similarity with persons with comparable information, biases and prejudices. But Stiglitz interprets Tocqueville's "properly understood" to mean a much broader and more desirable and moral objective, that of "appreciating" and paying attention to everyone else's self-interest. In other words, the common welfare is, in fact, "a precondition for one's own ultimate well being."17 Such commonality in the advancement of the public good is lost by the narrow self-interest. School tuition vouchers and charter schools are the operational models for implementation of the "narrow self-interest." It is easy to recognize, but difficult to justify. "

"The Gates Foundation has decided that the variable we can most readily change is the effectiveness of the classroom teacher. Therefore all their powers of measurement have focused on this single variable. We have explored in the past some of the problems with this. In particular, the fact that less than 15% of the differences in student growth can be attributed to their teacher suggests that perhaps we ought to be looking in the realm of the out of school factors, which have been found to account for more than 60% of these differences. Today I want to explore some of the areas that have remained unexamined."

"What makes Union City remarkable is, paradoxically, the absence of pizazz. It hasn't followed the herd by closing "underperforming" schools or giving the boot to hordes of teachers. No Teach for America recruits toil in its classrooms, and there are no charter schools. "

"But to apply a letter grade or a numerical ranking to a professional is to radically misunderstand the complex set of qualities that make someone good at what they do. It is an effort by economists and statisticians to quantify activities that are at heart matters of judgment, not productivity. Professionals must be judged by other professionals, by their peers. Nowhere is this more true than among educators, whose success at teaching character, wisdom, and judgment cannot be measured by standardized tests. "

"This is a preview of a new hour-long documentary about the fight to keep New York's DeWitt Clinton High School alive. Based in the Bronx, home of the NY Yankees, "The Bronx Bombers" It has educated more than 200,000 students over a hundred years. It is now being faced with plans by "Educational Reformers" to scale it back in a threat to it's tradition of excellence. Help us get the word out. See our Facebook page, Facebook.com/dwcfilm for how you can order and help distribute the whole film by Clinton grad Danny Schechter "The News Dissector." Help us save DeWitt Clinton and public education."