This report examines our pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of our teachers. At the heart of the matter are teacher evaluation systems, which in theory should serve as the primary mechanism for assessing such variations, but in practice tell us little about how one teacher differs from any other, except teachers whose performance is so egregiously poor as to warrant dismissal.

As the majority of legislative sessions around the country come to a close, many states will finish the season having pushed through policy changes that are likely to have a notable impact on teachers.

A growing number of school districts from Boston to Western Massachusetts are embracing a new kind of school to pursue educational innovations and compete more aggressively with charter schools.

Teachers, students and parents-one after the other - implored the Fond du Lac Board of Education to consider the impact of enacting a schedule change that would result in less contact time between staff and students before and after school.

At a dinner party, you're not supposed to talk politics or religion. Although Miss Manners never forbid it, chatting about how to save money in special education may as well have been included in that list of taboo topics, too. After all, cost can't be a consideration when deciding what services a student with a disability needs.

We do not need high stakes testing to tell us that we have inequalities in education. All we need to do is drive from a city school to a suburban school to see there are inequalities. Class size, student preparedness, parental involvement, and proper facilities are just a few of those inequalities that many of our students and colleagues have to face every day.

Education reformers who maintain poverty is often a major hurdle in teaching students received a much needed boost last Thursday. Paul Tough wrote in New York Times Magazine that school reformers reliant on charter schools and turnaround models are guilty of offering excuses for their limited progress in educating low-income students.

While our quality agenda has some very specific proposals, everything we have proposed is guided by four fundamental principles: Evidence-because evidence about what works, and not ideology about what should work, must always be our guide; Equity-because all children deserve a great education; Scalability-because we are not satisfied to provide that great education to only some children in only some schools; we must provide a quality educational opportunity to every child in every school; and Sustainability-because school improvement needs to withstand budget cycles and political shifts, and must outlast changes in school, district and union leadership.

"Let's refuse to be defined by people who are happy to lecture us about the state of public education - but wouldn't last 10 minutes in a classroom"

This is a great visual representation of the impact of poverty on New York Regent's Exam scores for 2009 by school.

Larry Cuban wrote a wonderful blog post recently, one that I've been planning to discuss in more detail, though now I'm going to bring it up in a way I hadn't originally intended.  In "Jazz, Basketball, and Teacher Decision Making" Cuban offers interesting analogies and scientific studies to illuminate just how complex teaching really is.  Teachers make several dozen instructional decisions every hour, hundreds per day.  For those decisions to be effective in promoting student learning, teachers need to know the difference between the meaningful information and the meaningless "noise" that we take in every second as we observe a classroom.  We need a clear sense of priorities for each student and for each moment - and though this idea will shock some people who barely understand teaching - the top priority is not always to stick to the lesson plan.  (More on that idea in a blog post coming soon).  In order for each decision to be the best it can be, we need to have a variety of options and approaches, and both the theoretical and practical background to weigh those options and make the right selection in a moment's time, and then constantly adjust.

Paul Krugman just finished speaking to an annual American Federation of Teachers conference in Washington, D.C. Unlike many of his fellow Times columnists--most notably David Brooks and Thomas Friedman, who tend to support standards and accountability reforms--Krugman rarely writes explicitly about education policy. Given his role as a sort of national spokesman for disaffected liberals, I tuned in with interest to hear what Krugman would say in front of an audience of teachers.

It's not often that we hear education reformers bragging in public about how they got the better of a teacher's union. But in the following remarkable video, Jonah Edelman, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Oregon-based nonprofit education reform organization Stand for Children, talks about how he and his organization maneuvered to get education reform legislation passed in Illinois this year, snookering union officials along the way.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker and state education superintendent Tony Evers, a pair of politicians who have fought bitterly in the past year on issues ranging from vouchers to the union rights of teachers, are uniting to create a new system that will hold all publically funded schools in Wisconsin accountable for their success.

Former Atlanta Superintendent Beverly L. Hall wrote an editorial for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, responding to an 800-page bombshell of a report from state investigators that says cheating on state tests was widespread in the district, and that she had to, or should have, known about it.

I just read an insightful article in Stateline Weekly this morning. While teachers and parents grow increasingly concerned about falling revenues for public schools, many legislatures and governors, of both political stripes, are seizing the moment to shift toward business-inspired, performance-based models and "outsourcing" the traditional classroom to privately managed, publicly funded charter schools and on-line instruction. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and state chambers are advocating for this shift and getting their talking points from education-reform theorists, or ideologues depending on your perspective, like Richard Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.

The administration has proposed a 20 percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budget for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent. The only real alternative to public schools for career training is profit-making colleges and trade schools, many of which have been harshly criticized for sending students deeply into debt without improving their job prospects. A little more than one in 10 students in higher education attend a profit-making institution.

...Thus explains how Nauiokas became principal at the Haven Academy Charter School, where a third of students are in foster care. Another third are in families receiving preventive services to diminish the need for foster care. The rest are from the Mott Haven community, which is in a Congressional district where a soaring poverty rate keeps a third of residents on public assistance.

THE SCHOOL privatization movement took an ominous new step in June with the creation of the first for-profit real estate investment fund aimed at the construction of charter schools.

When they were recently asked whether the current administration is seeking to privatize public education, a couple of PA State Senators used the term "selective dismantling" in discussions with school board members and superintendents in Delaware County.