Jonah Edelman as Machiavelli in Illinois.

"We think public schools should go away,'' says Teri Adams, the head of the Independence Hall Tea Party and a leading advocate - both in New Jersey and Pennsylvania - of passage of school voucher bills. The tea party operates in those two states and Delaware.

Dozens of schools across the city and state were flagged in a study of 2009 state standardized test scores that sought to use statistical analysis to ferret out possible examples of cheating on the PSSA exam.

In recent post, I discussed the questionable value of student survey data to inform teacher evaluation models. Not only is there little research support for such surveys, but the very framing of the idea often reflects faulty reasoning.

After months of arduous negotiation and partisan squabbling, states across the country have produced budgets for the new fiscal year that in many cases will bring deep cuts to state spending, including money for schools.

There are much more subtle ways to fraudulently raise test scores than tampering with student test papers.  One that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the practice by many charter schools of improving their test scores through attrition.  Up until recently, these charters have not been very upfront about this factor contributing to their success.  With everything that these charters have at stake in preserving their reputations and their rich funders, I can understand why they might try to conceal what they're doing.  Of course they have the right to portray their business in the most favorable light possible.  That's what most businesses do.  The reason that I've become so involved in uncovering the truth behind these successes is that these ruses have tricked politicians into believing that one of the big solutions in fixing education is to expand the influence of charter schools.  Only states that agree to lift caps on charters were even eligible to apply to Obama's Race To The Top initiative.

I recently examined the contracts being bid out by DOE for new "local assessments" that they intend to use to evaluate teacher performance.  Though back in May, this plan was reported in NY Times as "more than a dozen new standardized tests," it really is far more. 

This video of corporate reformer Jonah Edelman has been causing a stir in the edu-blogosphere this weekend. You may not want to watch the whole thing (it's down below), as it gets into the weeds of a specific political fight taking place in Illinois over "Senate Bill 7," but it is instructive for a larger reason.

In 2008, when Katherine Sprowal's son, Matthew, was selected in a lottery to attend the Harlem Success Academy 3 charter school, she was thrilled. "I felt like we were getting the best private school, and we didn't have to pay for it," she recalled.

Fred Klonsky blog readers: After watching the fourteen minute excerpt and then viewing the whole video of the hour-long session, I want to very sincerely apologize.

How do you sell a school that doesn't exist? If you are Chris Whittle, an educational entrepreneur, you gather well-to-do parents at places like the Harvard Club or the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, hoping the feeling of accomplishment will rub off. Then you pour wine and offer salmon sandwiches and wow the audience with pictures of the stunning new private school you plan to build in Chelsea. Focus on the bilingual curriculum and the collaborative approach to learning. And take swipes at established competitors that you believe are overly focused on sending students to top-tier colleges. Invoke some Tiger-mom fear by pointing out that 200,000 Americans are learning Chinese, while 300 million Chinese have studied English. Then watch them come.

A lively debate about charter schools, high-stakes testing and impoverished students arose as David Brooks criticized Diane Ravitch, she answered back and readers joined the fray.

As Lisa Guisbond said, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children's Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan's senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA's Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

It's too bad there is not a transcript of the Aspen video of Stand For Children's Jonah Edelman's presentation. It could be studied in every Local and Region in the IEA. Edelman looks at SB7 as a major victory over the teachers unions. So do I. In fact, he believes it is a model for doing to schools and teachers in other states what they did in Wisconsin, without the mess.

I have been wary of Geoffrey Canada as a social commentator ever since he published a book called "Fist,Knife, Stick Gun" whose first section describes the Morrisania section of the South Bronx in the 1950's and 1960's as a hell hole, a place plagued with violence and negativity. Violence and negativity there certainly was, but there were also great neighborhood sports programs, vibrant churches, great music and arts programs in the public schools, and many mentors and "old heads" who helped guide young people away from trouble. Canada's grim vision of this predominantly Black section of the Bronx, contradicted by liiterally scores of interviews I did with people who lived in the same community, was a disturbing example of literary "tunnel vision"- an author's propensity to make his personal experience universal.

I want to shift my focus for this entry and talk about something not directly related to macroeconomics (although I will pull it back in later): the US education system. It is a very hot topic at the moment as states everywhere are reducing expenditures in the face of fiscal crises. This is a recipe for disaster. Not only is their justification questionable, but it will only serve to make economic recovery more difficult. People believe that the budget choices we are making today are saving our children's future. It is, in fact, ruining it.

Once touted as a solution to Detroit's public school woes, charter high schools are often doing just about as poorly - and in many cases worse - at educating students and getting them ready for college, a Detroit News analysis of recent test data shows.

In writing my essay on education reform that appears in this weekend's magazine, I parachuted myself into an already crowded (and fairly angry) field of pundits reacting to Diane Ravitch's June 1 Op-Ed column in The Times. In the essay, I mentioned Jonathan Alter's response and Tim King's. There was also this retort from David Brooks and a reply to Brooks from the journalist John Merrow.