In the past, administrators often looked the other way when students skipped out a few days short of the year's final dismissal. Some still do. But these days, with numbers holding so much power over the fates of schools and their leaders, some principals are counting heads. They know that empty seats, even in the waning days of the school year, can lower their average attendance rates and shave points off their annual progress reports issued by the city.

"State Education Secretary Ron Tomalis said Monday he is pushing to enact school tuition voucher legislation before state lawmakers breaks for their summer recess, joining the governor and special interest groups calling for immediate education reforms."

"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."

"Pennsylvania has a larger percentage of high-performing charter schools than the national average, but it also has more underperforming ones. As a result, Pennsylvania charter students on average are lagging behind students in regular public schools."

"I don't include private schools on my lists because too many refuse to provide that data."

"I wonder when exactly the word reformer was cheapened to a political sound bite. When did billionaires buy it and re-define it by the crass rules of the marketplace?"

"Chicago won $20 million in federal money over three years to help improve its worst-performing schools, part of a $3.5 billion program that targeted 1,247 failing schools nationwide. The district is kicking in another $7 million in local money, and officials were determined to invest in programs that would help them measure progress, use the information to fine-tune tactics on the fly, and hold staff and students accountable for the results."

"We need to take stock of the growing evidence of significant problems with states' charter experiments. Data show most charter schools perform the same or worse than host district schools, and many charters rank among states' persistently lowest performing schools. Studies also show that charter schools are not serving students comparable to those enrolled in district schools, particularly very low income students, students with disabilities and those learning English."

On Monday's Fresh Air, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Martha Woodall details her ongoing investigation into Philadelphia's charter school system, where 19 of the 74 charter schools operating in the city are under investigation for fraud, financial mismanagement and conflicts of interest.

When policy and politics collide, the outcome is telling.  A recent exchange between a legislator from another district and our superintendent escalated into a public spectacle when the senator represented his views to a columnist who then issued a scathing article headlined, "State Senator Puts School Superintendent in His Place".  We believe that our public should be allowed to consider the evidence and decide for itself.

It goes without saying that class identification is complex and my model is simple (and uses cross-sectional data). In addition, the returns to a college degree are substantial. Still, these results suggest that, while college-educated Americans are very likely to identify as middle class or higher, the relationship may have weakened slightly over time. In other words, when it comes to people's perception of their own class position, college is a bit less of a "ticket to the middle class" than it used to be.

"Just seven months after his surprising expansion into reading, writing and arithmetic with the $360-million acquisition of Wireless Generation, News Corp.'s chairman and CEO seems intent on making the grade in what could be the future of education -- economized, customized, data-driven digitized instruction. "

"It should no longer shock me when classroom teachers are entirely ignored in education policy (there wasn't a teacher in the big bunch that wrote the No Child Left Behind law, for example). But I expected better from Maryland. "

"Investing in public eduation initiatives, from quality pre-kindergarten programs to lowering class size in elementary schools, pays big dividends for the state's economic and social welfare, according to a report from the Education Law Center and Penn State University Professor Dana Mitra. "

"Over the objections of some public school advocates, the Louisiana Senate voted 22-16 Monday to allow corporations to sponsor charter schools in exchange for controlling up to half of the enrollment slots and half of the governing board seats. "

"While politicians and the media misrepresent the achievement gap in order to demonize schools and teachers, we have ample evidence that addressing the whole life of the child is the only avenue to closing an achievement gap."

"Among 27 member nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. teachers work the longest hours, the Wall Street Journal reports. This seems particularly impressive as the U.S. has long summer vacations, and primary-school teachers only spent 36 weeks a year in the classroom, among the lowest of the countries tracked. Yet the educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching, in the most recent numbers from 2008. New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, had schools open for 39 weeks a year. The OECD average is 786 hours."

"If you are one of the millions of people who think teachers make just as much as people working in other comparable professions, you'd better think again."

"...the study asked whether financial incentives could change the behavior of those already in the system, but not whether the existence of performance incentives would change those who choose to be in the system."

"Policy makers and business leaders often point to our K-16 education system as the cause of our economic ills. The oft-heard refrain is that a reformed system of education will lead America into economic health during this age of global economic competition. The author questions this great faith in the transformative power of education given the realities facing youngsters today. Growing income inequality, unaffordable higher education, and paltry growth in jobs that pay a living wage conspire to rob education of its promise for too many of today's children."