According to the new Recovery School District (RSD) superintendent, John White, "Five years ago, there were 62 percent of the youngsters attending failing schools. There are now only 18 percent of those youngsters who attend failing schools …so what exists, works."1 What a stupendous claim! If true, it would signify extraordinary student progress that the RSD has made since Katrina. Conversely, considering that the RSD and its proponents are so adept at manipulating data and misleading the public to support their cause, Research on Reforms (ROR) decided to investigate these claims more closely. The data for this commentary were all obtained from the 2009 and 2010 School Performance Scores (SPS) and student enrollment data from the website of the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE).2"

"For the last year, Central Falls High School in Rhode Island has been under a microscope. Long considered one of the poorest-performing high schools in the state, administrators abandoned a proposal to fire all the teachers as long as they agreed to a so-called "transformation" plan. Now, as the school year winds down, that plan is in shambles. "

"The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is at the center of the debate over charter schools and the future of American public education-but what does it mean to the students who define its mission? A Patch Special Report. "

"Did Education Department officials leak market-sensitive info to stock traders?" That's the provocative headline from Project on Government Oversight reporting on a probe by the agency's inspector general into controversial claims that may implicate Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "

"There is nothing new about opposition to public-sector unionism. It has been a feature of American life for over one hundred years. But in some ways, the current wave of anti-unionism is a departure. Three different eras of opposition to public-sector unionism, including the current one, have been distinguished by distinct core arguments against collective bargaining for public employees."

"It is a staple of American politics that elected officials routinely frame their appeals to the "middle class." The idea is simple: Since the vast majority of Americans consider themselves members of the middle class, it makes sense to use this label as shorthand for "people like you." The practice of people locating themselves within a class structure - rather than being "assigned" to classes based on particular characteristics, such as income or occupation - is often called "subjective class identification.""

"A systematic search of the research literature from 1996 through July 2008 identified more than a thousand empirical studies of online learning. Analysts screened these studies to find those that (a) contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information to calculate an effect size. As a result of this screening, 50 independent effects were identified that could be subjected to meta-analysis. The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes-measured as the difference between treatment and control means, divided by the pooled standard deviation-was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face. Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K-12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K-12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education)."

"While several states have recently limited the ability for teacher unions to collectively bargain for their members, teachers will continue to flex their political muscle in a way scholars of policymaking have overlooked: through their pocketbooks, says a Baylor University political scientist."

"Today, America's teachers are so disillusioned with the Obama administration that their participation in the 2012 is a big question mark. Most teachers I know may ultimately vote for Barack Obama, but they will do so only because they fear the Republican candidate will do more damage, not because they think the Obama administration's policies are moving the nation in the right direction. When it comes to education policy, most teachers and professors see the Obama administration as promoting national initiatives which strip teachers of their autonomy, make them scapegoats for the nation's problems, and promote formulas for assessing teacher quality that will, if accepted, turn reduce instruction at all levels to memorization and test prep. They are very likely to sit out the next presidential campaign unless the administration switches gears and embraces a teacher centered strategy for improving American's schools and universities."

"Many of us have had at some point in our lives a wonderful teacher, one whose value, in retrospect, seems inestimable. We do not pretend here to know how to calculate the life-transforming effects that such teachers can have with particular students. But we can calculate more prosaic economic values related to effective teaching, by drawing on a research literature that provides surprisingly precise estimates of the impact of student achievement levels on their lifetime earnings and by combining this with estimated impacts of more-effective teachers on student achievement."

"Every morning, children in Boston disperse to schools all over. Childhood chums, and neighborhood feeling, can be left behind"

"Our earnest Secretary of Education, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized NCLB by the administration's deadline and to the President's satisfaction, was back at it on Friday. Exhibiting the administration's patented disinterest in the niceties of the U.S. Constitution, he announced that he's getting ready to waive NCLB requirements for states if they agree, as the New York Times put it, "to embrace President Obama's education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition.""

"...Today, the bands of nouveau corporate royalists (with coats of arms bearing such names as Coors, DeVos, Koch, Scaife, and Walton) are determined to take back those middle-class gains of yesteryear."

"Gov. Rick Scott seems determined to ruin public education in Florida. Not only is he devastating school budgets with multiple-billion-dollar cuts, but he is intent on crushing the morale of the state's teachers. One can't expect to improve the public schools while demeaning the professionals who work in them."

"Something remarkable has been happening in public education. Since the beginning of the year, the people appointed to run major school systems at the district and state levels have all come from a clearly identified reform movement that seeks to dramatically change the current system."

"In our education system we have nothing nearly so clear as prices to help piece together the various bits of knowledge and experience, desires and frustrations that comprise the system as a whole. Our education system is not a market and, even if Milton Friedman's vision of universal school choice were someday realized, would still not be a market, really, because there is nothing for sale and nothing produced save well-educated young minds."