"The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: "How do we teach it?" In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it's time to crack that shell. It's time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group."

"This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned. In their place must come recognition that income inequality causes many social problems, including problems associated with education. Sadly, compared to all other wealthy nations, the USA has the largest income gap between its wealthy and its poor citizens. Correlates associated with the size of the income gap in various nations are well described in Wilkinson & Pickett (2010), whose work is cited throughout this article. They make it clear that the bigger the income gap in a nation or a state, the greater the social problems a nation or a state will encounter. Thus it is argued that the design of better economic and social policies can do more to improve our schools than continued work on educational policy independent of such concerns."

"The metropolitan Nashville school system has 81,000 students, about 70 percent of whom receive free or reduced-price meals, according to the district. In addition, nearly one-quarter of the district's students come from homes where English is not the native language. That level of diversity and economic hardship, the district says, is one of the reasons the district repeatedly rejected an application by Great Hearts Academies to open a charter school, saying that affluent students would be over-represented in the proposed school's population because of the school's proposed location. That reasoning was not good enough for the Tennessee education department, which announced earlier this week that it would not change its decision to withhold $3.4 million in state aid from Nashville schools because, state officials said, the district violated state law by rejecting the charter. "

"Milwaukee's program has long been a model for other cities and state programs, from Cleveland, to New Orleans, Florida, and Indiana. Beginning in 1990 with 300 students in seven non-sectarian schools, by 2012 vouchers had expanded to almost 23,000 students in more than 100 private schools, most of them religious-based. In size, the voucher program now rivals Wisconsin's largest school districts, but with minimal public accountability or oversight. For more than twenty years, supporters of vouchers for private schools have had a chance to prove their assertion that the marketplace and parental choice are the bedrocks of educational success, that unions and government bureaucracy are the enemies of reform, and that vouchers will lead to increased academic achievement. After two decades and more than $1.27 billion in public funding, however, the Milwaukee voucher program's enticing promises have not materialized."

"Perhaps the most important change on the horizon for schools is the design of a new system for evaluating teachers. I hope that those who are involved will focus on how to improve teaching and learning rather than on things that are politically expedient or that play well in the newspapers."

"If the Department of Education gets its way, new teachers won't have to enroll in local colleges or universities to get certification to work in city schools. Shael Polakow-Suransky, the department's second in command, said today that the department would ask the state for permission to certify teachers internally by using top educators to train new recruits in shortage areas. Currently, teachers must either have completed an education certification program at a college or university or be enrolled in one."

"A new set of rules for private and parochial schools in Louisiana eligible for state tax dollars looks set to be approved by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, several months after the state adopted a plan to expand access to private school using public money, the Associated Press reported."

"An examination of the contract shows that some of the most controversial issues at stake in the strike have yet to be completely decided, with some issues relegated to committees. Partially because of teachers' new raises, the contract will cost the cash-strapped district $295 million over four years, a reality many believe will cause layoffs. Factions of teachers' unions in other cities inspired by the strike are seeking to fan the flames. Already, teachers in nearby Lake Forest and Evergreen Park have walked out. These fights represent a broader question the American populace is still grappling with: who owns our public schools?"

"A number of people have asked me about my brief encounter with New York Commissioner John King at the NYSCOSS Fall Leadership Summit on September 24, 2012. Here is my recollection."

"When President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law, few would have predicted that the next decade of education policy would unfold into a disaster of epic proportions. The law was based on a flawed concept of a "good education" - high scores on standardized tests."

"Most of the attention to the methodological shortcomings of the law focuses on "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) - the crude requirement that all schools must make "adequate progress" toward the goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014. And AYP is indeed an inept measure. But the problems are actually much deeper than AYP. Rather, it's the underlying methods and assumptions of NCLB (including AYP) that have had a persistent, negative impact on the way we interpret testing data. I'm not going to get into all of the details here, since I discuss them so frequently (follow the links below), but the most important issues include:"

"A seventeen year-old high school student from New York named Nikhil Goyal has been speaking out on education reform. In addition to several high profile television appearances, he has authored a book, One Size Does Not Fit All, A Student's Assessment of School. I asked him to explain his critique this week."

"The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a powerful non-profit organization whose membership is comprised of corporations and conservative politicians. This isn't merely a lobbying group, as corporate members craft legislation introduced at the state level that promotes free-market and conservative ideals - all behind closed doors."

"The latest progress reports for New York City elementary and middle schools came out last week, and many parents are baffled to see some of the city's top-performing schools getting "C's" and "B's." Proponents say, the "A" to "F" grading system is one of the best ways to get parents to pay attention, but critics say that the city's over emphasis on test performance skews the grades, making them unreliable for judging the quality of a school. If these progress reports are not reliable, what is the purpose of them?"

"In the out-of-the-mouths-of-babes category, here's a post about the flaws of modern teacher evaluation that are evidence to an 11-year-old but, apparently, not to school reformers."

"This research has important implications for the way we educate our children. For one thing, we should replace high-stakes, one-shot tests with the kind of unobtrusive and ongoing assessments that give teachers and parents a more accurate sense of children's true abilities. We should also put in place techniques for reducing anxiety and building self-confidence that take advantage of our social natures. And we should ensure that the social climate at our children's schools is one of warmth and trust, not competition and exclusion."

"New York City has just released the new round of results from its school rating system (they're called "progress reports"). It relies considerably more on student growth (60 out of 100 points) than absolute performance (25 points), and there are efforts to partially adjust most of the measures via peer group comparisons.* All of this indicates that the city's system is more focused on school rather than student test-based performance, compared with many other systems around the U.S. The ratings are high-stakes. Schools receiving low grades - a D or F in any given year, or a C for three consecutive years - enter a review process by which they might be closed. The number of schools meeting these criteria jumped considerably this year. There is plenty of controversy to go around about the NYC ratings, much of it pertaining to two important features of the system. They're worth discussing briefly, as they are also applicable to systems in other states."

"Anthony Cody, experienced middle school science teacher and fabulous blogger, has offered to coordinate our campaign to write President Obama on October 17. We call it the Campaign for Our Public Schools."

Investment money is pouring into Florida from wealthy Chinese who find that Florida has exactly what they are looking for - and what they need to secure US green cards. Chinese investors are taking advantage of the EB-5 investment visa program, the so-called "green card via red carpet," by putting millions into Florida's charter schools and an aquaculture farm in Central Florida.

State education officials want to raise the bar for charter schools and they're looking to outsource some of the work to create and carry out the new standards.