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The Christie administration's slowdown in approving charter schools in the suburbs hasn't slowed the push by Assembly Democrats to tighten controls on all charters -- possibly imperiling a slew of schools awaiting their final OK. The Assembly education committee yesterday moved a bill that would give local voters the right to approve new charters in their home districts. If passed by both houses, the law would make New Jersey only the third state to require charter schools to face a local referendum.

This paper examines the policy context of charter school adoption and implementation in Indianapolis -- the only city in the U.S. with independent mayoral authorizing authority. Our study identifies specific implications of this hybrid of mayoral control, including expanded civic capacity and innovation diffusion across Indianapolis area public school systems. This qualitative study utilizes over 30 in-depth interviews conducted with key stakeholders. Legislative, state, and school district documents and reports were analyzed for descriptive evidence of expanded civic capacity, school innovation, and charter/non-charter school competitive pressures. The case of Indianapolis reframes the mayoral role in education reform, and expands the institutional framework for charter school authorizing.

The city has dropped key controls for detecting cheating on the state's high-stakes standardized tests, the Daily News has learned.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who kicked off his own controversial reform effort in New York City schools almost a decade ago, is now jumping directly into the fray over public education in New Orleans. State filings show Bloomberg, whose media empire had already made him a billionaire before he became mayor and took control of New York City schools, signed a $5,000 check this month to help get Kira Orange Jones get elected to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

"Has the company that produces many standardized tests gained control of our education system?"

"The shame that many teachers and principals feel at being made responsible for a school's low academic performance is a recent phenomenon. Historically, policy elites and educators explained poor academic performance of groups and individual students by pointing to ethnic and racial discrimination, poverty, immigrants' cultures, family deficits, and students' lack of effort. School leaders would say that they could hardly be blamed for reversing conditions over which they had little control. Until the past quarter-century, demography as destiny was the dominant explanation for unequal school outcomes. Things began to change by the mid-1970s."

"critical pedagogy "…draws attention to questions concerning who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge, values, and skills, and it illuminates how knowledge, identities, and authority are constructed within particular sets of social relations""

Louisiana is poised to establish the nation's most expansive system of school choice by adopting a package of vouchers and other tools that would give many parents control over the use of tax dollars to educate their children. The initiative would effectively redefine vouchers, which have typically helped lower-income public-school students pay for private schools. Vouchers could now also be used by students to pay for state-approved apprenticeships at local businesses, as well as college courses and private online classes, while they are still in public schools.

One of the most frequent criticisms put to traditional public schools is that they waste money on administrative bloat, instead of channeling more funding where it belongs-the classroom. A much leaner and classroom-centered model, some say, can be found in charter schools, because of their relative freedom from stifling bureaucracy. A new study, however, concludes that this hypothesis has it exactly wrong. The study, released by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, at Teachers College, Columbia University, examines school spending in Michigan and concludes that charter schools spend more per-pupil on administration and less on instruction than traditional public schools, even when controlling for enrollment, student populations served, and other factors.

In the debate over school improvement, individuals and groups advancing agendas with little or no evidence to back them up have somehow claimed the mantle of education "reformers," while teachers, their unions and others with actual education expertise often are portrayed as obstacles to reform--despite their desire to be involved in an improvement process that frequently shuts them out. In this upside-down approach to school "reform," teachers are required to implement top-down policies made without their input, often in an austerity environment, with little more than an exhortation to "just do it," and then are blamed when the policies fail. Not surprisingly, these "strategies"--such as mayoral control, school reconstitution, misuse and overuse of standardized tests, vouchers, merit pay, or simply stripping teachers of voice and professionalism--haven't moved the needle. The American Federation of Teachers has promoted a better way.

The mayor wants to give his hand-picked superintendent the power to reassign bad teachers, reshape failing schools and stagger class times without union contract barriers. Mayor Frank Jackson, the only Ohio mayor who controls schools through an appointed board, angered fellow Democrats and the party's labor allies by challenging timeworn teacher union contracts. "What we will not accept is incremental change or the belief that everything is OK and we should continue down the same path," he said in a city hall interview. "That is not acceptable to us."

Perhaps most importantly, one of the best ways to improve public education would be to work to alleviate those factors beyond teachers' control that affect students' ability to learn. They are some of the same factors that lead to Louisiana's dismal Kids COUNT rating-unemployment, poverty, violence, crime rates, family instability, childhood hunger, access to health care. No, no, and no, according to the politicians. What do teachers know about education, anyway? Public-school teachers, according to most of the Senate members who testified, are obviously part of the problem, not the solution, so it's better to follow noneducators' recommendations when improving schools. The philosophies behind the legislation passed last week echo the pro-charter, pro-private philosophies of distinctly non-local figures as diverse as the anti-union former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (who now finds her former district embroiled in a cheating scandal), the deep-pocket GOP puppetmasters the Koch Brothers and, most significantly, the American Legislative Exchange Council. (ALEC, a conservative think tank that prizes small government and free markets, hosts large meetings at which it gives politicians dummy legislation that they can personalize and file in their home states; its influence is clear in some of Louisiana's education bills.) Similar legislation has been proposed in other states across the country, particularly in legislatures that, like Louisiana's, are overwhelmingly Republican, and teachers and others with an interest in public education would do well to pay attention to what's going on here.

Charter schools in New Orleans (NOLA) now serve over four out of five students in the city - the largest market share of any big city in the nation. As of the 2011-12 school year, most of the city's schools (around 80 percent), charter and regular public, are overseen by the Recovery School District (RSD), a statewide agency created in 2003 to take over low-performing schools, which assumed control of most NOLA schools in Katrina's aftermath. Around three-quarters of these RSD schools (50 out of 66) are charters. The remainder of NOLA's schools are overseen either by the Orleans Parish School Board (which is responsible for 11 charters and six regular public schools, and taxing authority for all parish schools) or by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (which is directly responsible for three charters, and also supervises the RSD). New Orleans is often held up as a model for the rapid expansion of charter schools in other urban districts, based on the argument that charter proliferation since 2005-06 has generated rapid improvements in student outcomes.

After months of studying, stressing and - yes - some crying, our kids are finally done with this year's state English Language Arts and math exams. This happens every year, and each year seems more intense than the last. But after all the fuss and agony to rate our kids, their teachers and their schools, what have our children really learned? If your kids are anything like our kids, they've learned more about pressure and bureaucracy than math and English.

If you're an educator, a parent, a student or anyone who cares about public education, you should know that ALEC, the radical conservative lobbying group, is eyeing your throat. The American Legislative Exchange Council has been drawing drams of lifeblood from the public school system for decades, but now that it has disbanded its controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force (read "More Guns and Fewer Democratic Voters Committee") it is expected to redouble its efforts to decrease local control of schools by parents and elected school boards, privatize public school jobs, funnel public dollars to private entities, and limit or destroy the collective bargaining rights educators rely on to advocate for students.

Ever since the debacle of Pineapplegate, it is widely recognized by everyone other than the publishing giant Pearson that its tentacles have grown too long and too aggressive. It is difficult to remember what part of American education has not been invaded by Pearson's corporate grasp. It receives billions of dollars to test millions of students. Its scores will be used to calculate the value of teachers. It has a deal with the Gates Foundation to store all the student-level data collected at the behest of Race to the Top. It recently purchased Connections Academy, thus giving it a foothold in the online charter industry. And it recently added the GED to its portfolio. With the U.S. Department of Education now pressing schools to test children in second grade, first grade, kindergarten - and possibly earlier - and with the same agency demanding that schools of education be evaluated by the test scores of the students of their graduates (whew!), the picture grows clear. Pearson will control every aspect of our education system.

Teach for America loves to expand its reach, and so it has again, this time partnering with the controversial Imagine schools, the nation's largest for-profit charter school network. That's an interesting pairing. Imagine is based in Arlington, Virginia, with some 75 schools in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The for-profit charter operator has been investigated in some states for the way it exercises control over the schools it manages, essentially ignoring the boards of trustees that are supposed to really run the schools. It has also come under scrutiny for its complicated real estate deals that generate millions of public dollars for Imagine.

Let us now praise the public school parents of Florida. They organized to oppose a bill known as the "Parent Trigger" or "Parent Empowerment." Under this proposed law, if 51 percent of the parents in a public school signed a petition, they could take over the school and decide whether to close it or turn it over to a charter management organization. The bill was wrapped in a deceptive and alluring packaging. Who could resist the bold idea of giving parents the power to take control of their public school? Well, it turned out that Florida parents had become savvy after watching their elected officials endorse one bill after another to advance the interests of charter schools and for-profit entrepreneurs. They figured out that the real beneficiaries of this legislation would be charter management corporations, not parents or children.

As demonstrated by recent survey data, job satisfaction within the profession is at its lowest since the Reagan years. What's at stake is the future of an entire generation, one that's growing up to face a new economic reality that requires a new set of skills. But because of circumstances the students don't control, they might have disaffected teachers carrying them there. According to MetLife, which interviewed 1,000 K-12 teachers by phone, the number of teachers who reported they were "very satisfied" dropped by 15 points between 2009 and 2011, from 59 to 44 percent. Two surveys that gauged teacher sentiment were commissioned by MetLife and Scholastic/The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, respectively.

Blatant forms of discrimination against women in academia have diminished since the Equal Pay Act and Title IX became law in 1964 and 1972, respectively. Yet gender differences in salary, tenure status, and leadership roles still persist among men and women in higher education. In particular, wage differences among male and female professors have not been fully explained, even when productivity, teaching experience, institutional size and prestige, disciplinary fields, type of appointment, and family-related responsibilities are controlled for statistically (see here).