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"The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people." Surely everyone recognizes the 5-word phrase. Some of you may have garbled the phrase on occasion - I have - into something like 'Our schools are drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity." But that's not what "A Nation at Risk" said back in 1983. The report, issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, was a call to action on many levels, not an attack on schools and colleges. "Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling," the Report states, immediately after noting that America has been "committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament." (emphasis added) Schools aren't the villain in "A Nation at Risk;" rather, they are a vehicle for solving the problem. Suppose that report were to come out now? What sort of tide is eroding our educational foundations? "A rising tide of (fill in the blank)?" This is a relevant question because sometime in the next few months another National Commission, this one on "Education Equity and Excellence," will issue its report. This Commission clearly hopes to have the impact of "A Nation at Risk." However, the two Commissions could hardly be more different. The 1983 Commission was set up to be independent, while the current one seems to be joined at the hip to the Department of Education.

Last week, Leo Casey gave Edwize readers the real story of Pascal Mauclair, whom the NY Post declared was the "at the bottom of the heap" when the DOE released the Teacher Data Reports to the press. The DOE gave Ms. Mauclair a "0" on her report, but the results seemed, to put it mildly, arbitrary. As Casey pointed out, Ms. Mauclair was graded on a small number (11) of high-need (ESL) students who were compared to other students learning in very different, departmentalized, classrooms. Aside from that, Ms. Mauclair has a reputation as an excellent teacher. As her principal said, "I would put my own child in her class." All this alone should be enough to clear Ms. Mauclair's name. But this week fresh evidence shows that Ms. Mauclair's report should be declared invalid altogether by the DOE.

The 2009-2010 school year marked another year of relatively slow growth in the for-profit education management industry. The greatest increase in profiled companies occurred in the category of small EMOs (i.e., EMOs that manage three or fewer schools). We believe our key finding from the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 report, i.e., that the growth of the EMO sector is slowing, still holds true for the 2009-2010 academic year overall. While the number of new schools under for-profit EMO management has slowed, the enrollments in these schools continue to grow at a more rapid pace. This Profiles report shows that generally large for-profit EMOs are managing fewer schools, and that small and medium for-profit EMOs are growing. While past annual Profiles reports have focused on descriptive data related to the number of EMOs and schools under EMO management, this year's report adds new variables on school performance as measured by federal or state rating systems. 

The Think Tank Review Project provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think-tank publications. Reviewers for the Think Tank Review Project apply academic peer review standards to reports from think tanks and write brief reviews for the project web site. They are asked to examine the reports for the validity of assumptions, methodology, results, and strength of links between results and policy recommendations. The reviews, written in non-academic language, are intended to help policy makers, reporters, and others assess the merits of the reviewed reports.

I've commented in the past about the difficulties of obtaining reconcilable data on finances of New Jersey Charter Schools. What do I mean by reconcilable? Well, when I'm looking at financial data on charter schools in particular, I like to be able to see some relationship between expenditure and revenue data reported on IRS 990 filings (Tax returns of the non-profit boards/foundations/agencies that operate the charters) and state government (department of ed) reported expenditures and/or any annual financial report documents that might be required by charter authorizers. This really is an authorizer/accountability issue. A financial reporting requirement issue.

"Horace Meister, a regular contributor, has discovered a shocking instance of contradictory research, posted a year apart by the same "independent" governmental agency. The first report, published a year ago, criticized New York City's charter schools for enrolling small proportions of high-need students; the second report, published a month ago, claimed that the city's charter schools had a lower attrition rate of high-needs students than public schools. Meister read the two reports carefully and with growing disgust. He concluded that the Independent Budget Office had massaged the data to reach a conclusion favoring the powerful charter lobby. Eva Moskowitz read the second report and wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal called "The Myth of Charter School 'Cherry Picking.'" Horace Meister says it is not myth: it is reality."

"Twenty years after their creation, charter schools constitute the fastest-growing sector of American public education, according to a report released Wednesday. Enrollment in these publicly funded but often privately run institutions rose by more than 200,000 students in the 2011-2012 school year compared to the previous year, the report found. That increasing enrollment has yielded a total of more than 2 million students in charter schools -- about 5 percent of the number of kids in public schools across the country. The report is an annual attempt by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group, to track the trajectory of these schools and their market share in different places."

Educators and policymakers have for years debated the academic performance of charter schools, when compared against traditional public schools. Now a new report focuses on charters' financial performance-and concludes that many well-known charter school networks spend more money than comparable, regular public schools. The report, released by the National Education Policy Center, examines charter schools' spending, as measured by their 990 filings through the Internal Revenue Service, and other state and local data. It focuses on charter school spending in three states: New York, Ohio, and Texas, over a three-year-period, from 2008-2010. But the findings are being strongly disputed by one of the charter operators cited in the report, KIPP, whose spokesman called its cost comparisons a "fiction" and said it does not present charter and regular public school expenses consistently, or transparently.

In its report, The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticizes local urban governance structures and presents the decentralized, charter-school-driven Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans as a successful model for fiscal and academic performance. Reviewing the report for the Think Twice think tank review project, Kristen Buras of Georgia State University writes that the report ignores the distinctive history of New Orleans and fails to provide evidence for its claims. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

While past annual Profiles reports have focused on either for-profit EMOs or nonprofit EMOs, this is the first annual Profiles report to cover both categories in a single report which allows for easier comparisons. The 2010-2011 school year marked another year of relatively slow growth in the for-profit education management industry and another year of steady growth in the nonprofit EMO industry. We believe our key finding from the past three years, that the for-profit school management sector has leveled off and that many for-profit companies are expanding into supplemental services, continued in the 2010-2011 school year. The nonprofit management sector's growth remains steady, both in terms of new nonprofit EMOs and new managed schools. While the number of new schools under for-profit EMO management has slowed, enrollments in all managed schools continue to grow at a rapid pace.

What counts as a "fact"? New York State Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern's ruling on the release of the New York City Teacher Data Reports reflects a view very much at odds with the social science research community. In ruling that the Department of Education's intent to release these reports, which purport to label elementary and middle school teachers as more or less effective based on their students' performance on state tests of English Language Arts and mathematics, was neither arbitrary nor capricious, Kern held that there is no requirement that data be reliable for them to be disclosed. Rather, the standard she invoked was that the data simply need to be "factual," quoting a Court of Appeals case that "factual data … simply means objective information, in contrast to opinions, ideas or advice." But it is entirely a matter of opinion as to whether the particular statistical analyses involved in the production of the Teacher Data Reports warrant the inference that teachers are more or less effective. All statistical models involve assumptions that lie outside of the data themselves. Whether these assumptions are appropriate is a matter of opinion.

"Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card" posits that fairness depends not only on a sufficient level of funding for all students, but also the provision of additional resources to districts where there are more students with greater needs. The National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four separate, but interrelated, "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage. Using a more thorough statistical analysis, the report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems and school funding fairness across the nation. The results show that many states do not fairly allocate education funding to address the needs of their most disadvantaged students, and the schools serving high numbers of those students.

Unfortunately the mainstream media continue to repeat without dispute Suransky's claim that the progress reports were much more "stable" this year, even though 60% of schools changed grades.     Not one reporter, to my knowledge anyway, has bothered to point out how experts have shown that 32-80% of the annual gains or losses in scores at the school level are essentially random - and yet 60% of the school grade is based upon these annual gains or losses. 

The release of a new "State of the Sector" report by the New York City Charter School Center will hopefully mark a turning point in efforts to have a more substantive conversation about charter schools' demographics and performance in our city. As local media have noted, the report is one of the first from within the charter sector itself to acknowledge some troubling data on charter schools that we and other analysts have been discussing for several years.

In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barak Obama's nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns' education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting "The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives." In December, Obama tapped Chicago's Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, "Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama's transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers' unions." They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

In a recent story, the New York Daily News uses the recently-released teacher data reports (TDRs) to "prove" that the city's charter school teachers are better than their counterparts in regular public schools. The headline announces boldly: New York City charter schools have a higher percentage of better teachers than public schools (it has since been changed to: "Charters outshine public schools"). Taking things even further, within the article itself, the reporters note, "The newly released records indicate charters have higher performing teachers than regular public schools." So, not only are they equating words like "better" with value-added scores, but they're obviously comfortable drawing conclusions about these traits based on the TDR data. The article is a pretty remarkable display of both poor journalism and poor research. The reporters not only attempted to do something they couldn't do, but they did it badly to boot. It's unfortunate to have to waste one's time addressing this kind of thing, but, no matter your opinion on charter schools, it's a good example of how not to use the data that the Daily News and other newspapers released to the public.

This second report from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project offers ground-breaking descriptive information regarding the use of classroom observation instruments to measure teacher performance. It finds that observation scores have somewhat low reliabilities and are weakly though positively related to value-added measures. Combining multiple observations can enhance reliabilities, and combining observation scores with student evaluations and test-score information can increase their ability to predict future teacher value-added. By highlighting the variability of classroom observation measures, the report makes an important contribution to research and provides a basis for the further development of observation rubrics as evaluation tools. Although the report raises concerns regarding the validity of classroom observation measures, we question the emphasis on validating observations with test-score gains. Observation scores may pick up different aspects of teacher quality than test-based measures, and it is possible that neither type of measure used in isolation captures a teacher's contribution to all the useful skills students learn. From this standpoint, the authors' conclusion that multiple measures of teacher effectiveness are needed appears justifiable. Unfortunately, however, the design calls for random assignment of students to teachers in the final year of data collection, but the classroom observations were apparently conducted prior to randomization, missing a valuable opportunity to assess correlations across measures under relatively bias-free conditions.

Sometime soon we can expect a report from the Council on Foreign Relations' Independent Task Force on U.S. Education Reform and National Security, chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice. The panel started its work in April 2011 and was charged, according to the council's Web site, with "evaluating the U.S. public education system within the context of national security." Can you guess what the report - which may be released next week - will say? In fact, knowing who headed the commission means that we can do better than just guess.

A new report being officially released today - by a Council of Foreign Relations task force chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice - seems to want very much to be seen as the new "A Nation at Risk," the seminal 1983 report that warned that America's future was threatened by a "rising tide of mediocrity" in the country's public schools. It's a pale imitation.

The National Study of CMO Effectiveness is a four-year study designed to assess the impact of CMOs on student achievement and to identify CMO structures and practices that are most effective in raising achievement. Earlier reports from the study documented substantial variation in CMOs' student achievement impacts and in CMOs' use of particular educational strategies and practices. The last report from the study found that the most effective CMOs tend to emphasize two practices in particular: high expectations for student behavior and intensive teacher coaching and monitoring. This report provides a more in-depth description of these two promising CMO practices, drawing on surveys and interviews with staff in high-performing CMOs that emphasize one or both practices.