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"It has been difficult to discern what specific details are left on the table in the Chicago teachers' negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents Mayor Rahm Emanuel's enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should teachers be judged by their students' test scores, as opposed to by more holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level of government are strapped? I'm not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in perspective. The modern teachers' union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and many of the problems back then -- from low school budgets to testing to debates over classroom autonomy -- remain more than salient today."

Through the years there have been many bitter teacher strikes and too many student protests to count. But a principals' revolt? "Principals don't revolt," said Bernard Kaplan of Great Neck North High School on Long Island, who has been one for 20 years. "Principals want to go along with the system and do what they're told." But President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals' revolt in history.

After scoring a legislative win with a recently-enacted state law limiting teacher tenure and strike rights, the well-heeled education advocacy group Stand for Children is turning its attention to issues specific to Chicago-including school turnarounds. On Wednesday, the group announced that it is launching a radio campaign to "educate Chicagoans about the value of public turnaround schools." Group leaders also plan to host "telephone town hall meetings" where CPS officials and community leaders can discuss with residents of the South and West sides the "need for quality schools."

One of the most striking segments of Gov. Cuomo's State of the State address was the portion on  school children.  In a fit of flourishing rhetoric, Cuomo suggested that all the players in educational politics have lobbyists: the teachers have lobbyists, the school boards have lobbyists and even the janitors have lobbyists. However, he said, the students themselves are not represented by anyone. The governor promised to fix that, saying he would take on yet another job, that of lobbyist for the state's children. Sounds good, right? Well, let's take a look and see.

We won't always win, and democracy is not a sure bet by any means, but the drive for personal liberty and our insistence that we actually are our "brother's" keeper is hard to kill. (On the same theme of optimism: Reading Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" has not entirely convinced me, but it has shed a different light on some of my depressing fears. It was once worse.) The latest issue of Commonweal has a piece by Peggy O'Brien Steinfels on Vaclav Havel which I recommend. Once again, a reminder of what's possible. Remember that many once held it to be impossible to overthrow a totalitarian regime from within. Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" strikes a deep chord. One we need to remember when "they" try to make teachers, parents, and students powerless.

The similarities between contemporary American educational reform and Soviet educational reform of the 1930s are as striking as they are discomfiting. Of the following three statements, which refer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and which refer to America today? 1.  "Teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs….The stakes are huge-and the time to cling to the status quo has passed."   2.  "We had to have a campaign for 100 percent successful teaching…all students must learn." 3.  "Poor work by the school and poor achievement by the entire class and by individual pupils are the direct result of poor work by the teacher."   Although all three of the above sentiments could be attributable to current officeholders in Washington, D.C., only the first is American-from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (Duncan 2010, January). The second and third are policy statements which emanated from old Soviet policy papers on educational reform (Ewing, 2001, p. 487).

Could teacher evaluations begin to offer us the best portrait yet of what instruction actually looks like in America's classrooms? And what changes might such information spur in teacher preparation and on-the-job training? Those are implications raised by a couple of different papers looking at teacher evaluations. I've written about them on this blog before, but only from the technical aspects of the systems. In reviewing the reports again, it strikes me that they also have a lot to say about instructional quality-some of which seems frankly troubling.

The New York City Education Department on Friday released the ratings of some 18,000 teachers in elementary and middle schools based on how much they helped their students succeed on standardized tests. The ratings have high margins of error, are now nearly two years out of date and are based on tests that the state has acknowledged became too predictable and easy to pass over time. But even with those caveats, the scores still provide the first glimpse to the public of what is going on within individual classrooms in schools. And one of the most striking findings is how much variation there can be even within what are widely considered the city's best schools, the ones that each September face a crush of eager parents.

The big "reform" trucks have been rollin' down the education highway for nearly a decade now. Public school educators are used to faux reform's inconvenience and injustice by now--and some even accept endless testing, lockstep standards and curriculum, and systematic destruction of public schools as necessary for positive change. Parents and grandparents may like their children's schools and teachers, but have absorbed the incessant media drumbeat: public education has failed. Out with the old! Something Must Be Done! If--like me--you still believe that public education is a civic good, an idea perfectly resonant with democratic equality, you're probably wondering if there's anything that can stop the big "reform" trucks. Those massive, exceptionally well-funded "reform" trucks with their professional media budgets, paid commentary and slick political arms. I can tell you this: it won't be teachers alone who turn back the tide of "reform." Teachers have been backed into a corner, painted as unionists bent on their own security (whether they pay dues or not), unwilling to be "accountable." They have been replaced, willy-nilly, by untrained temps--without retaliatory strike-back from their national union leaders. They have been publicly humiliated by their own cities and media outlets, not to mention the Secretary of Education.

"The Chicago teachers' strike exemplifies, in stark terms, how misguided the battle over education has become. The teachers are fighting for the things industrial unions have always fought for: seniority, favorable work rules and fierce resistance to performance measures. City Hall is fighting to institute reforms no top-performing country has ever seen fit to use, and which probably won't make much difference if they are instituted. The answer lies elsewhere - in a different approach to teaching education and to dealing with the unions."

"To building a lasting peace between teachers unions and communities of color, we can't forget their most painful battle of all."

Last night's meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy meeting was exhilarating, stirring, and depressing all at once.   Over a thousand parents, teachers, and striking Verizon workers showed up for the pre-meeting rally, and hundreds more filled the auditorium afterwards at Murry Bergtraum HS, chanting, booing Walcott and the DOE, and speaking up passionately for the need for more caring education priorities, and against the $120 million Verizon contract, which will steal even more resources from our children and the company's workers.

The latest numbers on poverty among U.S. children are so striking that they make you do a double take. In 2009, 31 million kids were living in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty threshold.

After thousands of striking Verizon workers and city teachers held a rally in Lower Manhattan, the mostly mayor-appointed Panel for Educational Policy voted 9-4 on the Department of Education's $120 million contract with the wireless communications giant.

In 1968, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) went on strike over the involuntary transfer of 19 teachers by a newly empowered community-controlled school board in New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. The controversies at the heart of that bitter struggle live on in current debates over the methods of teacher selection, the role of seniority and due process in teacher assignment, and the appropriateness of affirmative action in the composition of urban teaching corps. Then, as now, the role of educators of color in urban school districts was an issue that sparked controversy. In recounting how rules for teacher selection evolved in New York, Christina Collins' book, "Ethnically Qualified", Race, Merit and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920-1980, illuminates the failure of the city's teachers' unions to effectively challenge the exclusion and marginalization of African American teachers.

While some of the changes to the No Child Left Behind law proposed Tuesday are widely considered to be improvements, others could prove disastrous for students with disabilities and other groups of students. One of the bill's most striking features is its elimination of specific achievement targets for individual groups of students. For students with disabilities and students learning English, that portion of NCLB-the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act-was groundbreaking.

'We're from the government, and we're here to help." Those words strike fear in just about any situation but they sound particularly ominous when the subject of the government's help is Florida's university system, and the ones doing the helping are Gov. Rick Scott and the state Legislature, backed by Big Business. Their assistance, to take form during the spring legislative session, will be a push to replace subjects such as music, psychology and French literature with the study of science, technology, engineering and math.

"Chicagoans need to understand what is happening to our school system. The mayor and his hedge fund allies are going to replace our democratically-controlled public schools with privately-run charter schools. This will have disastrous results and people need to rise up and refuse. As a parent, do you really want your child wearing a three-piece polyester suit every day to school and pay a fine every time your child's tie isn't on straight?"

A broad coalition of 38 civil rights, education reform and business groups sent House education chairman John Kline a scathing letter Wednesday, describing his No Child Left Behind legislation as potentially racist. "It undermines the core American value of equal opportunity in education embodied in Brown v. Board of Education," the groups wrote.