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Tim Eller, spokesman for the state Department of Education, said the state is engaging schools in a three-part pilot program of a teacher evaluation system that relies heavily on value-added measures -- a controversial yardstick that uses student test scores to determine the "value" teachers add to student knowledge over the course of a year. The idea has grown in popularity since President Barack Obama expressed his support for the system during the federal Race to the Top education funding competition last year.

A recent discussion between David K. Cohen of the University of Michigan and the Fordham Institute's Chris Tessone used the term infrastructure. Cohen, in an earlier post on ShankarBlog (from the American Federation of Teachers' Shankar Institute), argued that individual reforms such as the DCPS IMPACT teacher performance review system were insufficient to fix the system overall. Cohen argues that what is needed is an instructional infrastructure that provides teachers with tools for their job.

Because The Academy made high academic growth on the ABCs of Public Education last year and met federal standards for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the school received a new charter from the N.C. State Board of Education this summer. The Academy had to meet this condition or demonstrate at least 70 percent of its students performing at proficiency on end-of-grade tests to renew its charter, according to a settlement that the school reached with the state last summer.

A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit filed by the mother of a 7-year-old autistic child who was repeatedly locked in a dark isolation room at his school for misbehavior.

As co-chair of Wisconsin's powerful legislative Joint Finance Committee, Alberta Darling was charged by Governor Scott Walker with cobbling together the most anti-public education budget in Wisconsin history. And Darling delivered, with a plan to slash $800 million in funding for public schools across Wisconsin while at the same time scheming to shift tens of millions from the state treasury into the accounts of private schools. She was delivering for American Federation for Children (AFC), the powerful national network of billionaire campaign contributors that has been pouring millions into school privatization fights across the country.

In 2010, California enacted education legislation known as the "parent trigger." The legislation empowers parents of children at schools that have failed to meet annual yearly progress for at least four years to change the administration, convert the school to a charter, or shut it down completely if they gather signatures from at least 51% of parents at the school. Similar legislation exists in Mississippi and Connecticut, but has failed to become law in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, and Maryland. Parents at McKinley Elementary in Compton Unified - a school that only met yearly progress once in the last eight years -were the first in the nation to "pull the trigger" and remain the sole group to do so to date. As a result of their action, the State of California required the district to hire a "direct assistance intervention team," and later, an attempt by parents to convert the school to a charter was rebuffed by the school district on technical grounds. A case is currently pending in Los Angeles Superior Court. Many school reformers believe that this law puts the interests of children ahead of teachers and helps to save children in failing schools before the clock runs out. Many education professionals, among them the president of the California Federation of Teachers, view the law as a "lynch mob provision," intended to dismantle the public school system. The politics of the "parent trigger" are confusing, with the lines between conservatives and liberals often blurred. This debate will examine the arguments in favor and in opposition to this reform, focusing on the experience to date in California and developments in other parts of the country where similar legislation is being considered.

Congressman Jared Polis, D-Colo., said Tuesday he will soon introduce a bill that would eventually require the federal government to pay for 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities. The money would come from cuts to defense spending.

The U.S. Department of Education has quietly invited states and schools using the most popular of four school improvement models to apply for some extra time to figure out the trickiest-and, arguably, the most crucial-component of the federal turnaround strategy: teacher evalution.

This was written by George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, who this year is also taking on the role of superintendent of his small school district. He is executive director of the non-profit Forum for Education and Democracy, a collaboration of educators from around the country.

There's no question that NCLB and RttT have marked an unprecedented level of federal involvement in education. In response to the sweeping and unproven reforms that these laws have brought to our nation's schools, there is an increasing call for the federal government to stay out of what has traditionally been regarded as a local issue.

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.

The Panel for Educational Policy on Wednesday approved a $120 million contract with a Verizon subsidiary to provide phone and Internet services for two years at city schools, despite calls for postponing the vote and boisterous protests over Verizon's possible role in federal theft charges against an Education Department consultant.

Montana and the U.S. Department of Education have ended a No Child Left Behind showdown after federal officials agreed to let the state reset its proficiency targets so more schools would make "adequate yearly progress" this year.

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 coming education cutbacks have alarmed some regional leaders, including Richard W. Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board. He noted in the board's quarterly publication Southwest Economy that a recent study ranked Texas "dead last in the percent of the population age 25 and older that graduated from high school, 37th in percent of population enrolled in degree-granting institutions, 35th in academic research and development, and 41st in science and engineering degrees awarded. We can't be happy that we are lagging behind in education," he wrote. 

The American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and American Enterprise Insitute Education Policy Director Frederick Hess debated reforms affecting teachers.

Tonight, the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on contracts for six Educational Partnership Organizations to take over a group of low-performing schools through the federal "restart" model. One of the restart schools is Banana Kelly High School, which EdVox wrote about last May. Banana Kelly High School is a small high school in the Bronx that seemed to have been set up to fail by the NYC Department of Education (DOE) which assigned rising populations of the highest-needs students and an increasing enrollment to Banana Kelly, yet allocated the school a declining budget. This year, the school was placed on NY State's list of Persistently Lowest-Achieving schools.

I had a conversation with the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, in which we discussed how teachers can be proactive in engaging political debates about public-sector employees, and how teachers are showing leadership in strengthening our schools.

A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: "Achievement gaps" became reformers' catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.

Class sizes in New York City public schools are the most bloated they have been in a decade, as budget cuts have sliced teachers from the system, the teachers union said Thursday. The city acknowledged that final class-size numbers would show more crowded classrooms, but it blamed a $1.7 billion drop in state and federal aid.