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A residency program in Denver, and mentorship and leadership-development programs in Georgia's Gwinnett County school system are among the projects getting a financial injection over the next five years from a $75 million investment from the New York-based Wallace Foundation that is aimed at improving the pipeline leading to the principal's office.

This was written by Brett Rosenthal, assistant principal at the high-achieving South Side High School in New York. He used to work at Jamaica High School in New York City.

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.

It wasn't the tests that made the Atlanta teachers and principals go insane with cheating. But they did go insane.

...officials revealed this week that the State Education Department had quietly been conducting erasure analysis on some high school Regents exams for more than three years, a process that red-flagged 64 incidences of possible problems, including one that led to the ouster of an assistant principal in the Bronx.

In essence, the law creates a parents' union, which advocates say will provide powerful and needed counterweight to teachers' unions and district bureaucracies. If 51 percent of parents in a persistently failing school sign a petition, they can force the school to change into a charter, close it entirely or replace the principal and teachers.

This is a fantastic overview of the literature and issues on value-added (includes paper summaries in appendix) put out by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

Warwick Valley School District leaders are suggesting sending students home an hour early once a month so teachers and principals can implement a new state law requiring staff evaluations. Administrators say they need the extra time to train and certify evaluators, develop a new data analysis process and conduct evaluations under the new state Annual Professional Performance Review regulations.

Sherrie Martin, former teacher of the year at a Metro school, is questioning whether she really belongs in the classroom after scoring low on the state's new teacher evaluation. In Sumner County, Summer Naylor left her third-graders behind last month, resigning after eight years teaching. Too many mandates and evaluations made her job no longer fun. New evaluations pushed Robert "Bud" Raikes - the Smyrna High School principal who has a stadium named after him - into retiring early.

The week before schools opened in Miami-Dade County. As teachers scrambled to put last-minute finishing touches on their classrooms and tweak their lesson plans, and pored over their rosters of students (in many cases much longer than last year's), they were stopped cold in their tracks at faculty meetings across the county. Principals, with the aid of a video presentation produced and distributed by the school district, broke the bad news

The New York Times reports that there is a pilot program in Houston, called the "Apollo 20 Program" in which some of the district's regular public schools are "mimicking" the practices of high-performing charter schools. According to the Times article, the group of pilot schools seek to replicate five of the practices commonly used by high-flying charters: extended school time; extensive tutoring; more selective hiring of principals and teachers; "data-driven" instruction, including frequent diagnostic quizzing; and a "no excuses" culture of high expectations.

It's customary for superintendents to address principals before teachers return to classes for the start of the fall semester. Determining how much of the content is merely rhetoric is hard to tell. After all, superintendents want to be seen as inspirational leaders.

The term "merit pay" has gained a prominent place in the debate over education reform. First it was D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee trumpeting it as a key to fixing the D.C.'s ailing public schools. Then a handful of other cities gave it a go, including Denver, New York City, and Nashville. Merit pay is a big plank of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's reform platform. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has just launched his own version of merit pay that focuses incentives toward principals.

New York State Education Commissioner John B. King has posted a Back to School message for educators, with a transcript included. The message for educators is that all adults in schools should constantly be asking, "Who is proficient? How do I know and how do I increase those levels of proficiency?" From the district superintendent, to the superintendent, to the principal, to the teacher, to the office staff, everyone has to be continuously asking, "Where are we? Where are we in terms of our goals and where are we in terms of our students' college and career readiness and how do we get there?"

When talk-show host Oprah Winfrey handed a $1 million check last September to the principal of New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, 200 students watched the broadcast from a church and celebrated with a brass band.

Educational reforms enacted through federal policies are directly impacting the voice of children, teachers, and teacher educators. The recently introduced bi partisan bill "Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals Act" frames a plan for state accreditation for teacher training academies based on student achievement. The newly introduced Race to the Top (RTT) competition, focused on early childhood, includes motivating states to receive some of the $500 million allotted to create ratings systems to score early childhood programs, write standards and related standardized tests, and expectations of what an early childhood teachers should know. Both the proposed bill and RTT competition are positioned to regulate with market driven ideology, reinforcing and reproducing social injustice and undermining democratic ideals.

Full RAND study by Jennifer L. Steele, Georges Vernez, Michael A. Gottfried, Michael Schwam-Baird

Colorado school districts have overwhelmed the state Department of Education with their interest in participating in a state pilot program this fall for evaulating new teachers and principals.

There had long been suspicions that cheating on state tests was widespread in the Atlanta public schools, but the superintendent, Beverly L. Hall, was feared by teachers and principals, and few dared speak out. Last summer a supposedly Blue Ribbon Commission, headed by a businessman volunteering his time, produced yet another flimsy report, urging further investigation.

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, the principal of South Side High School in New York.  She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.