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"Billionaires like privately managed schools. Parents are lured with glittering promises of getting their kids a sure ticket to college. Politicians want to appear to be champions of "school reform" with charters. But charters will not end the poverty at the root of low academic performance or transform our nation's schools into a high-performing system. The world's top-performing systems - Finland and Korea, for example - do not have charter schools. They have strong public school programs with well-prepared, experienced teachers and administrators. Charters and that other faux reform, vouchers, transform schooling into a consumer good, in which choice is the highest value."

"If the mission of the education system is to serve the economy, and that means maximizing profits, then those profits will be highest if we have an overabundance of college graduates to do the technical work that must be done to keep the machinery of production running. And we have low wage service sector that is unable to raise its wages because they are unorganized and have no political clout. Those who are unemployed are informed over and over again by the school system that they are inadequate because they cannot pass the tests, and therefore to perceive their status as being the result of their own failure to make themselves useful to employers. They are unemployed not because manufacturing has been outsourced to cheap labor overseas, but because they were not "career ready," as proven by their failure to pass the new, much more "rigorous" Common Core aligned tests. Education reform becomes an exercise in rationalizing the shift of half the nation's workers into "surplus" status. It creates a new meritocracy, based on a false paradigm that defines the ability to do well on tests as merit."

Thousands of people will be converging on Washington, DC this week to speak out in support of our schools at the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action.

Despite fewer delegates than previous years-just about 9,000, down from 10,000-the National Education Association's annual convention is still the largest delegated decision-making body in the world.

"The last thing I will do is refuse to take your test," said an angry 15-year old to a math teacher who's a friend of mine in Georgia. "I just wanted to teach him to balance his checkbook, something he would use in the real world," she said, "but the school system made me sit there and watch him sullenly refuse to write on the 'high stakes' standardized test for the two days before his 16th birthday when he would quit school. This is not teaching."

Scores for the 2010-11 NYSTP 3-8 ELA and mathematics assessments will be available to schools and districts in the Verification Reports in the Level 2 Reporting (L2RPT) environment (see http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/level2reports/home.html) and on nySTART (www.nySTART.gov) on August 4, 2011. Data on these assessments will be released publicly by the Commissioner on August 8, 2011. School and district aggregated results are embargoed until the Commissioner's public release. Data under embargo cannot be discussed at public meetings or released to the public or the media.

We know, as administrators, we set the tone in our buildings or districts. Some of us set a positive tone and others set a rather negative one. We all have tough jobs where we have to communicate effectively with parents, students and teachers. The level of difficulty increases depending on the size of our student population, age of students, and whether you are in an urban, suburban or rural setting. Although I understand the life of an administrator, I worry that we have not been communicating well enough with those who control our fate through high stakes testing.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard offered up more details Monday about their plans to hold principals to strict performance standards, award principals bonuses and work to create better principal preparation programs.

We caught up with Mr. Brill, a resident of Bedford since 1981, last Friday, before he was to launch the East Coast portion of his book tour.

The state's new teacher merit pay law kicks in this school year and the idea behind it sounds simple: the better students perform, the more teachers can earn. But in areas such as art, music and physical education, it's raising more questions than answers. The law mandates up to half of a teacher's raise be based on how well students do on standardized tests, but there is no state criteria to evaluate specialty teachers. Districts will have to come up with that this year.

Let's drop the excuses. Let's not kid ourselves about silver-bullet solutions. Let's do the difficult work. And let's welcome teacher leaders as partners in making it happen.

It wasn't quite the Smackdown in Edgartown, but two leading figures in the national education debate politely collided here Thursday over the causes of failing schools and the best ways to rescue them.

One of the central policy ideas of market-based education reform is to increase both the risk and rewards of the teaching profession. The basic idea is to offer teachers additional compensation (increased rewards), but, in exchange, make employment and pay more contingent upon performance by implementing merit pay and weakening job protections such as tenure (increased risk). This trade-off, according to advocates, will not only force out low performers by paying them less and making them easier to fire, but it will also attract a "different type" of candidate to teaching - high-achievers who thrive in a high-stakes, high-reward system.

For a generation, there has been loose bipartisan agreement in Washington that the federal government has a necessary role to play in the nation's 13,600 school districts, primarily by using money to compel states to raise standards. But the field of Republican presidential candidates has promised to unwind this legacy, arguing that education responsibilities should devolve to states and local districts, which will do a better job than Washington.

State Secretary of Education Melody Schopp announced via conference call to superintendents today that South Dakota will hold its goals for proficiency in reading and math at 2009-10 levels, rather than bumping up those targets as previously anticipated. In addition, the state will reduce its graduation rate goal to 80 percent from the current target of 85 percent.

This article will investigate the fix-the-teachers campaign of today's "education reformers." It's not their only project. They also want public schools run with the top-down, data-driven, accountability methods used in private businesses; they aim to replace as many regular public schools as possible with publicly funded, privately managed charter schools; some are trying to expand voucher programs to allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools.

In recent post, I discussed the questionable value of student survey data to inform teacher evaluation models. Not only is there little research support for such surveys, but the very framing of the idea often reflects faulty reasoning.

School systems around the country are in transition. Propelled by a combination of evidence, logic, and intuition about the need for fundamental improvements in the content and management of public education, districts and states are continuing to exhibit an innovative drive that has in some ways been a hallmark of the American system since its beginnings nearly two centuries ago.

Advocates for poor and minority students, students with disabilities, and others sent a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., expressing deep concerns with legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act put forth today.

"Our guest author today is Stephen Lazar, a founding teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, where he teaches Social Studies. A National Board certified teacher, he blogs at Outside the Cave. Stephen is also one of the organizers of Insightful Social Studies, a grass roots campaign of teachers to reform the newly proposed New York State Social Studies standards. The following is Steve's testimony this morning in front of the Senate HELP committee's hearing on ESEA reauthorization."