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There's nothing wrong with providing families with options. When charters open in their own privately financed, state-of-the-art buildings in poverty-stricken neighborhoods where they're welcomed by the community, there may be reasons to celebrate. But when charters co-locate in mixed-income areas, choice is only half the story. The existing schools in which they set up shop suffer both in terms of resources (only so many kids can fit in the lunchroom at one time) and morale. If the Cobble Hill Success Academy opens as planned in the Brooklyn School for Global Studies, which also houses a second high school and a special-needs program, in five years the building will be at 108 percent capacity - unless, of course, the other schools shrivel up and die. Call us paranoid, but parents like me are starting to wonder whether Mayor Bloomberg's larger goal isn't to privatize the entire New York City public school system. Why else would he be foisting charters on communities that don't want them? And how else can he justify diverting tax dollars to organizations that employ people to blanket neighborhoods with advertisements and try to poach students from public schools that are already thriving?

"I make numbers talk," Richard Bowman likes to say when describing his new profession. But he isn't in finance or economics, he's in education policy, and he hopes to use his analytic expertise to help reform the country's public school systems with the help of a program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Since 2008, the Strategic Data Project (SDP), under Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research, has placed fellows like Bowman in state education agencies, school districts, and charter school management organizations where they are helping policymakers to decode an avalanche of educational data. Their mission is to transform the use of data in education to improve student achievement.

There is enormous interest in information about how learners interact with educational materials. Being able to collect data about student progress in real time is a very powerful idea. Essentially, it enables us to observe and understand the process of learning. Questions such as 'how do people learn?' or 'what exactly influences learning outcomes?' have always been critical, and adaptive learning may help to address them. But who will have access to student data? At the moment most of these and similar data belong to the companies that collect them. In fact, to some extent, public money is indirectly financing data collection for the development of a for-profit product. Ironically, when such software products are finished, they may be sold back to students - much like those students whose data helped fine-tune the starting algorithms.

One of the leading criticisms of voucher programs-and charter and virtual schools for that matter-is that they undermine traditional public schools' finances by sucking away their per-pupil funding and resources. A new paper published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which supports public and private school choice, challenges that assertion.

A series of blog posts from School Finance 101.

What Rorty's book also draws attention to is the power of narrative and the way in which the American Dream is a specific narrative that comes into being at a particular time and place and then can be "read back" onto American history - on the Puritan beginnings and those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It is a narrative that can be "read forward," projected onto the future, as a means of establishing a vision for a society and economy. This is the art of narrative retellings of the America Dream, which, in the hands of Rorty or Barack Obama, becomes a shining beacon to unify the people in recognizing what is best in America. The question is whether, in a time of radical change and transition - when America is losing its world position as the only superpower, when millions of Americans are losing their homes and jobs as a result of the recession and financial crisis, when America enters into a massive budget-cutting and deficit-financing mode - whether the American Dream can be reclaimed, refurbished, re-articulated and retold in era of decline.

As the United States emerges from difficult economic times, the challenges of increasing child poverty, revenue declines and state budget cuts appear more daunting. Yet, so too is the national challenge of ensuring all students, especially low-income students and students with special needs, the opportunity to receive a rigorous, standards-based education to prepare them for today's economy. In order to address the challenges of concentrated student poverty and meet the needs of English-language learners and students with disabilities, states must develop and implement the next generation of standards-driven school finance systems, expressly designed to provide a sufficient level of funding, fairly distributed in relation to student and school need.  The inaugural edition of the National Report Card, issued in late 2010, served to focus attention on these important issues. This second edition, which analyzes data through 2009, seeks to continue and sharpen that focus. Amidst the ongoing effort to improve our nation's public schools, fair school funding is critical to being successful and sustaining progress. Creating and maintaining state systems of fair school funding is essential to improving our nation's public schools.

I've heard it over and over again from reform pundits. Funding equity? Been there done that. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference. It's all about teacher quality! The bottom line is that equitable and adequate financing of schools is a NECESSARY UNDERLYING CONDITION FOR EVERYTHING ELSE!

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia's school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

The charter school movement is gaining in popularity and maturity two decades after the passage of the state law authorizing the schools. Charter backers had hoped the creation of publicly financed, privately managed schools would reinvent and transform public education. Charters clearly have fostered change within the system. But education experts and even some of those in on the ground floor of the charter movement say the broader goal has not been achieved.

Monday's announcements that all three charter schools in the Believe Network would likely have their charters revoked at the end of the school year were no surprise to those who have been following recent news about these schools and the network which runs them. From security camera footage that showed Believe students were being forced to attend classes in factory space to the photo of Believe CEO Eddie Calderon-Melendez charging a New York Post photographer, evidence suggested that both the state's investigation into the Network's finances and the DOE's review of the school's management would find multiple egregious violations of the school leaders' legal responsibilities.

For the first time, New York City is closing a charter school for the offense of simply being mediocre. The announcement this week that the city planned to shut Peninsula Preparatory Charter School, a seven-year-old elementary school in Far Rockaway, Queens, was unusual by any definition. Since 2004, the city has closed only a few of its 142 charters that have opened - schools that are publicly financed but privately managed, and are a source of competition for traditional schools.

A new well-financed player has jumped into the debate over education reform in New York State, and already the sparks have begun to fly. The New York Campaign for Achievement Now, or NYCAN, has launched its Web site, and its executive director, Christine Grant, said it has raised $1.2 million from such entities as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

GIA announces the release of a comprehensive US report on the Charter Schools market. The proportion of students attending charter schools is on the rise. Over 30% of public school students attend charter schools in the four urban districts of Washington DC, Kansas City, New Orleans, and Detroit in the US. Following a marginal setback during the recession, which was instigated by reduced funding, the charter school market bounced back in 2009 with government support and revival in financing options. Growth in enrollment is expected to increase in the following years, given the increasing importance given by the Obama administration to charter schools.

In the last couple of years, Sharon Akman, a real estate agent, applied to the state of New Jersey three times to open a new charter school in the Highland Park area, to be called Tikun Olam Hebrew Language Charter High School. Then on Oct. 6, one week after the state's most recent rejection, the United States Education Department announced that it had approved a $600,000 grant to finance Ms. Akman's proposed charter.

As I'm sure many have already heard, yesterday the Board of Regents voted to approve Achievement First's application to establish a franchise network of "no excuses" charter schools in Providence. I've been pretty outspoken on this issue already, and there's a lot more I'd like to talk about (for example, how can a proposal that will drain so much money from Providence be given the thumbs up just hours after the city announced that it might not have enough money to finish out the year?). But my voice has already been heard enough in this debate. Now that the Board's decision has been made, my only hope is that the parents of Providence learn exactly what they are getting themselves into when Achievement First's well-financed PR campaign turns towards recruitment and its glossy posters and inspirational videos start appearing. Towards that end, I want to share a letter recently written by a former Achievement First parent who felt the need to warn families in Rhode Island about the damage an Achievement First education has the potential to inflict on their children.

The Chester Upland School District is more than $20 million in debt, its bank account is almost empty and it cannot afford to pay teachers past the end of this month. To make matters worse, the local charter school, with which the district must divide its financing, is suing the district over unpaid bills. The district's fiscal woes are the product of a toxic brew of budget cuts, mismanagement and the area's poverty. Its problems are compounded by the Chester Community Charter School, a nonprofit institution that is managed by a for-profit company and that now educates nearly half of the district's students. The district sees the charter as a vampire, sucking up more than its fair share of scarce resources. The state, it says, is giving the charter priority over the district. 

Charter schools, publicly financed but independently operated, have encountered fierce resistance in many suburban communities, criticized by parents and traditional educators who view them as a drain on resources. But since the Amani Public Charter School won state approval to open this year, officials at the Mount Vernon City School District have taken that opposition to a new level.

The Lilly Endowment is the venture philanthropy outfit which owns stock in the mega pharmaceutical drug company, Eli Lilly. As a major participant in advancing the corporatization of Indiana education, the Lilly Endowment prominently finances local initiatives and national rightwing anti-public school think tanks like the Sagamore Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. Besides Mitch Daniels, past and current drug company and endowment members are embedded in everything from front groups to charter school boards in Indiana.

This report presents data from the School District Finance Survey (F-33) of the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system for school year (SY) 2008-09 (fiscal year [FY] 2009). The F-33 is a district-level financial survey that consists of data submitted annually to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau (Census) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.