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This satirical site is both funny and scary...

Gary Rubinstein analyzes panel discussion with Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch.

One recent Monday morning, I boarded the C train at 168th Street in Upper Manhattan, on my way to jury duty. While I waited on the platform, I noticed a young black man, high-school student age, professionally dressed in a blue shirt and tie and dark blue slacks. The young man's face was hardened, possibly to ward off any conversation from strangers. We both boarded the train and took seats which called for direct eye contact if either of us faced forward. The young man happened to be sitting under a poster that read "Welcome Back to School." The posters are sponsored by the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the principal's union, and the one above his head had a picture of me on it.

Imagine trying to determine international rankings for tennis players or soccer teams entirely by a) determining how they rank relative to the average team or player in their country, then b) having only the average team or player from each country play each other in a tournament, then c) estimating how the top teams would rank when compared with each other based only on how their country's average teams did when they played each other and how much better we think the individual teams or players are when compared to the average team or player in their country? Probably not that precise or even accurate, ya' think?

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.

Long after they should have been settled in school, Boston public school students are still engaged in a prolonged game of musical chairs. School opened with almost 10,000 students - nearly 18 percent of the student body - still on waiting lists, trying to get into different schools than they were assigned.

My public middle school in South Los Angeles was labeled as a "failing school" almost 12 months ago making what is already a tough job even more difficult due to the Los Angeles Unified School District corporate inspired reform program called Public School Choice.  In short, if you are deemed a failing school, any organized group can submit a plan to take over your school and as a result, many public schools have been converted to charters in the last two years.  Brand new multi-million dollar buildings were handed over to corporations such as Green Dot and ICEF, and my school is on this dread list.

The secret of their success, usually not mentioned when their records are analyzed, has as much to do with the people who put them in their jobs as with their individual gifts.

It sounds so democratic, a very American idea: break down the walls of "remedial," "average" and "advanced" classes so that all students in each grade can learn together, with lessons that teachers "differentiate" to challenge each individual. Proponents of this approach often stress that it benefits average and lagging students, but a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that the upsides may come at a cost to top students - and to the international competitiveness of the United States. By trying to teach children of varying abilities in one classroom, is American society underdeveloping some of its brightest young people?

The Star Tribune declares it a miracle school on 9/24/11 with the headline 'At this school, usual excuses don't apply' http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/130474133.html Claim from the article: In this year's state math tests in grades three through eight, this school outperformed every metro-area school district, including Edina and Wayzata. Its students outperformed all state students in reading proficiency (77 percent to 75 percent), and state white students in math proficiency (82 percent to 65 percent).

The roughly 65,000 students who have entered eighth grade in New York City public schools will face a formidable task in the coming months. In addition to completing homework assignments and taking tests, preparing for the dreaded state exams and meeting the city's multiple promotion requirements, all eighth-grade students who wish to attend public (non-charter) high schools in New York city must also submit applications in which they rank up to 12 programs or schools from among nearly 700 possibilities citywide.

A review of the value-added analysis underlying the effectiveness rankings of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers by the Los Angeles Times

With more than 700 school aides facing their last day at work on Friday barring a last-minute deal, the Bloomberg administration is blaming the school aides' powerful labor union, District Council 37, for not doing enough to prevent the layoffs. A new Web venture featuring news, data and conversation about schools in New York City. The administration's push to assign blame underlines its strained relationship with the union and its executive director, Lillian Roberts. She said she held Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg responsible for the layoffs, calling them "outrageous" and "totally unnecessary," and she has emphasized that they would disproportionately hit the city's lowest-paid workers and poorest school

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.

Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

The nation has just celebrated Labor Day, yet few Americans have any idea why. As high school students, most were taught little about unions-their role, their accomplishments, and how and why they came to exist. This is one of the conclusions of a new report, released today by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center. The report, "American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor's Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks," consists of a review of some of the nation's most frequently used high school U.S. history textbooks for their treatment of unions in American history. The authors paint a disturbing picture, concluding that the history of the U.S. labor movement and its many contributions to the American way of life are "misrepresented, downplayed or ignored." Students-and all Americans-deserve better.

Here's a back-to-school math problem: There are 62 kindergarten seats at the Trinity School this fall, and 756 children wanted them. What percentage made the cut?

The state has thrown out the test scores of a top-performing Los Angeles school and of the highest-scoring campus in the nationally known Green Dot charter group after cheating was uncovered involving several teachers.

If they build a buzz, the kids will come. That's the thinking at a mediocre Brooklyn public school with grandiose aspirations -- it wants to hire a press agent to lure more and better students.

Thursday is the first day of school, but hundreds of public school kids won't go to class because the city hasn't found them seats.