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"The latest progress reports for New York City elementary and middle schools came out last week, and many parents are baffled to see some of the city's top-performing schools getting "C's" and "B's." Proponents say, the "A" to "F" grading system is one of the best ways to get parents to pay attention, but critics say that the city's over emphasis on test performance skews the grades, making them unreliable for judging the quality of a school. If these progress reports are not reliable, what is the purpose of them?"

"Anthony Cody, experienced middle school science teacher and fabulous blogger, has offered to coordinate our campaign to write President Obama on October 17. We call it the Campaign for Our Public Schools."

Nearly 5,000 children qualified for gifted and talented kindergarten seats in New York City public schools in the fall, 22 percent more than last year and more than double the number four years ago, setting off a fierce competition for the most sought-after programs in the system. On their face, the results, released on Friday by the Education Department, paint a portrait of a city in which some neighborhoods appear to be entirely above average. In Districts 2 and 3, which encompass most of Manhattan below 110th Street, more students scored at or above the 90th percentile on the entrance exam, the cutoff point, than scored below it. But experts pointed to several possible reasons for the large increase. For one, more middle-class and wealthy parents are staying in the city and choosing to send their children to public schools, rather than moving to the suburbs or pursuing increasingly expensive private schools. And the switch to a test-based admissions system four years ago has given rise to test-preparation services, from booklets costing a few dollars to courses costing hundreds or more, raising concerns that the test's results were being skewed.

The New York State tests, going on now in middle and elementary schools, have always been high stakes for students, particularly in fourth and seventh grades, when their scores determine whether they end up in the very awful school they are zoned for or the very attractive magnet school that draws from a larger and more competitive pool. But the stakes have recently become equally high for teachers, whose ability to teach is being determined by their ability to improve students' test scores. Many people think it's about time. Teachers need to be held accountable for the work they are being paid to do, and many, many teachers need to get better at teaching. But tying teacher performance to student test scores is having an opposite effect: It's producing worse teachers.

This is the text of the commencement speech that Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, gave this past weekend at the Loyola University Chicago School of Education. The institute is a non-profit organization created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. Rothstein is also the author of several books on education issues, and is senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law. From 1999 to 2002, he was the national education columnist of The New York Times.

Students in Northeast Florida have been offered gift cards, parties, even cars for their performance on the FCAT.  Continuing that long history of incentive programs in the state and Northeast Florida, KIPP Impact Middle School is offering $20 to students who reach specific learning gains scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.  If all of the school's 160 students reach their targets for learning gains, KIPP Impact would pay out about $3,200 in private funds to the students. KIPP Impact, which is a national network of public college preparatory charter schools that targets underprivileged students,  earned the six-county region's lowest FCAT score last year. 

Yesterday the College Board, the organization that administers the Advanced Placement program and the SAT, announced David Coleman will become its new president in October, and will focus on deepening the curricula on which College Board exams are based. Coleman is controversial, especially among English teachers. A classicist cum McKinsey consultant cum education reformer, he is (in)famous in education circles as the frantically energetic, hyper-intellectual architect of the new Common Core curriculum standards in language arts, which 45 states have agreed-at least theoretically-to adopt in 2014. Currently, about 80 percent of the reading American students are assigned in school is fiction or memoir, and 20 percent is non-fiction. If Coleman gets his way, that balance will soon tilt closer to 60-40. American children will spend a lot less time reading and writing what Coleman calls, somewhat derisively, "stories," and much more time reading and writing about the ideas in "informational" texts by the likes of Richard Hofstadter, Atul Gawande, and H.L. Mencken in high school; John Adams, Frederick Douglas, and Winston Churchill in middle school.

IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he's been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it's time for middle school, and there's been no neighborhood option available.

Controversial charter school founder Eva Moskowitz could be expanding her education empire into the upper East Side and Chelsea. The former city councilwoman has plans to open half a dozen more Success Academy charters in fall 2013, with two slated for a wealthy district that already has its share high-performing schools. By planning to open the schools in Manhattan's District 2 - which extends from Park Ave. over to Chelsea and the Village - Moskowitz continues her drive into upper-middle class areas.

The sun had not yet risen on Washington Irving High School when students, teachers and parents began gathering on the school's steps on Tuesday morning to protest its likely closing. Their school, which is located in the middle of Manhattan's upscale Gramercy Park neighborhood, is one of 25 public schools the city's Department of Education is proposing to close over the next several years for poor performance. But the group that assembled on the school's steps in the cold morning air was determined to have it otherwise.

Middle and high school counselors believe they have a unique and powerful role to play in preparing all students for good jobs or college, but they feel hamstrung by insufficient training, competing duties, and their own schools' priorities, according to a study released today. The online survey of 5,300 counselors was conducted this past spring for the College Board's Advocacy & Policy Center. One of the largest-ever surveys of counselors, it paints a picture of a committed but frustrated corps that sees a deep schism between the ideal mission of schools and the work that takes shape day to day.

The New York City Education Department on Friday released the ratings of some 18,000 teachers in elementary and middle schools based on how much they helped their students succeed on standardized tests. The ratings have high margins of error, are now nearly two years out of date and are based on tests that the state has acknowledged became too predictable and easy to pass over time. But even with those caveats, the scores still provide the first glimpse to the public of what is going on within individual classrooms in schools. And one of the most striking findings is how much variation there can be even within what are widely considered the city's best schools, the ones that each September face a crush of eager parents.

Judging by the applause lines at GOP campaign stops and debates this winter, a significant segment of the Republican electorate understands public education not as a crucial civic institution, nor as a potential path from poverty to the middle class, nor even as a means of individual betterment. Instead, this coalition of religious conservatives and extreme tax-cutters prefers to vilify public schools-and actually, pretty much any traditional educational institution, including liberal arts colleges-as potential corruptors of the nation's youth; as unwanted interlocutors in that most sacred relationship: the one between a child and her parent. It is a curious thing, because with some 90 percent of American children enrolled in public schools, there must be significant overlap between the consumers of public education and the approximately one-third of Americans who describe themselves as Tea Party-type conservatives. Never mind: It is clear that in the American political economy, there is nothing unusual about a voter hating and resenting a government program even while relying heavily upon it.

"Insider here reviews the report on charter schools by the NYC Independent Budget Office. The report covered only the early grades, not the middle grades or high school years."

"Katie Zahedi is principal of Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, which is located in upstate Dutchess County. She is active in the association of New York Principals who bravely oppose the State Education Department's educator evaluation plan based mostly on test scores. Zahedi has been a principal and assistant principal at her school for twelve years. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not those of the district or her school. Suffice it to say that she is a woman of unusual integrity and courage, who is determined to speak truth to power. She wrote this piece for the blog in response to the release of the Common Core test results in New York, in which scores collapsed across the state."

Here's what I have come to believe: we test too much in reading and math, and that narrow focus means schools are not teaching other basic subjects like history. A 2007 study by the Center on Education Policy (PDF), a middle-of-the-road organization, found that "approximately 62% of school districts increased the amount of time spent in elementary schools on English language arts and or math, while 44% of districts cut time on science, social studies, art and music, physical education, lunch or recess."

A new study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center took a close look at how often students in Texas are disciplined by in- and out-of-school suspension and expulsion. Among the findings: Students with disabilities are especially likely to be punished by one or more of these methods. The researchers looked at records for close to one million students and found that 75 percent of middle and high school students with disabilities in the nation's second-largest public school system were suspended, expelled, or both at least once. That compares to about 55 percent of students without a disability.

A prep course designed to help low income middle school students prepare for the city's elite specialized high schools will be cut from 16 months to three beginning in 2012, sources tell Insideschools. The program is falling victim to "budget constraints" which will "change the structure" of the Specialized High School Institute, according to a letter written by City lawyers obtained by Insideschools. Eligible students would begin the intensive SHSI program in the spring of 7th grade, rather than the summer after 6th grade, according to the proposed changes.

I read this New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough about character education at KIPP middle schools in New York City and at Riverdale Country School, an elite private school also in New York City, expecting to be aggravated by it, but I wasn't at all. It was a solid piece of journalism--nuanced, thought provoking, and objective. That being said, I see some real problems in the approach being described.

About two weeks ago, DOE officials released a list of twenty elementary and middle schools that they are considering closing.   According to the NY Times, "The schools on the list fit at least one of the following criteria: they got a D or F on their most recent progress report, or a C for a third consecutive year; they were on the state's list of persistently low-achieving schools last year; or they received a C or D from the teams of state and city officials who were sent to review them."