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Charter schools would expand and get more money under a plan by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's administration to be announced Monday, but some of the additional funding would have to come from local school districts. The proposal would increase per-pupil funding for charter schools from $9,400 to $12,000. Of that, $1,000 for the first time would be paid by the districts where those students live, according to sources who have been briefed on the plan. For districts like Bridgeport, which sends about 1,400 students to charter school, the cost would be $1.4 million annually.

All states rely on the GED test as a primary pathway to a high school equivalency diploma, and New York is among those now considering alternatives in the wake of a decision by an educational services company to revamp the exams and increase their cost. New York is one of 16 states considering joining to create a similar comprehensive test with questions taken from their own end-of-year exams, like the Regents exam in New York. Others are considering putting out a request to different vendors to create a new, cheaper exam.

As I read this stuff, I started to see some patterns within the charter school model. Despite the claims of advocates, it looked to me like, charter schools lacked public oversight and accountability; It looked to me like charter schools were about the massive deregulation of a democratically run, public institution; It looked to me like the charter model viewed public education through the anarchy of free market competition, paying little regard to the human costs and consequences; It looked to me like parents were being treated as consumers, not as democratic citizens; It looked to me like charter school advocates had their eye on the $600 billion dollar business of public education.

I am a teacher.   You know, one of those about whom you and your Secretary of Education say are so important to our young people.  If only I - and thousands, perhaps millions of other teachers - could believe those words.   There are things your administration has done that we respect, at least most of us.  The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act meant large numbers of teachers and other public employees did not lose their jobs.  Under ARRA, for the first time ever the Federal government for two years just about met its commitment to provide 40% of the average additional costs imposed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.  There was also the $10 billion in funds to support local government employment that also save some jobs.    We acknowledge these things. If only the policies your administration advocates were similarly supportive of teachers and what we see as the best interest of our students.

McKinsey's experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the U.S. debate. In a new report, "Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching ," we review the experiences of the top-performing systems in the world-Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. These countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that pursue this strategy if the United States decided it was worthwhile. The report also includes new market research with nearly 1,500 current top-third students and teachers. It offers the first quantitative research-based answer to the question of how the U.S. could substantially increase the portion of new teachers each year who are higher caliber graduates, and how this could be done in a cost-effective way.

But there is another case that teachers might make-a criticism that would level a blow to the radical overhaul of teacher evaluation, and, more importantly, one that just might help students learn. And the case is this: Achievement, as we measure it, is not really about achievement. As determined by multiple-choice tests-the dominant way that we measure it in the United States-achievement is not about how students can think or write or persuade. It is not about how they can perform experiments or produce original research. It is not about their prowess in art or civics or robotics. Instead, it is about memorized minutiae and good guesses. We accept this approach to measurement only because it is so common. And it is common not because it actually measures achievement, but because it is time-efficient and cost-effective. -iStockphoto.com/Nuno Silva Simply put, we're using the wrong instrument. Evaluating teachers through multiple-choice-based tests of student learning is like using the rules of Go Fish to assess poker skill.

Teachers in Louisiana have found themselves on the frontlines of austerity. First, in an unprecedented vote, the Jefferson Parish School Board voted 8-1 to close seven campuses, four of them traditional elementary schools and the rest alternative programs for students struggling academically. The board issued more bad news when it announced it was dropping plans to add an art instruction wing at Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts due to cost concerns. Construction of the wing is a hot-button issue in the area because the proposal to convert Lincoln into a magnet school that would draw students from across the parish was a result of the deliberations leading up to the system's settling a forty-seven-year-old desegregation lawsuit last year.

"A group of expert researchers have published a new collection of articles about teacher evaluation and high-stakes testing and their consequences. The collection appears online in the Teachers College Record. It is called "High-Stakes Teacher Evaluation: High Cost, Big Losses.""

"Teacher turnover - the rates at which teachers leave the profession and switch schools - is obviously a very important outcome in education. Although not all turnover is necessarily a "bad thing" - some teachers simply aren't cut out for the job and leave voluntarily (or are fired) - unusually high turnover means that schools must replace large proportions of their workforces on an annual basis. This can have serious implications not only for the characteristics (e.g., experience) of schools' teachers, but also for schools' costs, cohesion and professional cultures."

"If the mayor's proposed budget goes through and the promised 4,000 New York City teachers are laid off (costing the city 6,000 jobs, with attrition), P.S. 41, in the heart of Greenwich Village, will lose 12 teachers. That is more than the number of teachers now teaching the school's fourth and fifth grades. "

"...But facts don't count when blaming feels so right politically. Teachers are easy targets of the envious who lost jobs, benefits and pensions and aren't rich enough for tax reductions. Urban schools are demonized because - surprise - they spend more than suburban schools where race and privilege are, as the credit card ad goes, the "priceless," but uncounted, costs of success..."

Over the past decade I have served as a mentor teacher to more than a dozen beginning teachers in the challenging schools of Oakland. Most of them have been interns, fresh out of college, with just a few weeks of summer training, and a "bag of tricks" that they were given by their only slightly more experienced trainers. They are trained to focus on the data. Start testing early, and make sure the students understand how important those scores are. Set BIG goals, such as that 80% of your students will score well. Track progress using big graphs on the wall with each student's name or number. Develop reward systems to manage behavior. Step into one of these classrooms, and you will find elaborate systems that are designed to "incent" good behavior, and impose costs on bad. You may even find a whole economy, complete with currency - the "behavior bucks," handed out in $100 bills prepared on the school photocopier.

State and local pensions have been headline news since the 2008 financial collapse reduced the value of their assets, leaving a substantial unfunded liability. The deterioration in the funded status of these plans raised pension costs at the same time that the ensuing recession wreaked havoc with state and local budgets. Legislatures across the country have responded by reducing pension benefits - primarily for new employees - and increasing employer and employee contributions. As part of that process, governors in several states have launched initiatives to curb collective bargaining in the public sector. One possible implication is that governors view unions as responsible for pushing up state and local pension benefits. This brief identifies the impact of public sector unions and other factors on benefit levels, wages, and employment.

The use of value-added models in education research has expanded rapidly. These models allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. An important question is whether such effects are sufficiently large to achieve various policy goals. For example, would hiring teachers having stronger academic backgrounds sufficiently increase test scores for traditionally low-performing students to warrant the increased cost of doing so? Judging whether a change in student achievement is important requires some meaningful point of reference. In certain cases a grade-equivalence scale or some other intuitive and policy relevant metric of educational achievement can be used. However, this is not the case with item response theory (IRT) scale-score measures common to the tests usually employed in value-added analyses. In such cases, researchers typically describe the impacts of various interventions in terms of effect sizes, although conveying the intuition of such a measure to policymakers often is a challenge.   

Late Thursday, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and 13 other senators introduced a bill that proposes the federal government fulfill a decades-old promise to pay 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities, the Council for Exceptional Children's Lindsay Jones tells me.

The ability to measure cost effectiveness in education, and convince parents and educators that it's in their best interest, will determine the future of online education, according to a paper authored by the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick M. Hess.

Congressman Jared Polis, D-Colo., said Tuesday he will soon introduce a bill that would eventually require the federal government to pay for 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities. The money would come from cuts to defense spending.

Public education has never been so divided, between those like Dr. Tisch, Commissioner John B. King Jr. and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who support the Obama administration's signature Race to the Top initiative and its emphasis on standardized tests and charter schools; and dissenters on the board, who call it a Race to the Bottom and put their faith in teachers as well as traditional public schools. The Race to the Bottom folks warn that the supposedly free fellows come at a stiff political price.

Now, the implication that "anything is better than the status quo" is a rather massive fallacy in public policy, as it assumes that the costs of alternatives will outweigh benefits, and that there is no chance the replacement policy will have a negative impact (almost always an unsafe assumption). But, in the case of teacher evaluations, the "status quo" is no longer what people seem to think.

A ranking Democratic member of the House Education Committee is demanding that the state Department of Education investigate the costs of a charter school rally held in Orlando this week.