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On the 10th anniversary of "the lost decade," produced by No Child Left Behind, we will read plenty of explanations of why the law did little good, and often did great harm to poor children of color. Ironically, the rationale for NCLB was that educators had long used poverty as an "excuse" for "low expectations." I am struck, however, by the low expectations that policy wonks had for themselves, how many excuses they are now making for the failure of NCLB, and how they minimized its unintended negative effects, as they blame others.

For the first time, officials are moving to shut down an entire New York City charter-school network. Three schools that make up the Believe High School Network are slated to close in June after the state Education Department said on Tuesday it plans to revoke the charters of the two schools it oversees. The announcement came a day after the city Department of Education said it would close the Believe school under its purview. Although the city's struggling schools generally face closure because of poor academic performance, the Believe schools are being targeted for fiscal and governance problems.

In the last year there has been quite a bit of media and policy attention put on urban education reform. Feel-good stories about the success of certain charter school models like the Harlem Children's Zone's Promise Academy, The Uncommon Schools network, and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) abound. These schools, the media narrative goes, are poor, black and brown kids' great hope - promoting higher test scores, increasing high school graduation rates and advocating for higher levels of college attendance. They are certainly newsworthy, but a closer look reveals that the story of their success is more complex than portrayed. According to research available on the KIPP website, though almost 85 percent of the students graduating from their schools go to college, only 30 percent actually graduate. Of course, high school graduation is a worthy goal, and some college-level work is better than none. But according to the 2011 College Board report, in order to impact poverty rates, increase the qualified workforce for American businesses and ensure economic growth nationwide, college graduation is key.

Anna Scholl, ProgressVA, joins Thom Hartmann in exposing ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. In case you dont know what ALEC is - it's a far-rightwing organization that brings together corporate CEOs and lobbyists with elected lawmakers to come up with custom-made legislation that benefits anti-public school  "reformers", big polluters, job outsourcers, and banksters, and hurts unions, poor people, and voters. And apparently it's found a friend in the Virginia General Assembly, where since 2007, over 50 different pieces of legislation have been introduced that are exact carbon copies of ALEC written legislation.

Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers ("ProComp") is one of the most prominent alternative teacher compensation reforms in the nation.* Via a combination of ten financial incentives, ProComp seeks to increase student achievement by motivating teachers to improve their instructional practices and by attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to work in the district. My research examines ProComp in terms of: 1) whether it has increased retention rates; 2) the relationship between retention and school quality (defined in terms of student test score growth); and 3) the reasons underlying these effects. I pay special attention to the effects of ProComp on schools that serve high concentrations of poor students - "Hard to Serve" (HTS) schools where teachers are eligible to receive a financial incentive to stay. The quantitative findings are discussed briefly below (I will discuss my other results in a future post).

The repercussions from closing persistently failing schools are about to be felt by tiny Premont, Texas, which is located about 150 miles south of San Antonio. The town of 2,700 is bracing for the shuttering of the Premont Independent School District by the Texas Education Agency because of poor academics and a high truancy rate ("Texas district cancels sports in hopes of improving grades," Fox News, Jan. 21). In a last ditch attempt to avoid what seems to be inevitable, officials are eliminating sports this spring and next fall to save enough money to keep the district's schools open. Although school districts across Texas are dealing with about $4 billion in state-aid cuts, rural districts are particularly vulnerable because they have limited local tax bases. That's why the situation in Premont serves as an invaluable case study.

Clearly our emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum contributes to the problem.  School have, as George Wood of the Forum for Education and Democracy notes, "a perverse incentive to allow or encourage students to leave" especially if they are likely to be low scorers on the tests by which schools are evaluated.  Anyone who doubts this need merely look at the track record of Texas during the Governorship of George W. Bush, when its claimed remarkable improvements in state test scores later became the basis of the perversely named legislation No Child Left Behind.  In Texas, sometimes students were held back in 9th grade multiple times because the state tests were given in 10th.  After a second holding back students might be encouraged to leave, hiding the dropout rate by listing the child as having gone to an alternative educational program because s/he said s/he might eventually get a GED.  Or after being held back once, the child would be told s/he had made so much progress s/he was being skipped directly to 11th, and thus not tested.  Rod Paige became U. S. Secretary of Education, after being honored as supposedly the best Superintendent in the nation by a professional organization, largely on claims of more than a 90% graduation rate in Houston schools, at a time when only around 40% of those who entered in 7th grade graduated on time with their cohort.  Those forced out or held back and then skipped were heavily from poor families that were African-American or Hispanic.

I have a theory: in recent times, parents are too time-crunched to advocate vigorously on behalf of public schooling. They are too consumed with working for a paycheck and/or volunteering at the school, plus doing the actual childrearing and chauffeuring of nondriving children. The recession has only worsened the situation and pushed women to the breaking point. Into the vacuum created by their absence in the public sphere rushes all sorts of nonsense, from greedy Big Ed (as with Big Pharma or Big Ag, corporations that are happy to soak up federal dollars) to the latest research trend. On top of that, let's name what's really going on: it's mostly women (moms) who volunteer at the school in the PTA, on fundraising committees, or as boosters for sports and other activities. And it's mostly women (many of them also moms!) who are teachers and have recently been blamed for poor student test scores, however inadvertently, through the film "Waiting For 'Superman'". Add in the time-poverty and I say there are gender politics that subtly and powerfully undercut true education reform in several major ways

A penchant among far too many education writers who embrace the Poverty Myth of Education is to oversimplify the debate over the role of education in stemming the long-term effects of poverty. First, they argue that school reformers proclaim that education is the sole solution for economic development in poor communities - even though no one ever says this. Then they argue that education can't possibly be either the long-term or short-term solution for poverty - and find some flimsy data or examples to back it up.

A shareholder in Virginia-based K12 Inc. has filed a lawsuit against the virtual-schools operator in federal court, alleging that the firm violated securities law by making false statements to investors about students' poor performance on standardized tests. The class-action complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, also accuses K12 of boosting its enrollment and revenues through "deceptive recruiting" practices.

Advocates for protecting school funding say New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo hasn't lived up to his word on creating a more equitable funding system in the state. A report released this week says that the recent state budget approved by Cuomo, a Democrat elected last year, and state lawmakers results in cuts that are three times as large in poor districts as wealthy ones.

The AFT, led by its President Randi Weingarten, advocates vigorously on behalf of what it views as best for students in the public schools of America. In the current environment of test-driven accountability systems, there is a danger of narrowing the education our children receive to improve test scores. This leads to a "one-size-fits-all" approach that is justified on the grounds of the supposedly poor performance of U.S. schools on international comparisons. But too often, those who rely upon such comparison neither understand what the results mean nor do they examine what things high-scoring countries do. The AFT has never opposed the proper use of tests as one means of assessment. One can see AFT's well-thoughtout positions on proper use of testing on its website, including its position statement on Accountability and its publications and reports on Standards and Assessments. Now the AFT is running a petition drive against the idea of One Size Fits All in education, which has been the impact of current policies at the national and state level on assessment and accountability. 

The Cuomo Education Commission had its first and only public hearing in NYC for three scant hours this morning and they packed us all in a small cafeteria room at Hostos College in the Bronx.

"More D.C. teachers will be at risk of losing their jobs for poor performance in coming years, under a revised rating system, even though standardized test scores will carry less weight in their job evaluations. The changes - to be announced Friday - amount to the most extensive overhaul of a three-year-old evaluation system that has led to the firing of almost 400 teachers."

"A while back, I argued that Florida's school grading system, due mostly to its choice of measures, does a poor job of gauging school performance per se. The short version is that the ratings are, to a degree unsurpassed by most other states' systems, driven by absolute performance measures (how highly students score), rather than growth (whether students make progress). Since more advantaged students tend to score more highly on tests when they enter the school system, schools are largely being judged not on the quality of instruction they provide, but rather on the characteristics of the students they serve."

A city board voted on Thursday night to close 18 schools and eliminate the middle school grades at five others, citing poor performance. The decision drew howls of opposition from hundreds of teachers' union members, parents and students, who gathered in the auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High School along with a group that was inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The biggest problem in Connecticut is the achievement gap between wealthy and poor students, which largely correlates with the gap between white and minority students. The fact of the matter is that the gap has everything to do with poverty and not a whole lot of anything to do with tenure.

The New York Times, yesterday, released the value-added data on 18,000 New York City teachers collected between 2007 and 2010.  Though teachers are irate and various newspapers, The New York Post, in particular, are gleeful, I have mixed feelings. For sure the 'reformers' have won a battle and have unfairly humiliated thousands of teachers who got inaccurate poor ratings.  But I am optimistic that this will be be looked at as one of the turning points in this fight.  Up until now, independent researchers like me were unable to support all our claims about how crude a tool value-added metrics still are, though they have been around for nearly 20 years.  But with the release of the data, I have been able to test many of my suspicions about value-added.  Now I have definitive and indisputable proof which I plan to write about for at least my next five blog posts.

While there is widespread agreement on the importance of teacher quality, there is considerable disagreement about what should be done to improve it, or even what teacher quality means. A growing number of researchers, policy makers, and writers in the popular press are promoting a seemingly simple and straightforward solution: remove poor quality teachers from the workforce. In the past, policy makers have dismissed this "draconian" solution over concerns about teacher rights and strong opposition from teachers unions, but many are re-thinking their position in view of claims that this approach is justified on the grounds of social justice and the ends it will achieve for students.   Despite the growing popularity and the seemingly common sense appeal of this approach to improved teacher quality, it suffers from three fundamental flaws that prevent it from accomplishing all that its advocates claim it will

Republic Report has more information about Mitt Romney's ties to the controversial for-profit education industry, including poor performer Vatterott Colleges. The New York Times reported in January  that Romney praised for-profit colleges, in particular overpriced Full Sail University without telling voters that his campaign and Super PAC had received nearly $100,000 from Full Sail CEO Bill Heavener and from C. Kevin Landry, chairman of TA Associates, the private equity firm that owns Full Sail. But TA has other connections to Romney and the for-profit college industry.