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At the very least, I have to rethink my views of Darling-Hammond and the ill-considered labels thrown around in school policy battles, because I know the Hillsdale story is real. I attended Hillsdale and have visited often since graduating. Former Hillsdale principal Don Leydig, one of the most influential participants in its changes, has been my friend since third grade.

As a recent graduate of a New Orleans public high school, I find it very troubling that the national conversation about post-Katrina education amounts to little more than talking points about charter schools and test scores. The most telling indication of how we're doing in the classroom actually comes from a youth-led research project showing the hard realities students continue to face every day. As New Orleans moves to become the first all-charter district in the country, students here must be heard.

The National Study of CMO Effectiveness is a longitudinal research effort designed to measure how nonprofit charter school management organizations (CMOs) affect student achievement and to examine the internal structures, practices, and policy contexts that may influence these outcomes. The study began in May 2008 and will conclude in 2012.   This report presents findings on CMO students, resources, and  practices  as well as CMO impacts on student  achievement in middle school. It also examines the relationships  between CMO  practices and impacts. A subsequent version of this report will include findings on CMO impacts on high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment.   The study is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). It was commissioned by NewSchools Venture Fund, with the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. 

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

One of the signature issues of the Obama administration's education reform strategy is "turning around" low-performing schools. We have been led to believe that schools with low test scores can be dramatically changed by firing the principal, replacing half or all the staff, closing the school or turning the school over to private management. Part of the corporate reformers' message is that turning around a school may be painful but that it can produce transformational results, such as a graduation rate of 100 percent or a startling rise in test scores. The turnaround approach assumes that it is bad principals and bad teachers who stand in the way of school improvement. Any mention of poverty or other social and economic conditions that might affect students' motivation and academic performance is dismissed as excuse-making by the proponents of "No Excuses." Today there is a burgeoning industry of private-sector consultants devoted to "turnarounds." One of the leading turnaround specialists is a company called Mass Insight. I recently received an email in which Mass Insight hailed several schools that had turned around. The stories seemed too good to be true.

A new report released today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado shows that students at K12 Inc., the nation's largest virtual school company, are falling further behind in reading and math scores than students in brick-and-mortar schools. These virtual schools students are also less likely to remain at their schools for the full year, and the schools have low graduation rates. "Our in-depth look into K12 Inc. raises enormous red flags," said NEPC Director Kevin Welner. The report's findings will be presented in Washington today to a national meeting of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), where the report's lead author, Dr. Gary Miron, is scheduled to debate Dr. Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. The report is titled, Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools.

Teacher recruitment and retention are historical problems in high-poverty school districts, but using Teach for America "interns," who are recent college graduates and professionals, will only institutionalize this problem. The basic characteristics of Teach for America recruits - they are undercertified and lack classroom experience - mirror one of our most severe problems. Researchers frequently bewail the fact that experienced teachers do not remain poor districts, yet now Adamowski and the Windham Board of Education wish to enshrine the "farm" system.

Where I take offense is how Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has chosen to mandate a system that cannot take into account the myriad factors that actually affect teacher effectiveness. This matter demands serious inquiry, not sound bites or headlines. This matter deserves serious consideration of the available research to ensure that, long term, its ultimate success can be measured by the number of productive children our schools graduate.

Newt Gingrich has some unconventional ideas about education reform. He wants every state to open a work-study college where students work 20 hours a week during the school year and full-time in the summer and then graduate debt-free. In poverty stricken K-12 districts, Mr. Gingrich said that schools should enlist students as young as 9 to14 to mop hallways and bathrooms, and pay them a wage. Currently child-labor laws and unions keep poor students from bootstrapping their way into middle class, Mr. Gingrich said.

This paper outlines how such an investment structure might be used to solve a different challenge: chronic academic underachievement among low-income students. The academic achievement gap is well documented and seemingly intractable. Low-income students do consistently worse than their middle and upper-income peers in all measures of academic success at every grade level, including standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college completion rates. A number of social and education reforms have been offered to help close the achievement gap. This paper will not attempt to add to this voluminous history; rather, it will explore a new approach to financing schools that demonstrate success in closing the gap. It will also deliberately steer clear of any discussion of pedagogy. Curriculum reform is beyond the scope of this proposal as well. That said, this paper will focus on a particular type of school-charters-because many have demonstrated success serving low-income students.

In my post earlier today about NAEP test score trends, I said I was pessimistic about recent educational reforms because big gains among 9-year-olds mostly seem to wash away by the time students graduate from high school. However, several commenters complained that this was unfair: high school students in 2008 had spent only a few years in the post-NCLB "reform" environment. What we really want to look at are cohort effects. How do kids who have spent their entire lives in the new environment do?

"Two years ago, Kevin Kosar, a former graduate student of mine, conducted an Internet search for the term "failing school." What he discovered was fascinating. Until the 1990s, the term was virtually unknown. About the mid-1990s, the term began appearing with greater frequency. With the passage of No Child Left Behind, the use of the expression exploded and became a commonplace."

"For more than a decade now we have heard that the high-stakes testing obsession in K-12 education that began with the enactment of No Child Left Behind 11 years ago has resulted in high school graduates who don't think as analytically or as broadly as they should because so much emphasis has been placed on passing standardized tests. Here, an award-winning high school teacher who just retired, Kenneth Bernstein, warns college professors what they are up against. Bernstein, who lives near Washington, D.C. serves as a peer reviewer for educational journals and publishers, and he is nationally known as the blogger "teacherken." His e-mail address is kber@earthlink.net. This appeared in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors."

"Teach for America wanted to help stem a teacher shortage. Why then are thousands of experienced educators being replaced by hundreds of new college graduates?"

"If you have heard the phrase "no excuses" charter schools but don't really know what they mean, here is an informative post about  them and the controversial philosophy under which they approach student discipline and achievement.  Joan Goodman, a professor in the Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania and director of the school's Teach For America program, explains her research on these charter schools to freelance journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire, who worked for six years editing a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts and who authors the EduShyster blog, where this Q * A originally appeared. Goodman is a former school psychologist whose article "Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price?" appeared in the March 2013 issue of Educational Researcher."

"If the mission of the education system is to serve the economy, and that means maximizing profits, then those profits will be highest if we have an overabundance of college graduates to do the technical work that must be done to keep the machinery of production running. And we have low wage service sector that is unable to raise its wages because they are unorganized and have no political clout. Those who are unemployed are informed over and over again by the school system that they are inadequate because they cannot pass the tests, and therefore to perceive their status as being the result of their own failure to make themselves useful to employers. They are unemployed not because manufacturing has been outsourced to cheap labor overseas, but because they were not "career ready," as proven by their failure to pass the new, much more "rigorous" Common Core aligned tests. Education reform becomes an exercise in rationalizing the shift of half the nation's workers into "surplus" status. It creates a new meritocracy, based on a false paradigm that defines the ability to do well on tests as merit."

"The Condition of Education (COE) is a congressionally mandated annual report that summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available statistics. The report presents statistical indicators containing text, figures, and tables describing important developments in the status and trends of education from early childhood learning through graduate-level education. The contents of The Condition of Education are organized within the 5 sections shown on the left of this page. In addition to the indicators in these sections, there are Topics in Focus that examine specific issues. The Condition of Education 2011 contains 50 indicators, but additional indicators from earlier volumes are also available on this web site. "

"The Los Angeles Unified School District squanders more than $500 million a year on an academic-improvement strategy that has consistently proven to be ineffective, researchers concluded in a report released Tuesday. The nation's second-largest school system spends 25% of its teacher payroll ($519 million a year) to compensate teachers for completing graduate coursework. These courses are a primary means by which teachers earn credits that translate to raises. Yet such training has shown no overall benefit in improving student performance, said Kate Walsh, president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which conducted the research."

"I'm an advocate for charter schooling. Regular readers of RHSU know that this is not because I'm convinced they're the answer to the "achievement gap" or to driving up math and reading scores, but because chartering offers an opportunity to rethink how we go about teaching, learning, and schooling. In that context, I've long been concerned that our rethinking is almost entirely focused on reading and math scores and graduation rates and the result can yield a reflexive, frail conception of schooling. If we're going to reinvent schools, I'd like us to do so in a manner that respects the broad purpose of the schoolhouse, which means paying due attention to the arts, to a rich curriculum, and, perhaps most important of all, to helping students develop as moral individuals and citizens. "

"Three years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for "radical reform" to New York City's school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only "incremental" change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the dean of Harvard's education school, has described as "the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country," resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city's school system is still not remotely where it needs to be. "