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"Our district data coordinator, who is my assistant principal, brought me the SIRS report. It claimed that only 80 percent of our students from the cohort of 2008 (Class of 2012) were enrolled in college.   As soon as I saw the number, I knew it was not correct. Ninety-eight percent of the 2012 Class told us they were going to college and gave us the name of the college they would attend. Might some have left after one semester, or changed their minds? It's possible. But I found it difficult to believe that 18 percent had either not enrolled or quickly dropped out."

"Here is an open letter to Alexander and his committee about the NCLB rewrite that was written by an award-winning principal, Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York."

"The trend to use value-added models to rate teachers and principals in New York is psychometrically indefensible."

The UFT and the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators on May 7 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to prevent the "sham" closing and restaffing of 24 schools that would be reopened almost immediately in the same buildings and with the same students. The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction that would be in effect until the issue can be resolved through arbitration.

A few Saturdays ago, while taking a break from the black and Latino caucus meetings in Albany, I was eating lunch with Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters. We saw the state education commissioner, John B. King Jr., having lunch three tables away. He was on his way to a meeting, but we said hello and he stopped for a few minutes so we could talk. Leonie introduced me as a parent whose child was counseled out of Harlem Success charter following 12 days of kindergarten, after the principal told me there was something wrong with him and he needed to transfer to another school.

Philissa Cramer, managing editor at Gotham Schools.org, talks about disputes over teachers: principals are objecting to test scores for evaluations and Mayor Bloomberg has a modest proposal for class sizes. 

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

The Education Department will spend about $5 billion on the program, and even if you're thinking, hey, I could use $5 billion, consider this: New York won the largest federal grant, $700 million over the next four years. In that time, roughly $230 billion will be spent on public education in the state. By adding just one-third of one percent to state coffers, the feds get to implement their version of education reform. That includes rating teachers and principals by their students' scores on state tests; using those ratings to dismiss teachers with low scores and to pay bonuses to high scorers; and reducing local control of education.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy today outlined six broad principles that he says will guide the debate on education reform next year, including "intensive interventions" by the state in troubled school systems and a lighter bureaucratic touch at successful ones. In a two-page letter addressed to legislators and stakeholders, Malloy hinted at a willingness to take up the politically charged issue of tenure and pay reform, saying teachers and principals should be valued for "skill and effectiveness" over "seniority and tenure."

South Side principal and teachers speak out about why the new NYS teacher evaluation system is wrong for schools and students

Eight of the 10 school districts who are receiving School Improvement Grants could lose the money if they don't meet Saturday's deadline to provide evidence they have made the necessary changes to their evaluation systems for teachers and principals, state Education Commissioner John King said in a statement today. Millions of dollars in federal funding are in jeopardy, he said.

Perhaps the most controversial issue in Ed Reform is whether or not it is fair to tie teacher evaluation to their 'performance' as defined by reformers as how their students do on standardized exams.  Since even reformers acknowledge that teachers aren't able to take students from a low starting score to any absolute target of high performance, they have devised something that is intended to be fair.  It is known as 'value-added.' The idea, which has been around for about 30 years, is that there could be a way to compare how a teacher's students do on some test with how those same students would have done in a parallel universe where they had an 'average' teacher instead.  If it is possible to make such a measurement, it would determine that teacher's individual contribution to his student's 'learning.' To someone who is not a teacher, this sounds reasonable enough.  When you've spent time in schools, though, you know some of the basic problems with standardized tests.

Lessons Learned from Classroom Observations, Principal-Teacher Conferences, and District Implementation

To work for the Success Charter Network is to be both target and instigator of the ever-churning battle in New York over the direction of the public schools. Jim Manly has been in the line of fire the longest of any Success principal since Eva S. Moskowitz, the hard-charging former city councilwoman, founded the network in 2006.

"School principals should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and displaced tenured teachers who aren't rehired elsewhere within the system should be permanently dismissed, according to a controversial new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District. The report will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Education. The research, paid for largely by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of teaching in the nation's second-largest school system, with recommendations strongly backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. "

Chicago Public Schools principals are no longer prohibited from hiring teachers who scored low on a preapplication screening, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard told them Thursday, a day after officials had defended the process.

With just weeks to go before Labor Day, the city has announced the nonprofit groups that will help 14 struggling schools get a fresh start this fall. A deal between the city and teachers union last month cleared the way for 33 low-performing schools to receive federal School Improvement Grants starting this fall. In exchange, the city must overhaul the schools in accordance with one of four federally sanctioned processes, and one of them, "restart," requires schools to turn over the reins to an approved nonprofit organization.

Three fired public school principals claim a state-run school district is "arbitrarily and capriciously convert(ing) an indefinite number of public schools to charter schools to be controlled by quasi-private boards without protecting the statutory employment rights of public school employees."      The complaint involves the Recovery School District, a special district administered by the Louisiana Department of Education. According to the district's website, "the RSD is designed to take underperforming schools and transform them into successful places for children to learn." It was created by legislation in 2003.

The New York-based Wallace Foundation will give $75 million over the next five years to six school districts who are working on comprehensive methods to identify, train, evaluate and support principals. The six districts to receive the funds are: Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C.; Denver; Gwinnett County, Ga.; Hillsborough County, Fla; New York City; and Prince George's County, Md. Wallace will give each district between $7.5 million and $12.5 million, and, as a condition of the grants, the districts will contribute one- third of their grant amount in local matching funds.

This was written by Will Miller, president of The Wallace Foundation, an independent, national foundation that works to expand learning and enrichment opportunities for children. The foundation maintains an online library of lessons at www.wallacefoundation.org.