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"...education is at a crossroads in our country and our neighborhood, our city is right at the intersection of these crossroads. There is an attempt to make schooling privatized, charter-ized, and more inequitable than it already is. There is an attempt to get rid of experienced teachers who have built relationships with families, who truly know how to teach and replace them with less expensive, inexperienced teachers who likely will only be at the school for two years.  There is an attempt to teach through testing, to make your child so bored in school from over-standardized testing that students aren't excited for school anymore. There is an attempt to further cut librarians, counselors, nurses, PE, World Language, Art and now classroom teachers, in order to "save" money. A budget is a political document, not a financial one, it's about priorities. Some priorities obviously need to be re-evaluated.  Teachers in no way shape or form want to strike, we want to be working with and educating your children."

The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap. No other school model or policy reform in urban secondary schools seems to come close to having such a dramatic impact on the performance of inner-city students. Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported that criminal charges have been filed against 20 students in an affluent New York suburb for allegedly cheating on the SAT. Some are accused of paying stand-ins up to $3,500 per test to take the exam for them; others accepted payment to take the test. Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North High School, which five of the accused students attended, suggested that the experience of his community is the tip of an iceberg. "I think it's widespread across the country," he told The Times. "We were the school that stood up to it." We have every reason to believe he's right. While criminal authorities and the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, investigate, parents and educators should ask: What have we done to lead teens to such an act of desperation?

The union for Los Angeles teachers has suspended its legal challenge to a pilot evaluation program that includes using standardized test scores as part of a teacher's performance review. The union also reserved the right to reactivate the case should talks with the district sour. A joint statement released by L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy and United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher said the two sides agree that current teacher evaluation procedures need improvement.

The Obama administration's decision to allow states to request waivers from No Child Left Behind was a step in the right direction, but only a baby step. Four in five schools across the country will be deemed "failing" this coming year if nothing stops the "train wreck" that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will inflict upon the nation's schools. These include schools in which the vast majority of students are proficient in math and English, as well as schools in which students, teachers, and principals are making real progress in the face of formidable challenges: concentrated poverty, large numbers of students with special-needs, and state budget cuts that have severely reduced the resources needed to address the obstacles to learning.

While it might seem encouraging for education and civil rights leaders to assert that poverty isn't an obstacle to higher student achievement, the evidence does not support such claims. Over 50 years, numerous studies have documented how poverty and related social conditions - such as lack of access to health care, early childhood education and stable housing - affect child development and student achievement.

It's an argument that seems to bubble up cyclically. It doesn't matter what the hot policy idea du jour is, someone is bound to assert: What we're doing right now does not serve the needs of the gifted!

On the one hand you've got billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, pouring money into reshaping public education into whatever model they think best-and because they're billionaires, they must know best about everything, right? On the other hand you've got the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), spreading toxic, corporate-authored model legislation around the states to push for anti-immigrant laws, voter disenfranchisement laws, anti-sick leave laws and more. Except, wait. This isn't an on the one hand, on the other hand situation-they're the same hand, spreading the influence of the very wealthy not just in what politicians get elected, but what laws get passed. And Bill Gates' foundation is honoring that shared goal with a $376,635 grant to ALEC

Two education companies are in a battle over the right to provide testing items to the Florida Department of Education under a Race to the Top contract worth tens of millions of dollars. A subsidiary of McGraw-Hill, which is based in New York, filed a bid protest earlier this week to block a contract between the DOE and Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The filing with the Department of Administrative Hearings argues that the department used the wrong criteria in weighing the offers of McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the final round of bid consideration.

The list of initiatives reads like a grand plan to dismantle public education as we know it: Slash education spending. Outsource public teachers. Curb collective bargaining rights. Kneecap teachers' unions. Open the floodgates to charter and "cyber" schools. Welcome to education reform in the state of Michigan, where a Republican-dominated legislature and a GOP governor are pushing one of the broadest anti-union, pro-privatization agendas in the country.

Michigan sometimes gets short shrift in school reform news, what with all of the publicity given this year to Wisconsin - where some Democratic legislators left the state to avoid a vote on Gov. Scott Walker's efforts to restrict collective bargaining rights of teachers - and to Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich just saw voters repeal his effort to curb collective bargaining for public sector workers. But it shouldn't. Michigan's legislature this year has been considered a host of Republican-sponsored bills that public school advocates see as attacks on schools and teachers.

If a well-heeled neighborhood of Los Angeles wanted better police protection, would it be OK for the residents to donate money to their local police station so it could assign an extra patrol car to their streets? Most people would rightly say no. Law enforcement is a public service; taxpayers support it for the safety of all, to be deployed as needed to provide the best protection for the city. Residents might hire a private security guard for their neighborhood, but they cannot reshape public allocations of resources to benefit themselves through private donations. So is it all right, then, for parents to lavish donations on one school, providing it with art and music classes, instructional aides and extra library hours, while a neighboring school in the same district might have none of those?

Like freedom, choice is a complicated virtue in society. Yes, freedom unless ... Ditto for choice. Human rights and choices are sometimes comfortable together and sometimes not. If I want my child with a mere 100 I.Q. to attend classes with kids with more-academic smarts, while you with a child who has a 130 I.Q. want to be sure that your child keeps company only with smart peers-well, we can't both win. (Especially if we are typical of most parents.) Then it comes to who has the power to get what they want or to persuade the other side that what they want is good for everyone.

Much controversy has been aroused and much ink has been expended about the way in which Eva Moskowitz is now defying the original stated purpose of charter schools, and marketing her chain of Success Academies to white middle class families in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.  Her glossy flyers, sent to households by the truckload, with many families having already received five or six, increasingly feature the faces of little white children. There has also been much debate about the problems of NYC's demanding school "choice" process -- but not much said about how school choice may further segregate  our public schools, especially in many areas of Brownstone Brooklyn, where the last ten years or more of gradual gentrification have led to more diversity in neighborhood schools.  While the UCLA Civil Rights project has shown how charter schools contributes to more segregation nationwide, here are the observations of one Brooklyn parent who is also a high school teacher, Cindy Black, about what happened when a new elementary school of "choice" -- though not a charter -- opened up  in her community

The most famous teacher in the United States right now is Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy.  Khan Academy is a collection of nearly 3,000 online youtube tutorials mainly about math and science.  Bill Gates watches the videos with his kids, and has made Khan a household name.  Because of Khan, a new buzz-word in education is the 'flipped' classroom where kids are expected to watch videos the night before and then do their 'homework' in class, supervised by the teacher.

In Wisconsin, there has been a bigger push to adopt merit pay ever since Scott Walker limited the collective bargaining rights for teacher unions.  Merit pay sounds like a good idea in concept, especially to those in the business world, but most teachers know that it is a crock.  In theory, merit pay, would work in a way that you determine the quality of the teacher and reward them based on that quality.  This brings about many problems.  The biggest of which is how do you determine the quality of teachers? This has been a widely debated topic in many of the recent educational reform debates.  Should we measure based solely on standardized tests? This would result in more teaching to the tests, a narrowing of curriculum, and most likely cheating to ensure the bonuses as we have seen in Atlanta and DC.

Here's the point: parents have the right to select any school they believe best meets the interests and needs of their children. But the devil is always in the details. If truth-in-advertising laws were applied to school choice, I think more parents would be reluctant to expend the time, energy and money in the hope of getting a quality education for their children. Instead, parents might be willing to push for improving existing traditional schools in their neighborhoods. But don't try telling that to reformers.

The New York City reform model is centered upon closing 'failing' schools and opening new ones. Some of these 'failing' schools have been pillars of their communities for decades. One such school I read about in The New York Times is Jamaica High School in Jamaica, Queens. This large high school opened in 1925. But it is in the process, now, of being shut down. New York City rates schools on an A to F scale and if a school gets an 'F' or a 'D' or three consecutive 'C's, then it runs the risk of getting shut down. I thought I'd take a look at the last Jamaica High School progress report to see if there was anything 'interesting.' What I found is that Jamaica High School, in the 2009 to 2010 school year did very well on the regents component of their 'progress' score. They ranked, in fact, 164th out of 424 schools. In this post, I'll explain how the 'Weighted Regents Pass Grades' are calculated and how Jamaica High School fared quite well on this metric.  Below is from Jamaica High's 2009-2010 progress report.  The left bar graph is the comparison to their peer group and the right graph is the comparison to all city schools.  Click on the image to enlarge it.

Given the widespread, non-ideological worries about the reliability of standardized test scores when they are used in high-stakes ways, it makes good sense for reform-minded teachers' unions to embrace value-added as one measure of teacher effectiveness, while simultaneously pushing for teachers' rights to a fair-minded appeals process. What's more, just because we know that teachers with high value-added ratings are better for children, it doesn't necessarily follow that we should pay such teachers more for good evaluation scores alone. Why not use value-added to help identify the most effective teachers, but then require these professionals to mentor their peers in order to earn higher pay?

Given the experience to date with an overwhelming focus on student achievement scores as a basis for high-stakes decisions, policymakers would do well to pause and carefully examine the issues that make teacher assessment so complex before implementing an assessment plan. To facilitate such examination, this brief reviews credible research exploring: the feasibility of combining formative assessment (a basis for professional growth) and summative assessment (a basis for high-stakes decisions like dismissal); the various tools that might be used to gather evidence of teacher effectiveness; and the various stakeholders who might play a role in a teacher assessment system. It also offers a brief overview of successful exemplars.