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Nearly six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ushered in an era of efforts to integrate public schools, charter school advocates and researchers are shining a light on a number of those independent public schools that are integrated by design. Two new reports-one from the National Alliance of Public Charter schools, another from the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council-examine charter schools that have racially and socioeconomically diverse enrollments as part of their school missions. Researchers and advocates say that there is increasing demand for such schools, but that national educational priorities and policies are not necessarily stacked in their favor.

As the United States emerges from difficult economic times, the challenges of increasing child poverty, revenue declines and state budget cuts appear more daunting. Yet, so too is the national challenge of ensuring all students, especially low-income students and students with special needs, the opportunity to receive a rigorous, standards-based education to prepare them for today's economy. In order to address the challenges of concentrated student poverty and meet the needs of English-language learners and students with disabilities, states must develop and implement the next generation of standards-driven school finance systems, expressly designed to provide a sufficient level of funding, fairly distributed in relation to student and school need.  The inaugural edition of the National Report Card, issued in late 2010, served to focus attention on these important issues. This second edition, which analyzes data through 2009, seeks to continue and sharpen that focus. Amidst the ongoing effort to improve our nation's public schools, fair school funding is critical to being successful and sustaining progress. Creating and maintaining state systems of fair school funding is essential to improving our nation's public schools.

The departure of half the core teaching staff at an elite Upper West Side elementary school has roiled parents who worry test prep is destroying the school's creative spirit. In July, close to half of the parents at the Special Music school signed a letter decrying the "apparent shift in school culture" and the new principal's leadership.  "This is not the same place it was three years ago," said a 3rd-grade parent, who like most interviewed, asked to remain anonymous for fear of negative repercussions for their children. "There's a lot of talk about data and test prep, and I didn't used to hear that." The school, which until recently was a program at PS 199, provides an almost private-school like experience for musically gifted students who must audition in kindergarten and again in 5th grade for middle school.

Parents from Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx gathered in front of the Lenox Avenue headquarters of Success Charter Network Thursday to protest the school's expansion plans. Parents fear three Harlem schools - Wadleigh Secondary school for the Performing Arts, Frederick Douglass Academy II and Opportunity Charter school - will be slated for full of partial closure to make way for Success schools to expand. All three schools are currently co-located or will be with Success schools

We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while Democrats are squeezed between superintendents, school boards and teachers' unions that want money with no strings, and activists with little patience for concerns about federal overreach. When it comes to education policy, the two of us represent different schools of thought. One of us, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an education school professor who advised the Obama administration's transition team; the other, Rick Hess, has been a critic of school districts and schools of education. We disagree on much, including big issues like merit pay for teachers and the best strategies for school choice. We agree, though, on what the federal government can do well. It should not micromanage schools, but should focus on the four functions it alone can perform.

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public Schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city's most storied high Schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind-part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three Schools reflect some of the city's most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E. L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists-more than any other high School in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country's top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students. This spring and summer, however, more than a third of the School's social-studies department-eight of the twenty teachers-announced they wouldn't be returning for the 2011 School year. Their departure came after similar exoduses in other departments. In 2009, it was math; before that, English. In 2010, nearly a quarter of the teachers at Bronx Science had less than three years of experience; the corresponding numbers at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech were 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The reason for the seismic upheaval, virtually everyone agrees, is Valerie Reidy.

In 2008, the Louisiana Legislature passed the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program to provide tuition vouchers to low-income students in Orleans Parish to attend private and parochial schools or public schools outside of Orleans Parish.  The purpose was to give parents better, higher quality school options other than attending a failing school. Educate Now! analyzed the test scores for students in voucher schools and compared them to students in Recovery school District schools.

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.

My hard-working, middle-class parents, like millions of American families, depended on their neighborhood public schools to provide quality education for their children, and rightfully so. Certainly, all parents in the U.S. should be able to choose the educational option that works best for them and their children. Most important, in this nation, every family in every community should have access to good schools. The only difference among schools should be perhaps each having a different focus. No parent anywhere in these United States should have to move or risk arrest in order to secure quality education for her/his child(ren).   How is it then, that millions of American children live in neighborhoods with schools chronically neglected by the same political/educational system that now wants to condemn them as "failing"?  In such settings, it is hypocritical and cruel to use the illusion of "choice" and "free-market competition" to justify closing or taking even more resources from those same schools; sending parents scurrying for scarce or non-existent schooling options. 

We propose a fundamental shift in the framework and language we use to discuss educational reform. Instead of a framework that views students as products, we propose a framework in which the products of education are viewed as the contexts and content of schools themselves. The schools we produce should be positive and nurturing learning environments where students are engaged in a rich, coherent curriculum. Rather than view our students as widgets, we'd do better to view them as vibrant, dynamic organisms, and view the school, by extension, as an ecosystem. While such a model would make it harder to quantify school quality based on a simple numerical scale, it would enable us to have more productive conversations about systemic education reform, and to take action in targeted ways that will have a sustainable impact. There are principles for maintaining a healthy ecosystem that can provide guidance in strengthening our school environments. We are certain that this shift in focus will - perhaps paradoxically - result in more productive student outcomes. Land maintained according to sound ecological principles results in abundant microbial soil life, interdependency of diverse species, and a sustainable yield. A school maintained according to ecological principles will result in lower teacher turnover, greater community engagement, and positive long-term student outcomes.

Over a third of the city's public schools are failing their students, according to new state standards that paint a much bleaker picture than the one offered by the city. The New York State Education Department added some 350 city schools on Thursday to its annual bulletin of "schools in need of improvement" - but 180 of those schools earned A's or B's on their latest progress reports from the city. State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said the state's new list of troubled schools offers more proof of the city school system's dismal performance.

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.

There are three types of schools in New York City: Bloomberg schools, Gates schools, and orphans. The Bloomberg schools are the specialized small academies and charters that the Bloomberg administration set up to attract and hold the middle class. Student populations are often predominately White and Asian, although higher performing Black and Hispanic students from more stable home environments are generally welcomed. Gates schools are the foundation-supported schools that get extra resources from their benefactors. The Bloomberg and Gates schools get all the cookies.

While our society is more diverse than ever before, schools are more segregated today than they were 30 years ago. school choice policies that allow children to enroll in schools outside of their neighborhood have the potential to reduce segregation and many of the inequities that flow from that segregation. Yet some of the nation's most segregated K-12 schools are public charter schools. A new report from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), Chartering Equity: Using Charter school Legislation and Policy to Advance Equal Educational Opportunity, written and researched by Julie F. Mead of the University of Wisconsin and Preston C. Green III of Penn State, offers guidance on how charter school policies can best be shaped to promote equity goals.

Schools and School systems throughout the nation are increasingly experimenting with using various instructional technologies to improve productivity and decrease costs, but evidence on both the effectiveness and the costs of education technology is limited. A recent report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sets out to describe "the size and range of the critical cost drivers for online Schools in comparison to traditional brick-and-mortar Schools" (p. 2). The study divides online learning into two broad categories-virtual Schools and blended-learning Schools-and, based on data from 50 experts, reports that "the average overall per-pupil costs of both models are significantly lower than the $10,000 national average for traditional brick-and-mortar Schools" (p. 1). These findings, however, are undermined by a general lack of clarity about the models being studied and problematic data and methods. While the report addresses an important topic, the utility of its cost estimates are limited. Of more value are the qualitative findings about how various cost drivers affect the overall costs of online learning. The study would be more useful if it provided a rigorous analysis of a set of well-defined promising models of online learning as the basis for its cost estimates.  

There was no question about the early charter schools being public. An outgrowth of the small schools movement, these schools, usually a small number within urban school districts, were started and run by teachers who were all members of the local teachers union. The idea was to empower collaborative groups of teachers with innovative ideas about classroom practices that might produce better results for students than those found in bureaucratically governed traditional schools. It was hoped that these ideas and practices, if successful, could be shared with other schools in the district.

"The windowless basement meeting room buzzed with excited, nervous chatter. Rival schools were about to sit down to get to know one another, rather intimately. Nine schools in the Providence school District have agreed to consider converting to charter status, by partnering with one of Rhode Island's excellent charter schools. Together they'll adapt the charter-school's educational strategy, write up their co-created new design, and apply for charter status from the state. The new joint-venture schools will remain district-run and unionized. These sorts of district-school conversions are not terribly common, but they do exist -- mainly because faculties get so frustrated with certain district policies, curriculum or labor-contract provisions that they want the flexibility that comes with charter status. In Providence's case, the district itself is encouraging the conversions."

"Billionaires like privately managed schools. Parents are lured with glittering promises of getting their kids a sure ticket to college. Politicians want to appear to be champions of "school reform" with charters. But charters will not end the poverty at the root of low academic performance or transform our nation's schools into a high-performing system. The world's top-performing systems - Finland and Korea, for example - do not have charter schools. They have strong public school programs with well-prepared, experienced teachers and administrators. Charters and that other faux reform, vouchers, transform schooling into a consumer good, in which choice is the highest value."

"In The link between charter school expansion and increasing segregation, Iris C. Rotberg highlights that problems exist in both re-segregation of schools in the U.S. and the rise of charter schools as separate and interrelated forces. schools in the U.S. are re-segregating, regardless of type-public, private, and charter. And charter schools are not creating the education reform charter advocates claim, with one failure of the charter movement being segregating students by race and class. Thus, it is important to focus on the evidence that shows the need to reconsider how to address segregation and the flawed support continuing for expanding charter schools."