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In recent weeks the debate over the future of public education in America has flared up again, this time with the publication of the new book "Class Warfare," by Steven Brill, the founder of American Lawyer magazine. Brill's advocacy of "reform" has sparked different strands of criticism from the New York Times, New York University's Diane Ravitch and the Nation's Dana Goldstein. But behind the high-profile back and forth over specific policies and prescriptions lies a story that has less to do with ideas than with money, less to do with facts than with an ideological subtext that has been quietly baked into the very terms of the national education discussion.

I read something truly awful today in The New York Times Magazine article, What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? But before I share what it was, I'd like to preface it by restating my concerns about a pattern I see of some school reformers taking ideas and practices that have a huge learning and teaching potential and, instead, warping them so their benefits disappear and  can actually become destructive.

Some people must have been startled by President Obama's decision to draw a line in the sand on collective bargaining in his jobs speech to the Congress last week. Specifically, the President said: "I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy." Given the current anti-union tenor of many prominent Republicans, started by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, it seems pretty clear that worker rights is shaping up to be a hot-button issue in the 2012 campaign. Collective bargaining rights as presidential campaign plank? It wasn't that long ago that anything to do with unions was considered to be an historic anachronism - hardly worth a major Republican presidential candidate's trouble to bash. Times have changed.

I still support charter schools as they were first envisioned, as laboratories where educators could work without fear of failure on new approaches to improve the larger public school system. And, like my UTLA predecessors Day Higuchi and the late Helen Bernstein, I support the idea of union-inspired charters to "field test" the policies we propose in collective bargaining.

The idea of society providing a quality, comprehensive education for all children is inspiring and attainable, but the old model for delivering that education - a monolithic government entity led by politicians with a captive audience of students forced into grossly unequal schools - has got to go, one of the nation's pioneers in public school reform told a Tulane audience on Thursday.

"...There is no empathy emergency because empathy is not valued in our culture today, which Harvard-based physician-researcher J. Wes Ulm describes in his 2010 essay for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, "Cache of the Cutthroat"..."

I did a bit of digging to find out more about the role Teach Plus played supporting Senate Bill 1, passed this spring in Indiana. I found out that Stand For Children was responsible for active support of the law, including sponsoring polls that showed public support for the idea of basing teacher pay and layoffs primarily on "student academic growth."

Until Teach for America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes.  The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.

There will be no courses at the Relay Graduate School of Education, the first standalone college of teacher preparation to open in New York State for nearly 100 years. Instead, there will be some 60 modules, each focused on a different teaching technique. There will be no campus, because it is old-think to believe a building makes a school. Instead, the graduate students will be mentored primarily at the schools where they teach. And there will be no lectures. Direct instruction, as such experiences will be called, should not take place for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. After that, students should discuss ideas with one another or reflect on their own.

As Lisa Guisbond said, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children's Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan's senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA's Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

Once upon a time, the education "war of ideas" was fought on the battleground of the nation's op-ed pages. Then came blogs. But that was so two years ago (see "Linky Love, Snark Attacks, and Fierce Debates about Teacher Quality?" what next, Winter 2009.) Who has time for 400-word missives anymore? If you've got a point to make, tweet it!

In recent post, I discussed the questionable value of student survey data to inform teacher evaluation models. Not only is there little research support for such surveys, but the very framing of the idea often reflects faulty reasoning.

"Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: "Sorry. Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way""

Since 2008, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, has financed free international trips - some have called them junkets - for education commissioners whose states do business with the company. When the state commissioners are asked about these trips - to Rio de Janeiro; London; Singapore; and Helsinki, Finland - they emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools.

There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself. This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement. That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation's top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that could be repeated.

Last June, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times disputing the idea of "miracle schools." With the assistance of two volunteer researchers, Gary Rubinstein and Noel Hammatt, I learned that several schools touted by various political leaders as miraculous were not. My intention was not to criticize the schools and their staff, but to criticize the politicians who were using the schools to imply that their policies (like firing the staff and closing the school) were working and that it wasn't all that difficult to turn around a school that enrolled large numbers of low-performing students.

For the past couple of months, Steve Brill's new book has served to step up the eternally-beneath-the-surface hypothesis that teachers' unions are the primary obstacle to improving educational outcomes in the U.S. The general idea is that unions block "needed reforms," such as merit pay and other forms of test-based accountability for teachers, and that they "protect bad teachers" from being fired.

Most governors are fond of talking about education-why it needs to be improved, how they're going to improve it, the consequences of not improving it, and so on. But when governors attempt to use the bully pulpit to sell their ideas about education to the public, what are their favored rhetorical themes? A new analysis examines that question, and finds that governors overwhelmingly choose to frame education as important for economic reasons, rather than for the development of individual abilities, or as a matter of civic responsibility. And that political strategy has implications for society and its schools, the researchers say.