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I literally am sitting at my desk with tears in my eyes as I type this article.  I don't think  I have felt this much shame about being an American since the execution of Troy Davis.  It is times like these I am reminded that no matter how noble our written intentions are in the Constitution, our system is really only as "good" as the people who run it. If you don't know the story of Tanya  McDowell she made headlines last year when she was arrested for using a friend's address to send her son to a school in a better neighborhood.  At the time, McDowell was homeless but wanted her son to have access to a quality education.

But I think there's another factor that is poorly understood. Teachers (and their unions) have been made scapegoats for all the ills afflicting public schools. The unrelenting criticism makes them feel unappreciated. It's important to remember that teachers do not choose the profession for fame, fortune or power. They do so because they want to help young people reach their full potential. Their mission is captured in a recruiting slogan from many years ago: "Be all you can be... in the Army." The MetLife Survey puts to rest the assumption that teacher disaffection is higher in inner-city schools than in suburban schools. In fact, attitudes were remarkably similar across the board.

Let's face it. The past few contracts have seen a major erosion of core rights for teachers, and not just here in NYC.  I am a chapter leader, so I have little time to write these missives in the blogoshphere, as I engage in daily combat for my members trying to protect what rights they have left. So, I think alarmist reactions are in order, especially given anything of complexity negotiated by our union.  I have been around long enough to remember a document called Teaching for the 21st Century. Most UFT members of unaware of its existence. Yet, it was the primary driver of their Article 8 rights, which include how teachers are to be observed and assessed as professionals. It came out in the late 90s and was heralded with much fanfare as a great collaboration between the Board of Education and the UFT.

Why have our efforts fallen short? Over the past fifty years, U.S. school reform has been dominated by three major movements, aimed at promoting equity, increasing school choice, and using academic standards to leverage improvement. While all three have changed schooling in notable ways, none has brought about the needed level of general improvements because they mostly sought to improve education from the outside rather than the inside. To make real progress, we will have to think and act much more audaciously. The next round of reform must focus on the essentials of education-the quality of teaching and curriculum, and the means of funding them. Moreover, if we truly want to improve our schools sooner than later, then we must declare a good education to be a civil right for every child. This article explains the shortcomings of the three major reforms and proposes a bolder approach for future school reform. The current campaign for the presidency presents an opportunity to discuss this improvement agenda.

There's been a lot lately about "flipping the classroom," a teaching method where students are to view a lecture at home --ostensibly on-line--of their teacher presenting key concepts while saving doing harder and trickier homework-type assignments for in class. This idea appeals to me and I've been somewhat surprised that so many other education peeps out there whom I follow don't seem as enamored. Not only are they disparaging of the idea, but they seem to think "lecture" is synonymous with torture.

This note is in response to James O'Keefe's attempt to discredit me on his Project Veritas web site (though I think his point was intended to larger than this). I was lucky (?) enough to be part of one of his investigative set ups earlier this fall. I wrote and held on to this post and all related e-mails.

In the Republican Party, presidential debates candidates like Mitt Romney and Herman Cain tout their business executive experience and claim expertise at job creation. Former Governors Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman promote their management experience as the CEO of state governments. Whatever you may think of their proposals for stimulating the economy and ending unemployment, there is no question that these candidates believe, and they believe their audience believes, that knowledge and experience are important leadership qualities. However, when it comes to educational leadership, it seems that knowledge and experience do not count for very much, certainly not to the Obama-Duncan team, the Cuomo-King-Tisch team that establishes educational policy in New York State, or the Bloomberg-Walcott team that runs the schools in New York City.

Two posts ago, I wrote my most widely read post of all time (nearly 12,000 hits) about how upset I am with the current 'direction' TFA is headed in. In case you are wondering, I do not ever get contacted by anyone in TFA to beg me to stop. I really don't think they see my posts as a threat or as any kind of motivation to make changes that would make me not feel the need to make such posts. Maybe there are people in the TFA national office reading these posts, I don't know. But I don't want to seem like someone who just likes to complain without having any of my own ideas about how things can be improved. As an out-of-the-box thinker, I know exactly how I could easily turn TFA into an organization that I'd once again be proud of. (And then I could start wearing my T-shirts again.)

Right-wing think-tankers at the Fordham Institute are looking for answers and I'm sure they'll find them. You see, it's all in how you pose the question. Their latest quest has to do with charter schools. Fordham, which doubles as a charter school lobbying and support group in Ohio, and their business-minded partners, Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), are getting together to ponder whether or not so-called charter incubators can "can solve the problem of too many mediocre charter schools."

You'd think that privateers would turn to their heavy guns now that anger and frustration about school reform seemingly have reached a crescendo. But they've learned that a head-on approach can backfire after voters handily defeated vouchers or their variants in state after state between 1967 and 2007. As a result, they've decided instead to take more incremental steps. I'm talking now about the use of educational technology.

The overarching Common Core vs. No Common Core and Core Knowledge vs. Balanced Literacy debates (see this New York Times article and this Learning Matters segment) have spawned another debate: fiction vs. non-fiction. I think this misses the point and causes their critics to unfairly tarnish "non-fiction" as a genre. My apprehensions about the Common Core Standards aside, just as I defended the lecture several posts ago, I feel compelled to defend non-fiction.

But there is another case that teachers might make-a criticism that would level a blow to the radical overhaul of teacher evaluation, and, more importantly, one that just might help students learn. And the case is this: Achievement, as we measure it, is not really about achievement. As determined by multiple-choice tests-the dominant way that we measure it in the United States-achievement is not about how students can think or write or persuade. It is not about how they can perform experiments or produce original research. It is not about their prowess in art or civics or robotics. Instead, it is about memorized minutiae and good guesses. We accept this approach to measurement only because it is so common. And it is common not because it actually measures achievement, but because it is time-efficient and cost-effective. -iStockphoto.com/Nuno Silva Simply put, we're using the wrong instrument. Evaluating teachers through multiple-choice-based tests of student learning is like using the rules of Go Fish to assess poker skill.

Buffett's decision presents us with a conundrum. If he is not competent to determine the worthwhile recipients of his beneficence, then how is it that he knows that the Gates Foundation is dispensing beneficences in a worthwhile way? Education is an arena particularly prone to attracting Shoe Button Complexes. Everyone has been to school; everybody thinks they know what is wrong with schools.

Reuters reports that former Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Paul Vallas thinks end-of-year assessments are "not useful" and that it's "a big mistake" to use them for high-stakes purposes.

What I think these two instances have in common is that in both cases I responded to the challenge to solve a problem that for whatever reasons caught and held my interest. I could not have solved the problems without the "skills," but I never invested in learning the skills until I was captivated by the problems.

In short, there are different ways to measure the gender gap, and their "accuracy" is not about the statistics as much as how they're interpreted. The gap is 75-80 cents on the male dollar if you're making no claims that the difference is attributable solely to discrimination. When you account for the underlying factors - and you must do so to interpret the data in this manner - you get a somewhat different picture of the extent of the problem (problem though it still is). Now, think about how easily this all applies to test data in education. We are inundated every day with average scores and rates - for schools, districts, states, subgroups of students, etc. These data are frequently compared between groups and institutions in much the same way as wages are compared between men and women.

"If you were thinking of ponying up $20 to buy Jonathan Kozol's latest book, Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, don't bother. EduShyster has it on EXCELLENT authority that the book suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. While I haven't actually read Fire in the Ashes, I know someone who has-Teach for America foundress Wendy Kopp-and she thought it was a real dud. You see Kozol has spent the past 642 years writing about the scourge of poverty among America's children, racial segregation in the public schools and inequities in education funding-all of which we now know DO NOT MATTER AT ALL. In fact just by mentioning these non-mattering factors Kozol is practically a one man excuse factory."

"Cuomo apparently thinks that parents don't care about class size, or budget cuts, or layoffs, or loss of funding for the arts in their schools. No, he alone is the "lobbyist for the students," (as he once boasted), not their parents. Anyone who wants more money for schools must be fronting for the teachers' unions."

"Dr. Zuger explains what happens to the brilliant young doctors who aced every standardized test (there were so many of them!), but were flummoxed when it came time to diagnose a complicated real-life problem presented by a patient. She gives examples of how these hotshots dealt with new situations: Badly. They looked for the right answer, but there was none. What was needed was judgment and experience, and they didn't have enough of either. Dr. Zuger sees these young doctors as victims of linear thinking, a very bad habit caused by taking too many standardized tests with a single right answer."

"Instead, she encourages educators, parents and lawmakers to think as citizens rather than consumers when it comes to education. Ravitch's vision for education reform starts at ground level with each person supporting public education as a civic responsibility."