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"The College Board, the organization behind the SAT, acknowledges that historically its tests have been biased in favor of the children of wealthy, well educated elites - those who live in the best zip codes, are surrounded by books, go to the best regarded schools (both public and private), enjoy summer enrichment programs, and can avail themselves of as much tutoring and SAT test-prep coaching as they need. That's why, early last month, College Board president David Coleman announced that the SAT would undergo significant changes, with the aim of making it more fair and equitable for disadvantaged students."

Last month, students at Great Neck North High School were accused of paying an Emory University student to take the SAT exam for them. A new report now says the investigation is expanding to two other Long Island School districts and a private school, and officials say they have identified at least one more student who may have impersonated students and taken SATs for payments. SchoolBook invited student journalists at city high schools to write about the cheating scandal. Students from Stuyvesant High School submitted a news article and an editorial from The Spectator, the Stuyvesant High School newspaper.

"For many years now, a common talking point in education circles has been that U.S. public school teachers are disproportionately drawn from the "bottom third" of college graduates, and that we have to "attract better candidates" in order to improve the distribution of teacher quality. We discussed the basis for this "bottom third" claim in this post, and I will not repeat the points here, except to summarize that "bottom third" teachers (based on SAT/ACT scores) were indeed somewhat overrepresented nationally, although the magnitudes of such differences vary by cohort and other characteristics. A very recent article in the journal Educational Researcher addresses this issue head-on (a full working version of the article is available here). It is written by Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Andrew McEachin, Luke Miller and James Wyckoff. The authors analyze SAT scores of New York State teachers over a 25 year period (between 1985 and 2009). Their main finding is that these SAT scores, after a long term decline, improved between 2000 and 2009 among all certified teachers, with the increases being especially large among incoming (new) teachers, and among teachers in high-poverty schools."

Anybody paying attention to the course of modern school reform will not be very surprised by this news: Newly released SAT scores show that scores in reading, writing and even math are down over last year and have been declining for years. And critical reading scores are the lowest in 40 years.

When reporting test scores, it's essential to understand whether the scores reflect changes in performance or changes in the tested population (see here and here for how this plays out with NAEP results). In this case, while I don't have enough data to know exactly what is going on with SAT scores, there's no doubt that the story is more complex than meets the eye.

The College Board, which oversees undergraduate and graduate school entrance exams, released results for the 2011 SATs, revealing mixed news: More students took the test than ever before, posting scores that are some of the lowest in history. On reading comprehension, the 1.65 million students who filled out answer sheets earned a mean score of 497 out of a possible 800 - a three-point drop off from 2010. Comparatively, the results in 2005 showed a mean score of 507.

"Every year, around this time, the College Board publicizes its SAT results, and hundreds of newspapers, blogs, and television stations run stories suggesting that trends in the aggregate scores are, by themselves, a meaningful indicator of U.S. school quality. They're not."

In 1988, Deborah Bial was working in a New York City after-school program when she ran into a former student, Lamont. He was a smart kid, a successful student who had won a scholarship to an elite college. But it hadn't worked out, and now he was back home in the Bronx. "I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me," he told her. The next year Bial started the Posse Foundation. From her work with students around the city, she chose five New York City high school students who were clearly leaders - dynamic, intelligent, creative, resilient - but who might not have had the SAT scores to get into good schools. Vanderbilt University was willing to admit them all, tuition-free.  The students met regularly in their senior year of high school, through the summer, and at college. Surrounded by their posse, they all thrived. Today the Posse Foundation selects about 600 students a year, from eight different cities. They are grouped into posses of 10 students from the same city and go together to an elite college; about 40 colleges now participate in the program.

Average SAT scores fell across the board this past year-down 3 points in critical reading, 2 points in writing, and 1 point in math. This year, 1.65 million students in the high school graduating class of 2011 took the college-entrance exam, up from 1.6 million for the class of 2010, according to results released today. The increase in test-takers can lead to a decline in mean scores, the College Board says, because more students of varying academic ability are represented.

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 architect of many of the metrics the city uses to assess teachers and measure student growth spent Monday evening defending his work against a steady stream of criticism from parents and educators. Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky sat on a three-person panel titled "High-Stakes Testing 101″ hosted at The Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies and The Brooklyn New School. The panel included two principals, Long Island's Sean Feeney and Elijah Hawkes of the James Baldwin School in Manhattan, who have publicly criticized the city's and state's use of testing data to measure student growth and evaluate teacher effectiveness. Hawkes was one of about 170 city principals to sign on to a petition Feeney authored against the state's use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.

This is an open letter written by Larry Lee after he sat through a meeting of the Alabama House Ways & Means Education Committee last week during a hearing on HB541, a bill known as the "Education Options Act of 2012." Lee, of Montgomery, is the former executive director of the Covington County Economic Development Commission and the West Central Partnership of Alabama. He writes often about education. HB541 is intended to: * Allow local school systems to have more flexibility by entering into a contract with the Alabama Department of Education that allows flexibility from state laws, including state Board of Education rules, regulations, and policies, in exchange for academic and assorted goals. * Authorize the establishment of public charter schools in the state, which current has none.

We all know just how much Governor Christie values education, but if you thought that numbnuts, idiot and drug mule stretched the governor's vocabulary, then take heart. Over the past week, Chris Christie has added valuable new terms to his, and New Jersey's, political dictionary. Below is a guide to new terms, and old standbys, that the governor has brought back through sheer will, repetition and exasperation.

Yesterday the College Board, the organization that administers the Advanced Placement program and the SAT, announced David Coleman will become its new president in October, and will focus on deepening the curricula on which College Board exams are based. Coleman is controversial, especially among English teachers. A classicist cum McKinsey consultant cum education reformer, he is (in)famous in education circles as the frantically energetic, hyper-intellectual architect of the new Common Core curriculum standards in language arts, which 45 states have agreed-at least theoretically-to adopt in 2014. Currently, about 80 percent of the reading American students are assigned in school is fiction or memoir, and 20 percent is non-fiction. If Coleman gets his way, that balance will soon tilt closer to 60-40. American children will spend a lot less time reading and writing what Coleman calls, somewhat derisively, "stories," and much more time reading and writing about the ideas in "informational" texts by the likes of Richard Hofstadter, Atul Gawande, and H.L. Mencken in high school; John Adams, Frederick Douglas, and Winston Churchill in middle school.

"One can't help but be moved by the characters and story portrayed in Walden Media's film "Won't Back Down." The film is successful in driving home the sense of urgency parents and educators feel to do everything they can to provide the best possible education for their children. That is abundantly evident in this film-it's what I hear as I visit schools across the country, and it's what I heard when I sat down with parent and community groups from across the country last week. We share that pain and frustration. And we firmly believe that every public school should be a school where every parent would want to send his or her child and where every teacher would want to teach. Unfortunately, using the most blatant stereotypes and caricatures I have ever seen-even worse than those in "Waiting for 'Superman'"-the film affixes blame on the wrong culprit: America's teachers unions."

The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers "come from the bottom third" of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates. All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the "quality" of applicants to the profession. Despite the ubiquity of the "bottom third" and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it's unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so. Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it's worth taking a quick look at where the "bottom third" claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.

On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October, between 40 and 50 Cedarburg School District educators sat in a small auditorium to hear about plans that could change the way they earn an income. Instead of pay raises awarded on the basis of education credits and years of experience-long a hallmark of teachers union salary structures-Superintendent Daryl Herrick said the district wanted to distribute annual bonuses to teachers based on the quality of their work. Educators' ranking on Cedarburg's 6-year-old, multipronged performance evaluation system would determine the size of their bonuses.

Last week, New York State's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., used perhaps the only leverage he has to compel school districts and their unions to agree on the parameters of an evaluation system for teachers and principals assigned to struggling schools: He shut off the federal grants that were meant to improve them. On Monday, as Dr. King sat on a Board of Regents meeting inside the Education Department offices here, just across from the state's Capitol, protesters convened on the steps outside to decry his decision. The gathering was noticeable not because of its size - there were perhaps 20 people attending - but because it brought together two sides whose disagreements presumably were to blame for the grants' suspension: school officials and teachers' union representatives.

I sat down with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan yesterday for a wide-ranging interview on the hot education topics of the day: waivers, Race to the Top, reauthorization, and the election. If you want more than just the highlights, check out the full transcript. Or, read through snippets of our conversation below.

In the private sector, people with SAT and GRE scores comparable to those of education majors earn less than teachers do. Does that mean teachers are overpaid? Or that public schools should pay more to attract top applicants who tend to go into higher-paying professions?