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We all know that high stakes testing changes the school environment. Teachers and administrators are stressed because the tests will be tied to their evaluations. Students and support staff are stressed because there is a great deal of pressure to do well on the test. After all, it wasn't too long ago that the New York Post and other media outlets published the Value Added scores of over 18,000 teachers. The test has pushed students, parents and educators to their limits, but perhaps that is the greater plan.

The premise of this story is that the disaster of Hurricane Katrina was the weather event and that 5-year old children are unaffected today. Not surprisingly they use the example of an uptown resident who now works for the RSD. But for the 118,000 blacks who never made it back, and the tens of thousands who could never find affordable housing or work, the Katrina disaster never stopped and its emotional impact on children is as strong as ever; the same is true for those who did return only to encounter a second disaster in healthcare, housing, employment, and political dispossession.  It is inconceivable that the emotional trauma and stress on parents does not affect children; that the child does not know the origins of their own emotional stress does not mean they are unaffected.

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

If somebody told me, 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them, and devoting every ounce of teachers energies to raising their test scores, I would have said "what planet are you living on?." Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and which created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less doing their homework , that people living in middle class communities couldn't imagine. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors as well as people imparting skills, and at times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components. Now, such thinking is considered a form of educational heresy.

After months of studying, stressing and - yes - some crying, our kids are finally done with this year's state English Language Arts and math exams. This happens every year, and each year seems more intense than the last. But after all the fuss and agony to rate our kids, their teachers and their schools, what have our children really learned? If your kids are anything like our kids, they've learned more about pressure and bureaucracy than math and English.

It cannot be accidental that the sharp drop in teacher morale coincides with the efforts of people such as Michelle Rhee and organizations such as Education Reform Now and Stand for Children to end teacher tenure and seniority. Millions have been spent to end what is called "LIFO" (last in, first out) and to make the case that teachers should not have job security. Many states led by very conservative governors have responded to this campaign by wiping out any job security for teachers. So, if teachers feel less secure in their jobs, they are reacting quite legitimately to the legislation that is now sweeping the country to remove any and all job protections. Their futures will depend on their students' test scores (thanks to Arne Duncan), even though there is no experience from any district or state in which this strategy has actually improved education. Its main effect, as we see in the survey, is to demoralize teachers and make them feel less professional and less respected. Yes, there will be more teaching to the test: Both NCLB and the Race to the Top demand it. And yes, there will be teachers who are wrongly fired. And yes, teachers will leave for other lines of work that are less stressful.

The growing debate over the effectiveness and feasibility of online learning is too complicated to break simply into "for" and "against" camps. Proponents of online learning concede questions linger regarding how best to fund online programs, identify students that best fit the model, and yield the best academic results. Critics, meanwhile, often stress the difference between demanding research to prove effectiveness of online models and asserting that no such models exist. Yet it's hard to interpret a recent review from the National Education Policy Center as anything less than a line drawn in the sand between itself and the Fordham Institute over the issue, and perhaps more broadly across the nation's political landscape, after the NEPC not only challenged the findings of a report from the institute, but also the motivation behind it.

Public education has been a disaster for Andrew Cuomo, and vice versa. Right from the start of his administration, he's used the wrong tactics, the wrong strategies and the wrong sequences if he had any intention of actually elevating New York's public education system and giving especially stressed urban and rural school districts a much-needed boost.

Amid the debates about our public schools and the need for education reform, the impact of poverty on student learning outcomes seems to be missing. Research has established a clear link between poverty and student performance. Yet many critics of public schools deride the poverty-achievement link as an excuse for poor teaching. What do the data show about the relationship between student poverty levels and schools' performance?

"If children are under stress, the ways they respond are remarkably similar," she says. "They get sad, distracted, aggressive, and tune out." That is what she saw in the high-poverty schools she visited. Chaos reigned. The most disruptive children dominated the schools. Teachers didn't have control of their classrooms - in part because nothing in their training had taught them how to deal with traumatized children. Too many students had no model of what school was supposed to mean. "These were schools that were not ready to be schools," she said.

"Municipal finance analysts at Moody's recently took a look at the impact of charter school growth on public finances, finding "while the vast majority of traditional public districts are managing through the rise of charter schools without a negative credit impact, a small but growing number face financial stress due to the movement of students to charters.""

In the eyes of Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett, America's schools can only improve by taking on a number of different reforms simultaneously. Different parties to the education debate stress different measures -- charter schools, voucher programs that use public money to fund private schools, looser union protections for teachers -- but implementing reforms one at a time won't do anything, Bennett said.

Our educational system, historically a major engine for equal opportunity and a pathway to the American Dream, is under severe stress. Along with it, the working- and middle-class and immigrant dream of rising out of economic anxiety is evaporating, as our public education system, from preschools through public universities, has lost broad support. This is evidenced by declining state commitments to public education-relative to health-care and prison expenditure-by property-tax caps in communities and states that affect the quality of schools, and by expenditure cuts rather than tax increases at the federal level of the kind we just witnessed in the debt-ceiling agreements. We make decisions and deals like these at our peril.

It sounds so democratic, a very American idea: break down the walls of "remedial," "average" and "advanced" classes so that all students in each grade can learn together, with lessons that teachers "differentiate" to challenge each individual. Proponents of this approach often stress that it benefits average and lagging students, but a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that the upsides may come at a cost to top students - and to the international competitiveness of the United States. By trying to teach children of varying abilities in one classroom, is American society underdeveloping some of its brightest young people?

Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city's roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. "It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job," Ms. Strzelecki said.

"Anya Kamenetz's The Test comes from the conversation she's had again and again with parents. She and they have "seen how high-stakes standardized tests are stunting children's spirits, adding stress to family life, demoralizing teachers, undermining schools, paralyzing the education debate, and gutting our country's future competitiveness." Like so many Gen X and Gen Y parents, Kamenetz sees how "the test obsession is making public schools … into unhappy places." Kamenetz covers ten arguments against testing, starting with "We're testing the wrong things," and ending with "The next generation of tests will make things even worse." I'd say the second most destructive of the reasons is #4 "They are making teachers hate teaching." The most awful is #3 "They are making students hate school and turning parents into preppers.""

Question: Why do wealthy kids usually do better in school than poor kids? Answer: Disadvantaged children face a host of challenges to academic success. These challenges fall into two broad categories.

An article in yesterday's New York Times covered some recent research on the increasing education achievement gap between rich and poor. It's worth a read, but it misses a couple of important points.