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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, each irate that a stalemate over teacher evaluations is endangering federal education aid, fixed their sights Monday on a shared opponent: what they derided as New York State's education bureaucracy. Both men said the state could no longer tolerate a public school system they said was failing students, invoked the ideals of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and appeared ready for a fight.

Few Americans are aware of the extent to which our civilian economy used to depend on the breadth and quality of the vocational education system in our Armed Forces prior to the inauguration of the voluntary service following the Vietnam War.  Millions of young people who were taken in by the Army had basic skills that were a bit shaky and very little in the way of vocational skills.  They were trained as truck drivers, diesel mechanics, aircraft engine maintenance workers, road builders, computer system managers and quality system analysts.  After their tour was over, they entered the civilian economy, ready to be far more productive than they were before they entered the Army.  The services still train the people they recruit.  But now, they aim to keep them, and the rate at which they become available to the civilian economy has been drastically reduced.

A handful of the high schools the city wants to "turn around" are already doing a better-than-average job at preparing students for college. The schools all posted graduation rates below 60 percent two years ago, when the state compiled a list of "persistently low-achieving" schools that would receive federal funds in exchange for making substantive organizational and programmatic changes.

Earlier this month, ninth and tenth graders at the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation filmed a video inspired by Mr. Cuomo's declaration in his State of the State address that he intended to take a second job as a lobbyist for public school students. A nonprofit group that supports charter schools, the New York City Charter School Center, saw the video and was impressed. With a few tweaks to make it television-ready, and a modest outlay by the charter center, the clip has been playing this week as a 30-second commercial on NY1, the New York City cable news channel.

The main problem, among many, is that school systems cannot function as free markets if we want to achieve universal post-secondary readiness. Free markets produce efficiency, not equity for all. Efficiency helps maximize profit, but what about students that aren't profitable to educate?

In a state struggling to get better at teaching all students, every reform has a glaring omission. Some reforms want to pay special teachers more. As if there are Blackwater mercenary teachers out there, ready to storm the castle and kick down the achievement gap.  They even tried this to the extreme in New York, luring in teachers with $100,000 salaries to get the cream of the crop. It didn't really work. A University of Vanderbilt study, the most extensive on performance pay, concluded there was no correlation between closing the gap and performance pay. They value purpose more than profit. Teachers do not sit around all day brooding upon what their colleagues may or may not make. They deserve professional pay, but teachers are neither mercenaries nor missionaries some folks want to reform how we pay teachers. They pay no attention to reforming how they teach.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, has released its final content frameworks for the common standards. And the newsiest thing about the document is this: The consortium is going to create content frameworks for grades K-2.

This was written by George Wood, superintendent and secondary school principal at the Federal Hocking Local School District in Stewart, Ohio.  He is also the executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy and chair of the board for the Coalition of Essential Schools.

The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government that they will adopt the standards-which specify the math and English skills that students must attain in each grade from kindergarten to the end of high school-within the next several years. Some of these states genuinely believe that doing so will make more of their students ready for college and careers. Others are on board primarily because the Obama administration has enticed them with billions of dollars from its Race to the Top competition, part of the administration's economic-stimulus program. Within the school-reform community, the standards have set off a virtual civil war. It pits those who believe that America desperately needs national standards to catch up to its international competitors against those who think that the administration, by imposing the standards on the states, is guilty of an unwise, or even illegal, power grab.

While the fight over closing schools may be hotter than the weather this summer, the evidence shows that this is not a strategy that works to help all New York City kids get the education they deserve. Yet Mayor Bloomberg has adopted it with a single-mindedness that makes no sense. He has closed more than 140 schools since he took control of the city's school system in 2002. Bloomberg's agenda has disrupted school communities, alienated parents and destabilized neighborhoods. College-readiness rates in the new schools created to replace closing schools are abysmally low, and overall grad rates in these new schools have actually been falling, even as overall grad rates remained flat. Instead of closing schools, there is a better and more effective intervention to turn them around. The Chancellor's District was an innovative program involving nearly 60 schools that flourished from 1996 to 2003 under a joint agreement between then-Chancellor Rudy Crew and the UFT. It's an approach we can use in the 24 schools that are now the subject of litigation between the Department of Education and the principals' and teachers' unions over how they will be staffed.

"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.

"As a society, one of our most important shared responsibilities is the one we take to raise children who are ready to become productive, engaged members of our communities. It's up to all of us to keep them safe, healthy and whole, so they can do the hard work of learning and meeting their full potential. Keeping kids safe and healthy requires trust and cooperation among the adults in each child's life, as well as vigilance among the members of the broader community. This is why we have laws and policies against child abuse and neglect, as well as policies and practices that aim to prevent-or in the awful cases when that fails, to report and prosecute-such abuse. This is a serious issue, which is why it's incredibly offensive and dangerous for it to be politicized and trivialized, as has happened over the past few days. Last week, former journalist Campbell Brown published an incendiary op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, falsely accusing unions of failing to protect children."

raduating from Buffalo State College in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in math, Sara has a burning desire to teach. She's grateful to land a position fresh out of college, even in a troubled high school at low starting pay. It's been four years since the task report A Nation at Risk sounded the rallying call for change, and Sara is ready for the challenge. Unmarried, childless, and full of youthful vigor, she devotes lots of extra time to her job, even as she pursues her master's degree during the evenings. Students identify with Sara, who is young and cute, and Principal Bell makes sure the new teacher isn't assigned many "problem" kids. He urges Sara to take on extra volunteer work: chaperoning dances, serving on committees. For untenured teachers, these are offers you can't refuse.

The standard reformy template is that teachers should only be able to get tenure after 3 years of good ratings in a row and that teachers should be subject to losing tenure if they get 2 bad years in a row.  Further, it is possible that the evaluations might actually stipulate that you can only get a good rating if you achieve a certain rating on the quantitative portion of the evaluation - or the VAM score. Likewise for bad ratings (that is, the quantitative measure overrides all else in the system). The premise of the dice rolling activity from my previous post was that it is necessarily much less likely to roll the same number (or subset of numbers) three times in a row than twice (exponentially in fact). That is, it is much harder to overcome the odds based on error rates to achieve tenure, and much easier to lose it. Again, this is much due to the noisiness of the data, and less due to the difficulty of actually being "good" year after year. The ratings simply jump around a lot. See my previous post.

So a teacher can be effective in each of the sub-components and developing overall? How is that possible? You have a problem Sir. And it goes without saying that it will be as difficult for our best teachers to be in the Highly Effective Range, EVER, as it is for our smartest fourth graders to achieve a 4 on the State ELA test. Which we're working on, by the way. We want more 4′s and more 3′s and well, even without the TESTS, we aim to do a better job, aligning to the common core, making data driven decisions, doing all of the things well that you've asked us to do. Believe it or not, we do want every child to succeed and we understand we've got to be more deliberate in making that happen through the common core curriculum and data analysis, NOT through fear and intimidation. Not through the composite scores you're instituting. Two things will happen. One, I'll have to hire three more administrators to help me with all of the teacher improvement plans indicated by your scoring bands. Two, our teachers will be demoralized, defeated, and ready to give up. We get it Commissioner King. We are going to transform this district from the wonderful, productive place that it already is into a more focused PK-12 continuum of curriculum that positively affects student achievement in big ways. And we're also going to be sure that while productive, we don't suck all of the joy out of learning. Your insanely punitive scoring bands are not going to help make that happen. Raise expectations, think the best of us, help us to get there. Reward us when we do. The scoring bands and the publicly reported composite scores will not help us get there.

"The rationale here is muddled at best, but the detriments are obvious. For instance, young students in New York State who are developing as they should will be placed in remedial services, forgoing enrichment in the arts because they are a "2" and thus below the new proficiency level. That is where the vast majority of students fall on the new scales - below proficiency and off the "road to college readiness."  Students, who in reality may not need support will be sorted into special education or "response to intervention" services.  Parents will worry for their children's future. The newspapers will bash the public schools and their teachers at a time when morale is already at an extreme low. The optimism teachers first felt about the Common Core State Standards is fading as the standards and their tests roll into classrooms."

"According to the 2011 American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, 32.9 percent of New Yorkers (state, not city) 25 or older had at least a bachelor's degree. On the new,"more realistic" test scores released for New York State this week, 31 percent of students demonstrated "proficiency." Coincidence? Perhaps, but it's got me thinking about something that's bothered me for a while..."

"If the mission of the education system is to serve the economy, and that means maximizing profits, then those profits will be highest if we have an overabundance of college graduates to do the technical work that must be done to keep the machinery of production running. And we have low wage service sector that is unable to raise its wages because they are unorganized and have no political clout. Those who are unemployed are informed over and over again by the school system that they are inadequate because they cannot pass the tests, and therefore to perceive their status as being the result of their own failure to make themselves useful to employers. They are unemployed not because manufacturing has been outsourced to cheap labor overseas, but because they were not "career ready," as proven by their failure to pass the new, much more "rigorous" Common Core aligned tests. Education reform becomes an exercise in rationalizing the shift of half the nation's workers into "surplus" status. It creates a new meritocracy, based on a false paradigm that defines the ability to do well on tests as merit."

"But even good ideas can be torpedoed by bad execution. In New York, officials rushed to impose tests and consequences way before students were ready. And Louisiana, New Mexico and other states are skimping on or simply bungling implementation. If officials are trying to make these standards unattainable, they're doing a great job. No wonder students, their parents and teachers are angry, anxious and demoralized."

"Financially troubled ICEF Public Schools, backed by Richard Riordan, was to be acquired by Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, but the deal has been scrapped, and ICEF's leadership is in flux."