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Schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott said on Wednesday that the city will close and reopen 26 schools this summer, regardless of whether New York State's education commissioner approves the plans. State education officials have set a goal for themselves of issuing a decision by June, at which point they will either sign off on the city's plans and restore nearly $60 million in federal grant money that they have withheld, or reject the proposals and leave the city to cover costs for the second half of this school year, roughly $36 million. But with or without the financing, the schools will close, Mr. Walcott said.

I recently wrote about an analysis of Michigan's education system that concluded that charter schools-contrary to what some of their backers claim-spend more on administrative costs, and less on instruction, than traditional public schools. But you didn't really think that would be the final word on the subject, did you? This week, a consultant writing for a charter school association takes issue with that claim, put forward in a study released by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. In a blog post written for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Larry Maloney argues that the authors' research does not present a true comparison of administrative spending in charters and traditional publics, particularly in urban areas, such as charter school-rich Detroit.

One pervasive reformy argument is that our entire education system may be instantly transformed to be more productive and efficient by instantly adopting untested reformy policies and/or untested solutions of sectors other than education. Further, that we must take these bold leaps of faith because the public education system itself is too corrupt, too bloated, too inefficient to provide any useful lessons! Perhaps the whole system can be replaced with you-tube videos. Or perhaps we can just fire all of the teachers with more than 10 years experience and pay the rest based on the test scores they produce! Or perhaps some other lessons of industry can cure the (unsubstantiated) ills of American public schooling!

One thing that becomes clear is BCG's interest in cutting costs. Another is in opening the path to for-profit corporations. Not much about any interest in education or learning or curriculum or teacher morale or such. These guys should not be flying under the radar. Let them be known by what they advocate and what they do to our community schools.

"An examination of the contract shows that some of the most controversial issues at stake in the strike have yet to be completely decided, with some issues relegated to committees. Partially because of teachers' new raises, the contract will cost the cash-strapped district $295 million over four years, a reality many believe will cause layoffs. Factions of teachers' unions in other cities inspired by the strike are seeking to fan the flames. Already, teachers in nearby Lake Forest and Evergreen Park have walked out. These fights represent a broader question the American populace is still grappling with: who owns our public schools?"

"We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university. This is despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource poor two-year and non-selective four-year institutions to which they actually apply. Moreover, high-achieving, low-income students who do apply to selective institutions are admitted and graduate at high rates. We demonstrate that these low-income students' application behavior differs greatly from that of their high-income counterparts who have similar achievement. The latter group generally follows the advice to apply to a few "par" colleges, a few "reach" colleges, and a couple of "safety" schools. We separate the low-income, high-achieving students into those whose application behavior is similar to that of their high-income counterparts ("achievement-typical" behavior) and those whose apply to no selective institutions ("income-typical" behavior). We show that income-typical students do not come from families or neighborhoods that are more disadvantaged than those of achievement-typical students. However, in contrast to the achievement-typical students, the income-typical students come from districts too small to support selective public high schools, are not in a critical mass of fellow high achievers, and are unlikely to encounter a teacher or schoolmate from an older cohort who attended a selective college. We demonstrate that widely-used policies-college admissions staff recruiting, college campus visits, college access programs-are likely to be ineffective with income-typical students, and we suggest policies that will be effective must depend less on geographic concentration of high achievers."

The resolution commends Scott for "his concern about the overemphasis on high stakes testing" and says the board believes "our state's future prosperity relies on a high-quality education system that prepares students for college and careers," not just their ability to jump through the state's hoops. And it asks the state Legislature to "reexamine the public school accountability system in Texas and to develop a system that encompasses multiple assessments, reflects greater validity, uses more cost efficient sampling techniques and other external evaluation arrangements."

Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.

Over the objections of teachers' unions and many Democrats, Louisiana's Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families' access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure.

Dan Malloy is saying - you better get your legislators to cave in and vote for my version of the bill because if they don't your towns don't get the money.  If your towns don't get the money, you either don't provide the education services or you have to raise your local property taxes to meet those costs.. $40 million dollars to help 200,000 kids in return in return for what I want (or you get nothing).

In recent years, interest has grown in using classroom observation as a means to several ends, including teacher development, teacher evaluation, and impact evaluation of classroom-based interventions. Although education practitioners and researchers have developed numerous observational instruments for these purposes, many developers fail to specify important criteria regarding instrument use. In this article, the authors argue that for classroom observation to succeed in its aims, improved observational systems must be developed. These systems should include not only observational instruments but also scoring designs capable of producing reliable and cost-efficient scores and processes for rater recruitment, training, and certification. To illustrate how such a system might be developed and improved, the authors provide an empirical example that applies generalizability theory to data from a mathematics observational instrument.

Educators and policymakers have for years debated the academic performance of charter schools, when compared against traditional public schools. Now a new report focuses on charters' financial performance-and concludes that many well-known charter school networks spend more money than comparable, regular public schools. The report, released by the National Education Policy Center, examines charter schools' spending, as measured by their 990 filings through the Internal Revenue Service, and other state and local data. It focuses on charter school spending in three states: New York, Ohio, and Texas, over a three-year-period, from 2008-2010. But the findings are being strongly disputed by one of the charter operators cited in the report, KIPP, whose spokesman called its cost comparisons a "fiction" and said it does not present charter and regular public school expenses consistently, or transparently.

In the wake of news that a Chicago charter school network receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from fees on student misconduct, some educators are raising questions about the fairness of the practice.

The Georgia Legislature is hotly debating a bill that would allow the state to cover the costs of charter schools even if local school boards reject them, setting up a case that could set national precedent on educational reform. The legislation to amend the state constitution would allow the Peach State to create its own parallel K-12 system to local boards, drawing on the same limited pool of Georgia's taxpayer funds -- a decision that the Georgia Supreme Court said was illegal just one year ago.

Texas Education Agency data for the 2011-12 school year show that the number of elementary classes exceeding the 22-1 student-teacher ratio has soared to 8,479 from 2,238 last school year. Texas has had the 22-student cap for kindergarten through fourth-grade classes since 1984, and districts can apply for exemptions for financial reasons. But during the 2011 legislative session, to ease the pain of a roughly $5.4 billion reduction in state financing that did not account for the estimated influx of 170,000 new students over the next two years - and after an attempt to do away with the cap failed - lawmakers made those exemptions easier to obtain. Texas schools, which have shed approximately 25,000 employees this school year, including more than 10,000 teachers, have jumped at the chance to trim costs.

Now fast-forward to the latest plan to measure teacher and principal effectiveness. New York has joined with other states around the country to impose a system of measurement that on first blush appears to be long overdue. Known as the Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), the system of evaluation is a multifaceted approach to review all aspects of educator performance and includes the use of student test scores as a factor in rating performance. There is no doubt that education stands to improve in order to meet the demands of a highly competitive society, however there are many unforeseen consequences of this ill-conceived system.

Eric Hanushek testifies in school finance cases. Again, and again, and again. Thirty-some years ago in the Maryland (Hornbeck) case and most recently in the Colorado (Lobato) case. And each time, Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, testifies to the same position: increased funding for K-12 schools will not improve their effectiveness; court-ordered remedies that cost money will not improve the lot of poor students or English Language Learners or anyone else for that matter. Hanushek is nothing if not a believer in the unconditional truth emanating from his regression equations. But of course, those equations have not always been as clear cut in their implications as some might believe. In 1997, Hanushek published an article in which he argued that a summary of dozens and dozens of correlation studies proved that teacher experience is unrelated to their students' achievement-the financial implications being obvious.

Stand for Children, a group in nine other states that has initiated epic battles with teacher unions in Illinois and Oregon, began a five-week television campaign in the Boston market that several sources indicate will be cost more than $500,000. The group has past the first hurdle to getting a ballot question this November before voters, calling for teacher effectiveness over seniority rights in making decisions over promotions and layoffs.

Teacher pension systems target retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how the effects of teachers' pension incentives on workforce composition influence teacher quality. Teachers who are held in by the "pull" incentives in the pension systems are not more effective, on average, than the typical teacher. Teachers who are encouraged to exit by the "push" incentives are more effective on average. We conclude that the net effect of teachers' pension incentives on workforce quality is small, but negative. Given the substantial and growing costs of current systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful.

One of the leading criticisms of voucher programs-and charter and virtual schools for that matter-is that they undermine traditional public schools' finances by sucking away their per-pupil funding and resources. A new paper published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which supports public and private school choice, challenges that assertion.