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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.

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly - in terms of test score gains. But "improving teacher quality" cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It's actually a whole different sport.

I have written much on this blog about problems with the use of Value-added Estimates of teacher effect (used loosely) on student test score gains on this blog. I have addressed problems with both the reliability and validity of VAM estimates, and I have pointed out how SGP based estimates of student growth are invalid on their face for determining teacher effectiveness. But, I keep hearing two common refrains from the uber-reformy (those completely oblivious to the statistics and research of VAM while also lacking any depth of understanding of the complexities of the social systems [schools] into which they propose to implement VAM as a de-selection tool) crowd. Sadly, these are the people who seem to be drafting policies these days.

"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."

Quick.  What comes to mind when you hear "Democratic Education?"  Pause… Okay, years ago the first thing coming to mind would be that there was at least a Civics class being taught in the school.  Later, I would add that there should be a student government.  Then I would have thought that an experiential piece should be included, like a mock presidential election or town hall meeting. Much later I came to understand that teaching about how our democracy works (even including a "mock" event or a student council with limited decision making) is a pale imitation of the lived experience of democracy.  And therein lies the rub.

Look for all the furies to be unleashed at a public hearing Tuesday evening on a proposal to locate a high-performing charter school in a Brooklyn building that has hallway after hallway of vacant classrooms. The Success Academy charter network is seeking to open an elementary school in Cobble Hill's K293, a structure that has space for 700 desks, despite being occupied by three other schools.

Three West Harlem secondary schools are on the chopping block for poor performance and in danger of being closed. All three schools are, or will soon be, sharing buildings with charter schools belonging to the Success Academy Network. Some in the community think their schools are being sacrificed to allow for the expansion of the well-funded and politically potent Success Academy Network. They say the DOE has not done enough to support the struggling schools. The DOE is "starving these schools so they have an excuse to shut them down," said Noah Gotbaum, a representative for Community Education Council 3 who attended public hearings about the future of all three schools.

I always cringe when I hear so-called reformers say poverty is "no excuse" for lack of student achievement. It is not because I don't subscribe to that belief, but because I know politicians will use that message as an excuse for not "leveling the playing field" for poor children. To believe that you can treat and fund all schools in the same way meets what many call the definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. From collective bargaining contracts to federal law, poverty has to be a factor in every decision that affects the education of poor children and those who educate them.

All students have strengths, and most of those strengths are not assessed through high stakes testing. It seems that all we hear about in education is how...or whether, our students are achieving. Although not a bad topic to discuss, it is often tied into high stakes testing. Many of us in education would like the achievement discussion to include so much more than a test our students take over a few days which are created by a few large publishers who also happen to publish the textbooks used in our classrooms. All of which happens to be a billion dollar industry.

The departure of half the core teaching staff at an elite Upper West Side elementary school has roiled parents who worry test prep is destroying the school's creative spirit. In July, close to half of the parents at the Special Music School signed a letter decrying the "apparent shift in school culture" and the new principal's leadership.  "This is not the same place it was three years ago," said a 3rd-grade parent, who like most interviewed, asked to remain anonymous for fear of negative repercussions for their children. "There's a lot of talk about data and test prep, and I didn't used to hear that." The school, which until recently was a program at PS 199, provides an almost private-school like experience for musically gifted students who must audition in kindergarten and again in 5th grade for middle school.

Thanks to Darren Marelli, here are highlights from the hearing that occurred on Tuesday about the controversial proposal to co-locate another branch of the Success Academy charter chain in Cobble Hill, District 15, in Brooklyn.  Passionate and articulate parents, teachers, elected officials, students and community members spoke out against this damaging, deceptive and most probably illegal proposal, and pointed out how the co-location will likely wreck the schools that now inhabit the building, one of which is in transformation, by overcrowding them, forcing them to increase class size and lose valuable programs.  Does the DOE care?  You be the judge.

Two education companies are in a battle over the right to provide testing items to the Florida Department of Education under a Race to the Top contract worth tens of millions of dollars. A subsidiary of McGraw-Hill, which is based in New York, filed a bid protest earlier this week to block a contract between the DOE and Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The filing with the Department of Administrative Hearings argues that the department used the wrong criteria in weighing the offers of McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the final round of bid consideration.

This article takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for such dismissals. With the cooperation of the CPS, I matched information on all teachers who were eligible for dismissal with records indicating which teachers were dismissed. With these data, I estimate the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics. I find evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

You'll often hear the argument that half or almost half of all beginning U.S. public school teachers leave the profession within five years. The implications of this statistic are, of course, that we are losing a huge proportion of our new teachers, creating a "revolving door" of sorts, with teachers constantly leaving the profession and having to be replaced. This is costly, both financially (it is expensive to recruit and train new teachers) and in terms of productivity (we are losing teachers before they reach their peak effectiveness). And this doesn't even include teachers who stay in the profession but switch schools and/or districts (i.e., teacher mobility).* Needless to say, some attrition is inevitable, and not all of it is necessarily harmful, Many new teachers, like all workers, leave (or are dismissed) because they are just aren't good at it - and, indeed, there is test-based evidence that novice leavers are, on average, less effective. But there are many other excellent teachers who exit due to working conditions or other negative factors that might be improved

Sunday, unseasonably warm and beautiful for late fall, I wandered coatless across Central Park to a meeting of the New York affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. Sol Stern was speaking on school reform-on his dashed hopes for the good that he once thought would come from No Child Left Behind and by the early promise of Mayor Bloomberg's push for higher standards. I knew Stern's work from having reviewed his 2004 book on school reform Breaking Free and was eager to hear him: a former leftist, once an editor of the radical Ramparts magazine, who turned conservative largely as a result of his encounter with the union-dominated New York City public schools.

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.

Here is Ellen McHugh's account of the controversial Cobble Hill charter co-location hearing, more description and video of which is here.  Ellen is head of Parent to Parent - NYS, and a member of the Citywide Council for Special Education

A proposed charter school is splitting the Williamsburg community in half, but while opponents turned out in force for a hearing Tuesday, the program is expected to be approved by the Panel for Educational Policy. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.

I work at one of the thirty-three PLA schools Mayor Bloomberg has publicly stated that he wants to close.  As part of this plan, he is also seeking to replace up to 50% of the teachers.  I have worked in the same school for the past nine years.  I can dismiss the sensationalistic claim from Mayor Bloomberg that 50% of teachers are ineffective, because it is simply not true.  Likewise, when I hear defenders of educators claim that all teachers do great work, I know this is not correct either.  The answer lies somewhere in between-in this case, much closer to the defenders of teachers. 

State Education Commissioner John King spent most of his time before legislators today going to bat for Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed schools budget. But on one key point, he said the Board of Regents would prefer a change. The Regents would rather not hinge so much of the state's funds on a competition among districts, King said. Cuomo proposed using $250 million of a proposed $800 million school aid increase to reward districts for strong academic performance and management efficiency. King said the Regents, whose agenda is similar but not identical to Cuomo's, would slash that number by 80 percent. They would still hand out $50 million through a competition but think the remaining $200 million would be better used helping high-needs districts cover their expenses, he said.