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U.S. public education: A race to the bottom? education Historian Diane Ravitch tells Christine Romans that the U.S. should learn from top-ranked education systems and stop focusing on student testing.

Ditch Testing (Part 5): Testing Has Not Improved Education The evidence is clear. Test-score cheating is not isolated to Atlanta, Baltimore, and a few other schools, as testing proponents tend to suggest. It is not a problem that can be fixed with technical measures such as tightened security. It may be human nature but it is the high and unreasonable pressure of high-stakes standardized testing that leads to corruption. Thus, we cannot minimize the problem, trivialize potential solutions, or blame a few educators who have been caught. The Atlanta scandal should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, especially to those who continue to promote testing as a necessary and effective way to improve Education.

A diverse group of over 60 educational leaders representing a variety of organizations, from academic institutions to state boards of education and from foundations to education providers, released an open letter today calling for the states and the assessment consortia designing the next generation of assessments aligned to the Common Core to move with all haste to deploy an assessment system that not only explicitly accommodates emerging models of innovative schooling, but also supports them.

Paul Tough, author of one of my favorite books about education (Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America), recently published two important essays on education reform. Tough usually writes for general audiences, transforming dry, wonky policyspeak into page-turners filled with rich characters. This time, Tough took a break from writing his upcoming book The Success Equation to pour some cold water on the overheated heads of education reformers.

The original Shanker conception of a public "charter school" was not ideological and political, but educational. In recent years, however, political ideologues opposed to public education and to teacher unions have sought to turn the charter school concept into its opposite, using it as a vehicle to privatize public education and undermine teacher voice and professionalism. To this end, these political ideologues divisively pit school against school, parent against parent, charter against district, using the politics of conflict. That we will always oppose, as educators and as citizens. Our democracy depends upon public schools, both district and charter, which unite us as Americans.

Since 2008, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, has financed free international trips - some have called them junkets - for education commissioners whose states do business with the company. When the state commissioners are asked about these trips - to Rio de Janeiro; London; Singapore; and Helsinki, Finland - they emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools.

Last week, a group of around 25 education advocacy organizations, including influential players such as Democrats for education Reform and The education Trust, released a "statement of principles" on the role of teacher quality in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary education Act (ESEA). The statement, which is addressed to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House committees handling the reauthorization, lays out some guidelines for teacher-focused policy in ESEA (a draft of the full legislation was released this week; summary here).

The Panel for Education Policy (or PEP), enacts policy for the New York City Dept. of Education. The PEP replaced the Board of Education when Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002. It is intended to be a democratic forum where people voice concerns, prior to the panel's vote on Educational policy. Today the panel is convening to discuss new standards being implemented in schools. 200 parents, teachers staff and students are in attendance.

"As the new year begins, I've been pondering what I might recommend as guiding principles for the path forward for education policy in New York City under its new Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is often referred to on Twitter as BDB. So here are my thoughts for the way forward, from one BDB (Bruce D. Baker) to another. Note that I had drafted much of this content last spring when convening with a group of scholars to discuss the path forward for NYC education policies. Not being as well versed in the specifics of NYC education policies, but having at least written academically about some, I kept my ideas broad, and applicable to many educational settings across the U.S."

""This is one of the big insights for me. I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn't seem to work in a choice environment for education. I've studied competitive markets for much of my career. That's my academic focus for my work. And it's [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn't work. I think it's not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed. Frankly parents have not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we've had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. I think we need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools, but I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.""

"Wayne Au, editor of Rethinking Schools and co-editor of Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools, writes of the book, Badass Teachers Unite: "In this powerful collection of essays, education activist and historian Mark Naison offers teachers, parents, students and anyone else concerned with the health of public schools in this country some invaluable tools in the fight against corporate education 'reform.' Badass Teachers Unite is a clarion call for all of us to reclaim public education in the name of social justice.""

"Education policymakers have successfully framed the language of modern school reform to reflect specific values - "accountability," for example, means standardized test-based accountability, and "no excuses" means that teachers are to blame if students don't do well. The author of the following post argues that to move past this limiting reform model supporters of public Education will have to reframe the debate with language that infuses their own values of shared responsibility and empathy.  This was written by Arthur H. Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J."

Today, the Schott Foundation, whose Board I am proud to chair, released the results of an analysis that they conducted on New York City schools, the nation's largest school system. The report, A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City, documents that in New York City student Education outcomes and their opportunity to learn are more determined by where they live than their abilities. In addition to documenting the problem, the report lays out solutions.

Few people define themselves as being a member of a special interest. That term applies to the folks on the other side -- the people you disagree with. New Yorkers got more evidence of that this month with the formation of StudentsFirstNY. In a nutshell, the group wants to preserve and extend the education policies of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and battle the teachers union, which has had an increasingly rancorous relationship with Bloomberg. In its mission statement, the group declares, StudentsFirstNY will be New York's leading voice for students who depend on public education for the skills they need to succeed, but who are too often failed by a system that puts special interests, rather than the interests of children, first. Nice sentiments. But the people behind this statement hardly qualify as disinterested observers anymore than the United Federation of Teachers does. The New York StudentsFirst group is an offshoot of the national organization StudentsFirst, created by former Washington, D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee. It includes many who have backed the Bloomberg administration's education policies over the years -- people who even their foes have come to call reformers. The name persists after 10 years of "reformers" running the city's schools and racking up a decidedly mixed record. Whatever they have or have not done for students in New York City and beyond, though, these policies have helped make some people rich and successful.

he race for City Hall starts in the classrooms Mayor Michael Bloomberg may not be running for reelection next year, but he will undoubtedly be playing a starring role in the race to replace him. The six Democrats expected to run next year are all supportive of the mayor's efforts to take control of the school system, but differ with Bloomberg on most everything else-whether it's school closures, co-locations with charter schools, relations with the teachers union or standardized test scores. So if next year's race is for the right to be the next education mayor, how do the candidates stack up? What are their qualifications, their accomplishments and their thoughts on some of the more controversial policies of the Bloomberg administration? David Bloomfield, a professor of education at CUNY and an expert on education policy in New York, was kind enough to offer his analysis of each candidate's qualifications.

A popular history of vouchers suggests that they are a "new" reform tool and a product of free market ideas. They captured national attention relatively recently when they were implemented in the Milwaukee and Cleveland schools in the early 1990s.  In 2002, the Supreme Court resolved the constitutional questions concerning Cleveland's voucher program. This history typically cites Milton Friedman as the intellectual father of vouchers. Not so fast, says Professor Jim Carl. The origins and purposes of vouchers in American education are closely tied to our social history, he argues. In Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American education, Carl skillfully traces the origins of vouchers back to the segregated South in the 1950s. In this context, they were used to combat desegregation post- Brown.  However, through their history, civil rights advocates, free market economists, and policy makers all have embraced vouchers, seeking solutions to urban education. In other words, vouchers have been pliable and appealed to different groups, for different reasons. But, importantly, they began as a product of a social agenda in the South.

Over more than 20 years in the field of education-including two with Teach For America-I have helped promote state standards, the Common Core, the hiring of teachers with strong content knowledge, longer class periods for math and reading, and extra support for struggling students, to name a few. I have recently discovered, however, that what I believe as an education policy wonk is not always what I believe as a father. I am incredibly fortunate that my two young daughters are ready learners who attend a high-functioning school. That said, I make the following confessions

Gov. Bobby Jindal has remade the Louisiana public schools system with impressive speed over the past legislative session. Last week, he signed into law a suite of landmark reform bills that will likely change the direction of public education in Louisiana forever. But not all change is good, and critics say both Jindal's agenda and the strategy to move it come right from the playbook of conservative advocacy group ALEC, in an effort to revive Jindal's national political profile. Louisiana is now home to the nation's most expansive school voucher program. Charter school authorization powers have been broadened. And teacher tenure policies have been radically transformed. Louisiana already had something of a reputation as a radical-reform state, thanks to the post-Katrina educational climate in New Orleans. But not all change is good, and education advocates have deep concerns about the efficacy of Jindal's overhaul, and the interests that have push it.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

University of Oregon professor Yong Zhao's 2009 book Catching Up or Leading the Way sent a jolt through our educational system. He questioned the use of tests and "accountability" from the unique perspective of someone educated in China, now living - and raising children - in the USA. His next book, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, is due out soon, so I asked him to share some thoughts about some current issues.