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In the past, administrators often looked the other way when students skipped out a few days short of the year's final dismissal. Some still do. But these days, with numbers holding so much power over the fates of schools and their leaders, some principals are counting heads. They know that empty seats, even in the waning days of the school year, can lower their average attendance rates and shave points off their annual progress reports issued by the city.

...Thus explains how Nauiokas became principal at the Haven Academy Charter School, where a third of students are in foster care. Another third are in families receiving preventive services to diminish the need for foster care. The rest are from the Mott Haven community, which is in a Congressional district where a soaring poverty rate keeps a third of residents on public assistance.

Basically, almost everything that market-based reformers think needs to happen has been the reality in DCPS for the past 2-3 years. And the staff  has been transformed too. The majority of principals, and a huge proportion of teachers, were hired during the tenure of either Michelle Rhee or her successor, Kaya Henderson. The district should be in overdrive right about now. Is it?

A fund called The Michael R. Bloomberg Revocable Trust, of which the principal trustee is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, donated $100,000 to a Baton Rouge-based political action committee just days before a pivotal Louisiana election that decided the make-up of the state's main K-12 board of education. The PAC in question, Alliance for Better Classrooms, spent at least $300,000 in contributions on behalf of generally pro-charter, anti-teacher-tenure and anti-union candidates running for positions on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.

With approximately 500 tax-exempt bond transactions completed to date, the charter school sector of the municipal market continues to gain size and momentum and has emerged as much more than a fragmented niche for high yield investors. The growth rate in the number of charter schools across the country - now exceeding 5,000 - is expected to increase due to the heightened focus that policymakers at all levels of government have placed on results-driven education reform. This growth will generate greater charter school demand for affordable facility financing, a demand that is well met by the tax-exempt bond market with its tax-exempt interest rates and longer principal repayment periods. To date, however, fewer than 8% of charter schools have accessed the market for their permanent facility financing needs.

Released in August, the U.S. Department of Education study mapping state proficiency standards onto the National Assessment of Educational Progress scales produced a remarkable statement from Joanne Weiss, the chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. According to an article in the Aug. 24 issue of Education Week, Weiss said the practice of permitting each state to set its own proficiency standards amounts to "lying to parents, lying to children, lying to teachers and principals about the work they're doing." Her intemperate outburst crosses the line, not only by the standards of what passes for civil discourse in Washington these days, but also for what it says about the assessment itself. Indeed, a plausible case can be made that when it comes to telling fibs about proficiency, NAEP has a nose that annually grows longer, for its definition of proficiency is seriously flawed.

"This is the executive summary of the statement of the American Statistical Association on the use of value-added assessment to evaluate teachers. Please share it with other teachers, with principals, and school board members. Please share it with your legislators and other elected officials. Send it to your local news outlets. The words are clear: Teachers account for between 1 and 14% of the variation in test scores. And this is very important to remember: "Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.""

"New York officials recently released the results of the state's 2014 Common Core State Standards-aligned exams. In this post information award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School  in the Rockville Centre School District, explains what they mean. Burris has been writing about problems with the controversial school reform efforts in her state for some time on this blog. "

"On Thursday, August 21, 2014, United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used his "Homeroom" blog to announce victory in his war on schools and teachers. After six years of decrying the inadequacy of education in the United States, Duncan "celebrated that "America's students have posted some unprecedented achievements in the last year." In addition, after battling against teacher tenure and seniority rights, Duncan decided, "we should celebrate America's teachers, principals, and students and their families.""

"But the biggest thing to keep in mind about these results is that most of the important lessons cannot be gleaned from the results alone. Perhaps the most important considerations is how teachers and other stakeholders (e.g., principals) respond to the system. For example, do teachers change their classroom practice based on the scores or feedback from observations? Do the ratings and feedback influence teachers' decisions to stay in the profession (or in their school/district)? How do these outcomes vary between districts using different measures or scoring? These are also questions that really matter, and they are not answerable in the short-term, and they certainly cannot be addressed looking at highly aggregate distributions across rating categories and imposing one's pre-existing beliefs on how they should turn out."

"Dani Lea, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University, believes that Teach for America (TFA) teachers in her high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, were detrimental to her learning experience and for those around her. Lea claimed that her principal didn't even know which teachers were members of TFA and which weren't. Upon hearing this, TFA co-CEO Matthew Kramer said, "That's not our lived experience." Lea responded, "That was my lived experience.""

"Over the last ten years, I have worked as a certified English teacher in a high school in Long Island, New York, a suburb of New York City.  I am in my seventeenth year working in public education.  I have taught various courses in four different school districts on Long Island that range from grades six to twelve.  Children and adolescents, whether they are school shooters or gangbangers, do not become violent without cause.  None of them were born violent. I tend to connect the rise in school violence in my suburban school district, 95% of which is African American and Hispanic, to the recent economic downturn and education policy insidiously devoted to teacher, principal and school evaluations tied to standardized testing of students.  These students have been exposed to school curriculum, said testing, and "raised" standards (Common Core) conceived by politicians, economists and billionaires, not professional and long-time education practitioners who would know much, much better how to make our public schools the envy of the world (again).  They have also been victimized by inflexible "zero tolerance" policies with mandatory minimum suspension periods, as well as increased in-school surveillance and security measures that prepare chocolate and caramel students much more for the realities of prison than they do a safe existence."

"Public school teachers and principals deserve fair treatment on important decisions about who should be retained and who should be fired. They should not be fired based on student test scores because the variation in student test scores is random. It is no more reliable than a coin toss. How wise would it be to fire doctors or lawyers based on a coin toss? Heads they stay. Tails they go. Imagine what this would do the moral of staff who had also most no control over whether they stayed or were fired. In this report, we will look at the scientific research (or lack of it) on using student test scores to evaluate teachers."

State Education Commissioner John King Jr., 36, took his post in June at a pivotal time for education in New York. King is overseeing the implementation of education reforms at a time when school districts, and his own department, are financially strapped. During an exclusive interview last Friday, Education Reporter Meghan E. Murphy asked King about the top issues facing the state today: from school funding disparities to criticisms regarding the state's teacher evaluation regulations.

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state's high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he'd make his scores public.

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city's most storied high schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind-part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three schools reflect some of the city's most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E. L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists-more than any other high school in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country's top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students. This spring and summer, however, more than a third of the school's social-studies department-eight of the twenty teachers-announced they wouldn't be returning for the 2011 school year. Their departure came after similar exoduses in other departments. In 2009, it was math; before that, English. In 2010, nearly a quarter of the teachers at Bronx Science had less than three years of experience; the corresponding numbers at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech were 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The reason for the seismic upheaval, virtually everyone agrees, is Valerie Reidy.

Minutes after Mayor Bloomberg finished delivering his State of the City address today, reactions started flying about his aggressive slate of education proposals. The reactions ranged from withering (in the case of UFT President Michael Mulgrew) to bewildered (Ernest Logan, principals union president) to supportive (charter school operator Eva Moskowitz and others whose organizations would benefit from the proposals). Below, I've compiled the complete set of education-related reactions that dropped into my inbox. I'll add to the list as more reactions roll in.

Commissioner King's decision to cut off funding to School Improvement Grant (SIG) districts will disrupt services to our neediest students and deprive their schools of millions in promised federal funding - in what appears to be an arbitrary exercise of brinksmanship. Instead of requesting a waiver for New York's SIG school districts to give them a reasonable extension of time to construct quality evaluations that support teacher development and growth in student learning, SED is using a blunt instrument - taking away funds that provide essential services for students in our neediest schools.