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Last night's meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy meeting was exhilarating, stirring, and depressing all at once.   Over a thousand parents, teachers, and striking Verizon workers showed up for the pre-meeting rally, and hundreds more filled the auditorium afterwards at Murry Bergtraum HS, chanting, booing Walcott and the DOE, and speaking up passionately for the need for more caring education priorities, and against the $120 million Verizon contract, which will steal even more resources from our children and the company's workers.

Michele Bachmann's victory in the Iowa straw poll Saturday represents many obvious things: the mainstreaming of the Tea Party, the overnight ordinariness of female presidential candidates, the increasing irrelevance of also-ran moderates like Jon Huntsman. But her growing popularity among the Republican base also signals something that's been less widely acknowledged: a sea change in the party's education agenda. It's safe to say that the political era of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind is now officially over, even as the law's testing mandates continue to reverberate in classrooms across the country.

In a motion filed just after noon today in Superior Court of Newark, the ACLU of New Jersey announced it is suing Newark, accusing the city of violating numerous OPRA regulations and demanding the release of all correspondence between Zuckerberg, Booker, Gov. Chris Christie, and Acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf surrounding the September 2010 donation.

With a daughter entering the seventh grade, Noemi Gonsalez dreams of her child's college years. She said her best hope is with a proposed mayoral academy for Providence and Cranston students.

Nearly 780 employees of the New York City Education Department will lose their jobs by October, in the largest single-agency layoff since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in 2002.

There's no question that NCLB and RttT have marked an unprecedented level of federal involvement in education. In response to the sweeping and unproven reforms that these laws have brought to our nation's schools, there is an increasing call for the federal government to stay out of what has traditionally been regarded as a local issue.

Below is an update sent to Manhattan Community Education Councils this morning

It is unfortunate that the day after a court decision held that NY teachers should be evaluated by use of multiple assessments, with student scores on state standardized tests only one minor factor, today, the appellate court said that the DOE could release the teacher data reports to the public, based only on these same test scores. 

The American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and American Enterprise Insitute Education Policy Director Frederick Hess debated reforms affecting teachers.

Response to intervention, or RTI, is a strategy that involves identifying students' learning problems quickly and using a series of focused lessons, or interventions, to address those problems before they become entrenched. The intensity of the interventions increase if a student doesn't respond. In this survey, full implementation of RTI involved universal screening of students at least three times a year, the use of clear decision rules to move students between tiers of instruction, and regular monitoring of students' progress based on their learning needs.

Sometimes it seemed like a slick oilman or salesman was hovering around the room. Yes, he is personable, but personality does not resolve issues affecting the masses and the middle class if a genuine intent to do the right thing is absent.

As charter schools play an increasingly central role in education reform agendas across the United States, it becomes more important to have current and comprehensible analysis about how well they do educating their students. Thanks to progress in student data systemsand regular student achievement testing, it is possible to examine student learning in charter schools and compare it to the experience the students would have had in the traditional public schools (TPS) they would otherwise have attended. This report presents a longitudinalstudent-level analysis of charter school impacts on more than 70 percent of the students in charter schools in the United States. The scope of the study makes it the first national assessment of charter school impacts.

I gotta admit that my favorite part of the Third Way memo responding to my critique of their "Middle Class" report is the end of the memo.

Video of remarks at AEI.

I've posted a few blogs recently on the topic of Student Growth Percentile Scores, or SGPs and how many state policymakers have moved to adopt these measures and integrate them into new evaluation systems for teachers. In my first post, I argued that SGPs are simply not designed to make inferences about teacher effectiveness.

Imagine trying to determine international rankings for tennis players or soccer teams entirely by a) determining how they rank relative to the average team or player in their country, then b) having only the average team or player from each country play each other in a tournament, then c) estimating how the top teams would rank when compared with each other based only on how their country's average teams did when they played each other and how much better we think the individual teams or players are when compared to the average team or player in their country? Probably not that precise or even accurate, ya' think?

My friends (a group with a disproportionately large percentage of teachers) are neatly divided into two camps: the folks who thought last year's Education Nation was such a smarmy, hyped-up caricature of "journalism" that they're avoiding the whole thing in favor of grading papers or watching baseball--and those who are watching, hoping fervently that NBC will have learned something from their heartfelt complaints / letters / tweets / blogs. Call them education's jaded pessimists and earnest optimists.

Privatization of Michigan's public education system is a "very real" threat,  and a change that could make education about the bottom line versus what's best for students, a state lawmaker said Monday at town-hall forum held in Kalamazoo.

Arlene Ackerman's $905,000 settlement with the Philadelphia district grabbed headlines, but she isn't the only Pennsylvania superintendent who has been shown the door in recent months with a generous settlement in hand.