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Look at those numbers above. Think about how many of the Hispanic kids speak Spanish at home. Look at the economic statistics. Think about how this may affect test scores. Charter schools have freedom, all right - the freedom to exclude the most difficult-to-teach students from their rosters. This, apparently, is Christie's great new vision for schools: economic segregation.

In 1981, Chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend private school. As a result, more than 1000 private schools entered the market, and the private enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage points, with greater impacts in larger, more urban, and wealthier communities. We use this differential impact to measure the effects of unrestricted choice on educational outcomes. Using panel data for about 150 municipalities, we find no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores, repetition rates, and years of schooling. However, we find evidence that the voucher program led to increased sorting, as the "best" public school students left for the private sector.

Race to the Top is marketed as a "solution" for states and districts in search of reform.  The catch - as with all federal money - is the cash comes with strings that will continue the emphasis on high-stakes testing and the top-down management theories that were the basis of No Child Left Behind. The U.S. Education Department wants teacher evaluations tied to student test scores regardless of how it is done, and they want it done quickly.  Asked about the lack of research during a presentation to school administrators from Georgia, Education Department Assistant Superintendent Teresa MacCartney replied, "We are hoping the research will catch up with us in a few years."  I admire her optimism, but deplore the fact that $400 million will be spent on the development and integration of a teacher evaluation method with no evidence whatsoever to support a positive effect on student achievement.  That's not a string; it's a rope.

During the current tumultuous debate on determining which teachers must be fired for incompetence, the New York City and State teachers' unions are fiercely resisting the insistence of Governor Cuomo (now a self-declared lobbyist for students) and Mayor Bloomberg (always a lobbyist for himself) that a significant measuring base for teacher competence is student test scores. Indeed, the ultimate decider, the boss-State Education Commissioner John King-has decreed, no matter what compromises are achieved, "teachers whose students don't improve on standardized tests are prohibited from receiving good ratings."</> So, there will be no input from students with long-range direct knowledge of their teachers.

Unlike many of my colleagues and friends, I personally support the use of standardized testing results in education policy, even, with caution and in a limited role, in high-stakes decisions. That said, I also think that the focus on test scores has gone way too far and their use is being implemented unwisely, in many cases to a degree at which I believe the policies will not only fail to generate improvement, but may even risk harm. In addition, of course, tests have a very productive low-stakes role to play on the ground - for example, when teachers and administrators use the results for diagnosis and to inform instruction. Frankly, I would be a lot more comfortable with the role of testing data - whether in policy, on the ground, or in our public discourse - but for the relentless flow of misinterpretation from both supporters and opponents. In my experience (which I acknowledge may not be representative of reality), by far the most common mistake is the conflation of student and school performance, as measured by testing results.

Disruption as a goal is not a positive one for education. I don't care what kind of school they're in, kids and their families, especially those with enough disruption, crisis, and loss in their lives already, shouldn't be forced to play musical schools to the tune of "Get Those Test Scores Up." If that's our idea of reforming education, we're in big trouble.

Plenty of school reformers say that if 5 to 10 percent of teachers in the United States are fired each year, then U.S. standardized test scores would compete with the top-achieving nations. It's not true, but that doesn't stop them from saying it. Well, now we learn that teachers are no longer the only professionals who are being targeted for wholesale firing. Here's the lead "story" from the new spring edition of a satirical Onion-esque publication designed for those of us who religiously follow education policy and choose to laugh rather than cry about it. The publication is called Education Tweak and it's anonymously authored and published. The latest issue is the 20th; this and all the back issues are available at edtweak.com.

The state's private-school voucher program in New Orleans -- the test case for Gov. Bobby Jindal's new statewide voucher push -- has yet to produce enough raw data to show whether it is really boosting student achievement. The governor's office is backing the voucher idea with figures that appear to show impressive test results for New Orleans students who get state aid to pay private school tuition. But in truth, limited test-score data and the lack of comparable public school numbers make the program's effectiveness almost impossible to judge, according to some of the country's leading number-crunchers in the education field. At best, state data offer only a snapshot of how those students are doing, and even then results are mixed.

I have a theory: in recent times, parents are too time-crunched to advocate vigorously on behalf of public schooling. They are too consumed with working for a paycheck and/or volunteering at the school, plus doing the actual childrearing and chauffeuring of nondriving children. The recession has only worsened the situation and pushed women to the breaking point. Into the vacuum created by their absence in the public sphere rushes all sorts of nonsense, from greedy Big Ed (as with Big Pharma or Big Ag, corporations that are happy to soak up federal dollars) to the latest research trend. On top of that, let's name what's really going on: it's mostly women (moms) who volunteer at the school in the PTA, on fundraising committees, or as boosters for sports and other activities. And it's mostly women (many of them also moms!) who are teachers and have recently been blamed for poor student test scores, however inadvertently, through the film "Waiting For 'Superman'". Add in the time-poverty and I say there are gender politics that subtly and powerfully undercut true education reform in several major ways

South Side High School Principal Dr. Carol Burris has co-authored a letter, signed by two thirds of Long Island's public school principals and a growing number of educators from across New York state, asking state education Commissioner John B. King Jr. and the Board of Regents to delay and change a new teacher evaluation plan that links educator ratings to student test scores. The letter, co-authored with Sean Feeney of The Wheatley School and sent on Nov. 2, urges the state to use school-wide achievement results in evaluating teachers and principals, pilot and adjust the system before implementing it on a large scale and use performance "bands" - not numbers - to rate education professionals.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) just released a "fact sheet" on value-added (VA) analysis. I'm all for efforts to clarify complex topics such as VA, and, without question, there is a great deal of misinformation floating around on this subject, both "pro-" and "anti-." The fact sheet presents five sets of "myths and facts." Three of the "myths" seem somewhat unnecessary: that there's no research behind VA; that teachers will be evaluated based solely on test scores; and that VA is useless because it's not perfect. Almost nobody believes or makes these arguments (at least in my experience). But I guess it never hurts to clarify. In contrast, the other two are very common arguments, but they are not myths. They are serious issues with concrete policy implications. If there are any myths, they're in the "facts" column.

A new national study on the effectiveness of the networks that operate charter schools finds that their students' test scores in math, science, and social studies improve after they have spent a year or two at the school, but not by much. Overall, the report out today finds that middle school student achievement varies widely at schools run by charter-management organizations, which are the groups that establish and operate multiple charter schools. Most networks seem to produce a positive effect on student achievement, compared with results for students in district-run schools in the same area that are not run by CMOs. Some actually have a negative effect. The overall impact, however, tends not to be statistically significant, according to the report by from Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

Perhaps the most controversial issue in Ed Reform is whether or not it is fair to tie teacher evaluation to their 'performance' as defined by reformers as how their students do on standardized exams.  Since even reformers acknowledge that teachers aren't able to take students from a low starting score to any absolute target of high performance, they have devised something that is intended to be fair.  It is known as 'value-added.' The idea, which has been around for about 30 years, is that there could be a way to compare how a teacher's students do on some test with how those same students would have done in a parallel universe where they had an 'average' teacher instead.  If it is possible to make such a measurement, it would determine that teacher's individual contribution to his student's 'learning.' To someone who is not a teacher, this sounds reasonable enough.  When you've spent time in schools, though, you know some of the basic problems with standardized tests.

Nearly 40 years have passed since the Fiscal Crisis budget cuts and our public schools now face a challenge more insidious and perhaps, more formidable. All across the nation, a poisonous coalition of multi billionaire business leaders, test and technology companies, charitable foundations and elected officials are pushing a nationwide education agenda that involves the introduction of high stakes testing at all grade levels, evaluation of teachers and schools based on student test scores, and the introduction of "competition" into public education by the creation of independently managed charter schools given special advantages in funding and recruitment.

As a recent graduate of a New Orleans public high school, I find it very troubling that the national conversation about post-Katrina education amounts to little more than talking points about charter schools and test scores. The most telling indication of how we're doing in the classroom actually comes from a youth-led research project showing the hard realities students continue to face every day. As New Orleans moves to become the first all-charter district in the country, students here must be heard.

Today the NY Charter Schools Association sent a letter to the state's charter schools, rejecting the demand from the State Education Department that they provide information that can link teachers to student test score to enable the creation of a statewide data system designed to evaluate teacher effectiveness.

Scores of public school principals in New York are fighting the state's new educator evaluation system, which ties the evaluations and pay of teachers and principals to how well students do on standardized tests.

There's a fascinating and very worthwhile teacher quality debate that's happening in the blogosphere right now (see Rotherham versus Weingarten and Hanushek versus Ravitch). Hanushek suggests, based on economic analyses of student test score data, that up to 400,000 teachers (up to 10% of a 4-million-person workforce) should be fired. That number is scary and high for anyone who has many individual teachers in their lives whom they care about.

As I travel the country, I am frequently asked to identify an urban district where public education is working. My first impulse is to say that public schools everywhere have been hemmed in and harmed by the mandates of No Child Left Behind; one has to look far and wide for an urban district that has managed to sustain a vision of good education, untainted by the federal law's pressure to produce higher test scores every year.

The New York State Board of Regents recently decided to change grading regulations to ban teachers from scoring their own students' state exams. They said it was to prevent cheating. To any outsider, this seems like a simple decision. However, like too many educational decisions, it is actually a reactionary decision to a relatively small problem that will hurt a large number of students.