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Two state education officials, expected to play a key role in the future of the city's school system, share a common background with MBAs and ties to a Los Angeles-based foundation. One more similarity: Camden's school board has rebuffed initial requests from their reform programs. Bing Howell and Rochelle Sinclair are assigned to state Department of Education programs - Hope Act Schools and Regional Achievement Centers - that are intended to upgrade the performance of Camden's school system. Both are fellows of the Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to improve urban schools through "better governance, management, labor relations and competition."

Public education is by necessity an extension of our political system, resulting in schools being reduced to vehicles for implementing political mandates. For example, during the past thirty years, education has become federalized through indirect ("A Nation at Risk" spurring state-based accountability systems) and direct (No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top) dynamics. As government policy and practice, bureaucracy is unavoidable, but the central flaw with the need for structure and hierarchy is that politics prefers leadership characteristics above expertise. No politician can possibly have the expertise and experience needed in all the many areas a leader must address (notably in roles such as governor and president). But during the accountability era in education over the past three decade, the direct role of governors and presidents related to education has increased dramatically-often with education as a central plank in the campaigns and administrations of governors and presidents. One distinct flaw in that development has been a trickle-down effect reaching from presidents and governors to state superintendents of education as well as school board chairs and members: People attaining leadership positions that form and implement education policy have no or very little experience or expertise as educators or scholars.

…Directly Publicly Subsidized, Limited Public Access, Publicly or Privately Authorized, Publicly or Privately Governed, Managed and Operated Schools

In many ways the for-profit edu-corporations and their not-for-profit allies resemble a giant octopus with tentacles reaching into every facet of public education in the United States. I am reminded of the book The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris that detailed the way railroads at the start of the 19th century controlled every facet of business and individual life. There is also a famous political cartoon from 1904 that portrays the Standard Oil monopoly as a giant octopus controlling state and national governments. This giant octopus is strangling public education in both blatant and subtle ways. For example, on the surface the 2000 and 2003 editions of the popular middle school United States history book The American Nation barely differ. Both editions list the publisher as Prentice-Hall in association with American Heritage magazine. However, in the 2003 edition Prentice-Hall was listed as a sub-division of Pearson.

The single greatest bi-partisan success of NCLB, the argument has been, is that the federal government began forcing all schools to address the achievement gaps among subgroups of students, impacting significantly how schools identified, tested, and displayed test data related to English language learners, African American students, and special needs students. Here, though, the use of the term "achievement gap" has never been challenged or examined for what agenda it fulfills or how it positions our entire national view of students, teachers, and schools.

Education reform does not suffer from lack of energy or activity. Everywhere you look-Congress, state legislatures, local school boards, wherever-scores of eager-beavers are filing bills, proposing solutions, calling for change, and otherwise trying to "push the ball forward." Yet for all the effort, for all the pain, we see little gain. What gives? The conventional answer, in most reform circles, comes down to: "the opposition of special interests." Teachers unions, school administrators, colleges of education, textbook publishers, and other defenders (and beneficiaries) of the status quo fight change at every step and guard their selfish prerogatives jealously. That may all be true, but our challenges are much more fundamental. It's not that the wrong people are in charge. It's that there are so many cooks in the education kitchen that nobody is really in charge. And that is a consequence of an antiquated governance structure that practically forces all those cooks to enter and remain in the kitchen.

In its report, The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticizes local urban governance structures and presents the decentralized, charter-school-driven Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans as a successful model for fiscal and academic performance. Reviewing the report for the Think Twice think tank review project, Kristen Buras of Georgia State University writes that the report ignores the distinctive history of New Orleans and fails to provide evidence for its claims. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled "education reform movement." As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They've gone political as never before-like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers' unions.

Anyone who wants to start a charter school must of course receive permission, and there are laws and policies governing how such permission is granted. In some states, multiple entities (mostly districts) serve as charter authorizers, whereas in others, there is only one or very few. For example, in California there are almost 300 entities that can authorize schools, almost all of them school districts. In contrast, in Arizona, a state board makes all the decisions. The conventional wisdom among many charter advocates is that the performance of charter schools depends a great deal on the "quality" of authorization policies - how those who grant (or don't renew) charters make their decisions. This is often the response when supporters are confronted with the fact that charter results are varied but tend to be, on average, no better or worse than those of regular public schools. They argue that some authorization policies are better than others, i.e., bad processes allow some poorly-designed schools start, while failing to close others. This argument makes sense on the surface, but there seems to be scant evidence on whether and how authorization policies influence charter performance. From that perspective, the authorizer argument might seem a bit like tautology - i.e., there are bad schools because authorizers allow bad schools to open, and fail to close them. As I am not particularly well-versed in this area, I thought I would look into this a little bit.

A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production. In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government--none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

This report takes a closer look at the powerful forces behind the Committee and their playbook for "saving" New York. The Committee's backers are primarily big business interests, billionaires, and other leading lights of New York State's "one percent." They played a key role in crashing New York's economy through their own style of gambling, won billions in government bailouts, but now insist on "fiscal responsibility" for the rest of the state. Though the Committee frames its agenda as altruistic and public-minded, its backers stand to profit substantially from the policies for which it advocates. These policy payoffs include not just casino gambling legalization, but pension reform, new and continued corporate tax loopholes, and favorable development policies.

According to Wikipedia, cost-benefit analysis "is a systematic process for calculating and comparing benefits and costs of a project, decision or government policy (hereafter, 'project'). CBA has two purposes: 1.To determine if it is a sound investment/decision (justification/feasibility), 2.To provide a basis for comparing projects. It involves comparing the total expected cost of each option against the total expected benefits, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and by how much." I believe that it would be prudent to apply this process to the current accountability movement now being administered in public education, primarily in the form of testing mandates such as No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top.

"In 1954 the Supreme Court declared that public education is "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education stood for the proposition that the federal government would no longer allow states and municipalities to deny equal educational opportunity to a historically oppressed racial minority. Ruling unanimously, the justices overturned the noxious concept that "separate" education could ever be "equal." Yet today, nearly 60 years later, our schools remain separate and unequal. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are nonwhite. The average white student attends a school where 77 percent of his or her peers are also white. Schools today are "as segregated as they were in the 1960s before busing began." We are living in a world in which schools are patently separate."

"It has been difficult to discern what specific details are left on the table in the Chicago teachers' negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents Mayor Rahm Emanuel's enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should teachers be judged by their students' test scores, as opposed to by more holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level of government are strapped? I'm not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in perspective. The modern teachers' union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and many of the problems back then -- from low school budgets to testing to debates over classroom autonomy -- remain more than salient today."

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.

NCTQ has made some big changes to our TR3 database, where you can compare the local policies and state laws governing teachers in over 100 school districts in the United States.  This database allows you to compare districts on almost any factor that affects teachers. We've pulled this data from state laws, teachers' contracts, school board policies, school calendars, salary schedules, and teacher evaluation handbooks and more. We've sorted through thousands of documents so you don't have to.

Maybe we can all agree on a basic starting point: no one is perfect, and every individual and organization should strive for growth and improvement. To go a step further, perhaps we can all agree that it is our shared responsibility to monitor public institutions - including schools, school districts, state and federal governments - and hold them to high standards. What happens when we fall short?  Or when "they" fall short?  How do we respond?  What do we want to see happen?  Too often in this culture, I think we assign blame.  Someone must be held accountable - and if it wasn't my job, then I certainly can't be blamed for the results.  By shaming or punishing those responsible, we feel like we've done our job as monitors or guardians of whatever values we uphold and whatever institutions have let us down.  It feels good, doesn't it - seeing the scandal hit home, the lies revealed, the hypocrites exposed, the inept upbraided and the corrupt brought low?

Long governed largely by inertia and school convention, teacher evaluation has recently become a focal point of education reform. Many states, under prodding from the federal Race to the Top program, have begun to implement new, comprehensive evaluation systems that incorporate student test-score data and more rigorous observation protocols. School systems are also working to tie evaluation results more closely to teachers' tenure status and professional advancement.

The American Federation of Teachers, vilified by critics as an obstacle to school reform, is leading an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system in a place where deprivation is layered on heartache. The AFT, which typically represents teachers in urban settings, wants to improve education deep in the heart of Appalachia by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County. The union has gathered about 40 partners, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, IBM, Save the Children, foundations, utility companies, housing specialists, community colleges, and state and federal governments, which have committed to a five-year plan to try to lift McDowell out of its depths.