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This morning, the New York Times carried a column by Nicholas Kristof talking about the import of the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff paper; later, Kevin Carey wrote a blog entry telling us what to think about the study.1 To be honest, I'm shocked it took more than half a week for folks to use Friday's Times story by Annie Lowrey as a springboard for public policy discussions. Maybe the quick responses by Bruce Baker and Matthew Di Carlo played a role in delaying the inevitable.2 What was most surprising about the Kristof column is not that he bought the weakest part of the paper as a shiny bright object (as did Carey) but that he first cited (and linked to) Di Carlo's comments and then entirely ignored Di Carlo's cautions about the extrapolatory analysis on young-adult effects.

"Ultimately, as more states pass charter school amendments like Georgia, and money is sucked out of public schools, then public schools will meet the same fate as the rest of the ghettoized public institutions in America. Public education will be just like public housing, which most Americans think of as low-income, crime-ridden neighborhoods. Or it will be like public hospitals, which most Americans see as disease-ridden institutions filled with impoverished, sick people. Because, in both cases, these institutions principally serve the very poor, there's little sympathy for Americans stuck in public housing or public hospitals.  Little sympathy also translates into little funding, which perpetuates the cycle of poverty and the disintegration of our public institutions.  "

"In response to my post, "What Happens when Profits Drive Reform?" Tom Segal has written a full-throated defense of the profit-seeking enterprises in the education sector. I think he overstates their value, and brushes aside legitimate concerns about the dangers our public schools face."

At a time when government budgets at all levels are under enormous strain, families and businesses are struggling and federal agencies are facing dramatic across-the-board spending cuts, you would think lawmakers would be careful about spending public money. So it may surprise you to learn that in a growing number of states, legislators are setting aside public money to pay for private school tuition - and rich people are benefiting.

"For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation's education system. What's less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called "school choice" movement - code words for privatizing our public education system - are billionaires who don't live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week's LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg. For more than a decade, however, one of the biggest of the billionaire interlopers has been the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who have poured millions into a privatization-oriented, ideological campaign to make LA a laboratory for their ideas about treating schools like for-profit businesses, and treating parents, students and teachers like cogs in what they must think are education big-box retail stores."

"Editor's note: The author of this piece is an urban high school teacher who is writing under a pseudonym in order to protect the privacy of his students and his colleagues. Since I'm a public school teacher, everybody always asks me what I think about charter schools. They usually ask it with a certain expression, their eyes alert and their head poised at an angle, as if they are readying themselves for an explosion, or at least a case of spontaneous combustion. I usually respond with some variation of this: It's complicated. You got an hour?"

"Here's a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer. What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially."

NCLB's fixation on testing has sabotaged the law's noble intention. Schools have become focused on compliance rather than on innovation and achievement. We've become obsessed with hitting test-score targets and sanctioning schools and educators; instead, we should be focused on improving teaching and learning. We've narrowed the curriculum; instead we should be paving a path to critical thinking and problem solving -- the very kinds of knowledge and skills our children need to be well-educated and to compete in today's global economy.

Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.

Theories are like maps, the authors argue. They are "useful in helping us get somewhere." "Rather than attempt to imitate the hard sciences, social scientists would be ... doing what they do best: thinking deeply about what prompts human beings to behave the way they do." This includes gathering data-anecdotes, myths, and other such "soft" insights along with the so-called "hard" ones. It means including direct data, not just indirect test data which we hope "correlates" with reality." It means acknowledging tradeoffs: Do life, liberty, and happiness sometimes clash? Of course, this kind of "soft science" leads to less certainty. But less certainty where certainty doesn't exist is a good thing. One reason we need to stick with even flawed forms of democracy is that there isn't any flawless form! Every form of voting, for example, rests on a bias about whom and what is more important. Anyone studying the gerrymandering of districts in New York state notes that the latest plan makes it likely that a majority of voters will be "out-voted" by a minority when it comes to our state's legislative bodies. Our Constitution rests on similar "gerrymandering"-some voters count more than others.

Class Warfare:  Inside the fight to Fix America's Schools, Steven Brill's ethically challenged, error ridden, incoherent yet highly illuminating love letter to the corporate education reformers bent on privatizing public education, is an extraordinary and illuminating document and one that, in a sane world, could easily serve as an indictment against the very process and people it was written to lionize. Perhaps, in time, that day will come. Perhaps, indeed, it is closer than we think. In the main, Class Warfare tells the tragic and true story of how a handful of extraordinarily wealthy and ruthless private citizens in league with their corporate and political allies have been able to undermine the democratic process in order to try to remake the public school system in their image:  that is to say, to remake it as another cog in the wheel of the ever more destructive unregulated free market which has brought the globe to the brink of chaos and profited no one but  themselves.

If somebody told me, 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them, and devoting every ounce of teachers energies to raising their test scores, I would have said "what planet are you living on?." Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and which created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less doing their homework , that people living in middle class communities couldn't imagine. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors as well as people imparting skills, and at times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components. Now, such thinking is considered a form of educational heresy.

Those who think that there is too much pressure to "teach to the test" find this time of year to be infuriating. Schools typically cease to focus on their regular curriculum and begin to prepare their students for these venerated exams. Laura Klein Some schools stop all social studies and science classes, as well as gym, art and enrichment activities, so they can spend all day on test prep in Math and English. This overhaul of the curriculum is extreme, but not unique. Unfortunately, for the students, it sends a larger signal that learning for the year is just about done.

y daughter and I were swimming in my pond one sunny summer day, and I said, "This is the best pond in the world." My daughter responded (sharply): "Why must it be the best? Can't it just be a wonderful pond?" I was actually slightly miffed, but she had a point. We are (or I am?) so accustomed to assuming that praise has to include a comparative term that it rolls out without thinking. It's not a wholly silly notion, but we've taken it to such extremes that I find my daughter's chiding words even wiser today than I did that summer day. Whatever the cause of this bad habit, both child-rearing and schooling have swallowed it whole. Everything is a "race," a "competition;" everyone and everything is rank ordered. We forget that no matter how "we" improve there are always exactly the same number of kids in the front of the line as at the end of the line-and every place in between. Ditto for individuals, schools, and nations! The "who" can change, but everyone cannot be in the top half. If the bottom moves up, who takes their place?

Last Friday, Michelle Rhee was on Brian Lehrer's radio show. The segment, unsurprisingly, is a textbook example of the incoherence of the corporate reform movement. I'll have more to say about the rest of the interview later, but for now, I want to focus in on a remarkable passage, starting at 18:19. I have transcribed it in its entirety because I think it needs to go on Rhee's permanent record (all emphasis mine)

Perhaps most importantly, one of the best ways to improve public education would be to work to alleviate those factors beyond teachers' control that affect students' ability to learn. They are some of the same factors that lead to Louisiana's dismal Kids COUNT rating-unemployment, poverty, violence, crime rates, family instability, childhood hunger, access to health care. No, no, and no, according to the politicians. What do teachers know about education, anyway? Public-school teachers, according to most of the Senate members who testified, are obviously part of the problem, not the solution, so it's better to follow noneducators' recommendations when improving schools. The philosophies behind the legislation passed last week echo the pro-charter, pro-private philosophies of distinctly non-local figures as diverse as the anti-union former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (who now finds her former district embroiled in a cheating scandal), the deep-pocket GOP puppetmasters the Koch Brothers and, most significantly, the American Legislative Exchange Council. (ALEC, a conservative think tank that prizes small government and free markets, hosts large meetings at which it gives politicians dummy legislation that they can personalize and file in their home states; its influence is clear in some of Louisiana's education bills.) Similar legislation has been proposed in other states across the country, particularly in legislatures that, like Louisiana's, are overwhelmingly Republican, and teachers and others with an interest in public education would do well to pay attention to what's going on here.

The New York State tests, going on now in middle and elementary schools, have always been high stakes for students, particularly in fourth and seventh grades, when their scores determine whether they end up in the very awful school they are zoned for or the very attractive magnet school that draws from a larger and more competitive pool. But the stakes have recently become equally high for teachers, whose ability to teach is being determined by their ability to improve students' test scores. Many people think it's about time. Teachers need to be held accountable for the work they are being paid to do, and many, many teachers need to get better at teaching. But tying teacher performance to student test scores is having an opposite effect: It's producing worse teachers.

Over the last several weeks, in light of all the standardized testing taking place in the state of New York, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the ideas of assessment and testing and how important they are in the world of public education. In New York State we have reached a point where our children are sitting for at least 6 days of standardized testing in grades 3, 4 and 5 in the areas of English Language Arts and Mathematics. As if that weren't enough, the results from these tests will serve as the proverbial rock thrown into the middle of a placid lake on a beautiful spring day. We all know what happens next because we've seen it - the pond fills with ripples and the rock disappears. These ripples represent our children, their families, our classroom teachers, fellow building principals, schools as a whole and our communities at large. Everyone, at least in the state of New York, will be impacted and judged based on the results of these various standardized tests.

Over the last decade, research in public education has led us to three conclusions about the teaching profession: teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student achievement; there is wide variation in teacher effectiveness; and those differences really matter for kids. These findings should have profound implications for policymakers and practitioners. Now that we have evidence attesting to the enormous contributions of the most effective educators, if we are truly serious about improving student learning and closing the achievement gap, we must think anew about teacher recruitment, placement, evaluation, professional development, retention, and separation.

This piece was inspired by a heated discussion I had with a man who believes that teachers have an easy job. Please feel free to share it with others if you agree with the message.