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The Oregon House again postponed a debate and vote on House Bill 2287, which modifies the state charter school law to give developers more rights to appeals and longer contracts.

For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the "pilot district" for charters) and in the "Ohio 8" urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a "challenged district," as measured by whether the district received a state "report card" rating of "academic watch" or "academic emergency." This is a performance-based standard.

Now another Michigan lawmaker has doubled down on the GOP attack on public school teachers. In an interview with the Gongwer News Service, state Sen. Randy Richardville, the majority leader, slammed the MEA-the state's main teachers' union-as focused on "big-paid, high-honcho people." Then he claimed that teachers are "more than greedy," presumably for demanding health insurance, retirement benefits, and modest increases in their even more modest salaries. (The average teacher in Michigan made $54,088 a year in 2009, the highest in the nation.)

Note: This is a continuation of the last post, so be sure to read that one first.

The abrupt departure of John Covington from his post as superintendent of Kansas City, Missouri's schools reveals how interpersonal disputes between school board members can get between strategic plans and the children they're meant to serve.

The beliefs of star teachers are compared with those of quitter/failures. Twelve of these beliefs are explained, and examples are given of how they are demonstrated in terms of actual teacher practices. The argument is presented that the strength of these belief systems makes teacher selection more important than training.

Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, we recorded over 50 hours of testimony from students and parents, and administered a survey project that engaged 450 students from six public high schools, yielding over 25,000 student observations. This research initiative represents the most extensive youth-led, student-centered evaluation of New Orleans public high schools since Hurricane Katrina. Our study encompasses Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) and Recovery School District (RSD) schools, both direct-run and charter. In total, 450 students have "raised their hands" through either a survey or interview to express their concerns.

The increasing availability of longitudinal student achievement data has heightened interest among researchers, educators and policy makers in using these data to evaluate educational inputs, as well as for school and possibly teacher accountability. Researchers have developed elaborate "value-added models" of these longitudinal data  to estimate the effects of educational inputs (e.g., teachers or schools) on student achievement while using prior achievement to adjust for nonrandom assignment of students to schools and classes. Achallenge to such modeling efforts is the extensive numbers of students with incomplete records and the tendency for those students to be lower achieving. These conditions create the potential for results to be sensitive to violations of the assumption that data are missing atrandom, which is commonly used when estimating model parameters. The current study extends recent value-added modeling approaches for longitudinal student achievement data Lockwood et

Kenneth Bernstein @teacherken comments on a NYT column by Charles Blow.

Authors such as Henry Levin have explained on numerous occasions that for a choice model to yield equitable distribution of opportunity, consumers must have equitable access to information on schools and equitable mobility among options. Clearly, equitable geographic access is out the window in Post-Katrina New Orleans.

This week, the Daily News published yet another editorial taking an unjustly negative view of district schools in comparison to the charter sector - in this case, arguing that the relatively high proficiency levels in upper grades at schools in the Harlem Success and Harlem Village charter chains are primarily due to those schools' extended days and school years. However, the latest available official data indicates that the schools in these two chains are also characterized by lower proportions of high-needs students than local district schools, and by extremely high rates of student attrition over time - in one case, a 68% drop in cohort size between 5th and 8th grades.

This is a compilation of previous posts, in response to the egregious abuse of data presented on Page 3, here: http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/64717249

The New York Times reports that there is a pilot program in Houston, called the "Apollo 20 Program" in which some of the district's regular public schools are "mimicking" the practices of high-performing charter schools. According to the Times article, the group of pilot schools seek to replicate five of the practices commonly used by high-flying charters: extended school time; extensive tutoring; more selective hiring of principals and teachers; "data-driven" instruction, including frequent diagnostic quizzing; and a "no excuses" culture of high expectations.

The legislative mandate was simple - keep kids in school if at all possible, suspension and expulsion having been identified as a point of entry for the school-to-prison pipeline. Passed in 2003, the Juvenile Justice Reform Act endorsed a wide variety of measures to reduce rates of juvenile incarceration. One such measure was support for in-school programs that reward students for good behavior rather than simply punishing them for acting out. It identified the state's higher than average suspension and expulsion rates as a cause for concern.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis Thursday rejected an offer of a 2 percent raise for working a 90-minute-longer school day, saying teachers would not be "bullied" by public attempts to push through a slapdash plan.

Restless parents pack into the room, waiting to ostracize the commission for the near $1 million buyout of Ackerman. It's clear that, in their eyes, she's still their choice for superintendent. Throughout the meeting, audience members heckle the SRC, demanding its removal. Some parents voice desire to have an elected school board. "Out, out, out," parents chant - a simple, yet direct message to the SRC.

Sad news today. In an unanimous edict, the state appeals court ruled that the city can turn over Teacher Data Reports of teachers in grades 4-8 to the media. Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post are said to be quite overwhelmed with joy right now.

I've previously written about the growing number of rigorous peer reviewed and other studies which tend to show positive effects of state school finance reforms. But what about all of those accounts to the contrary? The accounts that seem so dominant in the policy conversations on the topic. What is that vast body of research that suggests that school finance reforms don't matter? That it's all money down the rat-hole. That in fact, judicial orders to increase funding for schools actually hurt children?

In several posts, I've complained about how, in our public discourse, we misinterpret changes in proficiency rates (or actual test scores) as "gains" or "progress," when they actually represent cohort changes-that is, they are performance snapshots for different groups of students who are potentially quite dissimilar.

A pdf of the article.