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I read something truly awful today in The New York Times Magazine article, What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? But before I share what it was, I'd like to preface it by restating my concerns about a pattern I see of some school reformers taking ideas and practices that have a huge learning and teaching potential and, instead, warping them so their benefits disappear and  can actually become destructive.

Putting Parents in Charge is a condescending NY Times column on parent engagement that was written by Peg Tyre.

Can Terry Grier save Houston's struggling public schools? That was the question on everyone's minds when the get-tough reformer was hired as superintendent of the state's largest ISD in 2009. Two controversial, tumultuous, and frustrating years later the city's parents, teachers, and politicians are asking something else. Can anyone?

I spent some time the other day, while out running, pondering the usefulness of student growth percentile estimates and value added estimates of teacher effectiveness for the average school or district level practitioner. How would they use them? What would they see in them? How might these performance snapshots inform practice?

Some people must have been startled by President Obama's decision to draw a line in the sand on collective bargaining in his jobs speech to the Congress last week. Specifically, the President said: "I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy." Given the current anti-union tenor of many prominent Republicans, started by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, it seems pretty clear that worker rights is shaping up to be a hot-button issue in the 2012 campaign. Collective bargaining rights as presidential campaign plank? It wasn't that long ago that anything to do with unions was considered to be an historic anachronism - hardly worth a major Republican presidential candidate's trouble to bash. Times have changed.

When reporting test scores, it's essential to understand whether the scores reflect changes in performance or changes in the tested population (see here and here for how this plays out with NAEP results). In this case, while I don't have enough data to know exactly what is going on with SAT scores, there's no doubt that the story is more complex than meets the eye.

Chances look good for passage and enactment of legislation to provide right-to-work status for Michigan public school teachers. Under the measure, called the "Freedom to Teach Act," teachers would no longer be required to join or support a union as a condition of employment.

Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School - which is odd, because he's the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly "TT" (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled "2T" (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city's private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that's for prekindergarten.

Lawmakers are taking steps to ensure charter schools can continue to grow at a robust pace.

Last October, a friend called with a question: "What do you know about Stand for Children?" The advocacy organization, based in our hometown of Portland, Ore., was expanding into his state of Illinois, and he hoped to glean some insight into the kinds of reforms the group would support. Just two months later, Stand's Illinois branch had amassed more than $3 million in a political action committee and unveiled an aggressive teacher evaluation bill.

Seventeen-year-old Kevin Fish has won international mountain bike races, has ridden alongside Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and hopes to become a professional cyclist when he turns 19. To do that, he trains 20 hours a week: four-hour bicycle rides, long runs and practice on a stationary bike. Spending seven hours a day in traditional private or public schools would leave Kevin riding in the evenings - or not at all, depending on homework. Then his family read about Star Charter School on the Web. The campus, which received the highest academic rating under the state accountability system, offers small classes and four-hour days. And as an open-enrollment charter school, it is public and tuition-free.

One by one, teachers at public elementary schools here have been voting to buck their own union and take Mayor Rahm Emanuel up on an unusual offer: to accept bonus pay in exchange for waiving union contract provisions and keeping children at some schools longer each day.

Every year, the state of Ohio releases an enormous amount of district- and school-level performance data. Since Ohio has among the largest charter school populations in the nation, the data provide an opportunity to examine performance differences between charters and regular public schools in the state. Ohio's charters are concentrated largely in the urban "Ohio 8" districts (sometimes called the "Big 8"): Akron; Canton; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Columbus; Dayton; Toledo; and Youngstown. Charter coverage varies considerably between the "Ohio 8" districts, but it is, on average, about 20 percent, compared with roughly five percent across the whole state. I will therefore limit my quick analysis to these districts.

These Charter Schools, and Bill Gate's own words,  like the words of propaganda used in Orwell's Animal Farm - are often preaching to us from on high, using the language of 'choice', 'freedom', and 'civil rights' as outlined in my own blog "The White Shadow:  Bill Gates, Charter Schools, and the Evil Twins". This re-segregation is repeated more and more across our country, harming the lives of so many of our children, our families, our teachers, and our public schools.

Published by the National Chamber Foundation, the Institute for a Competitive Workforce, and the US Chamber of Commerce

In an effort to quickly address any concerns that our community may have in regards to the Department of Education's recent placement of Williamsburg Charter High School on Probation we would like to share all relevant and pertinent  information that will help everyone understand how the school has reached this juncture after 7 years of operation.

Weeks after Indiana began the nation's broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.

In the U.S. people-yes, I include myself here-making decisions about important issues such as buying a home, picking a school for a five year-old or deciding on a college often give more weight to those features carrying numbers with them rather than qualitative features without numbers.

Yesterday morning, parent groups, including Class Size Matters, the NYC Parents Union, and individual parent plaintiffs, took the city to court over charter co-locations, and the way in which DOE provides free space and service to charters for free, which we believe violates state law.