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"...There is no empathy emergency because empathy is not valued in our culture today, which Harvard-based physician-researcher J. Wes Ulm describes in his 2010 essay for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, "Cache of the Cutthroat"..."

"ON the last day in March, when most eighth graders in New York City learned where they would be going to high school in the fall, Radcliffe Saddler watched the majority of his classmates rip open thin envelopes and celebrate."

"Pundits love to make cross-state comparisons and rank states on a variety of indicators (I'm guilty too). A favorite activity is comparing NAEP test scores across subjects, including comparing which states have the biggest test score gaps between children who qualify for subsidized lunch and children who don't. The simple conclusion - States with big gaps are bad - inequitable - and states with smaller gaps must being doing something right! It is generally assumed by those who report these gaps and rank states on achievement gaps that these gaps are appropriately measured - comparably measured - across states. That a low-income child in one state is similar to a low-income child in another. That the average low-income child or the average of low-income children in one state is comparable to the average of low-income children in another, and that the average of non-low income children in one state is comparable to the average of non-low income children in another. LITTLE COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH."

"Here's a quick data driven post on Governor's state aid cuts - or aid changes. So far, I've been able to compile data from a few states which make it relatively easy to access and download data on district by district runs of state aid (and one state that does not, but I have good sources of assistance). Here, I compare changes in state aid to K-12 public school districts in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York."

Tired of waiting for Congress to fix No Child Left Behind, Oregon passed its own package of laws similar to NCLB last month that include their own, customized approaches to accountability systems. Why? According to current NCLB measurements, four out of five schools nationwide could be labeled as failures, and could possibly lose all federal funding.

Perhaps the greatest current impediment to better schools is our meager understanding of the most high-leverage actions and elements that ensure large, swift improvements to learning. If implemented, they would have an immediate effect on student learning and on college and career preparation.

How ALEC, the Koch brothers and their corporate allies plan to privatize government.

This report examines our pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of our teachers. At the heart of the matter are teacher evaluation systems, which in theory should serve as the primary mechanism for assessing such variations, but in practice tell us little about how one teacher differs from any other, except teachers whose performance is so egregiously poor as to warrant dismissal.

This is a great visual representation of the impact of poverty on New York Regent's Exam scores for 2009 by school.

"Everybody was in fear," another teacher said in the report. "It is not that the teachers are bad people and want to do it. It is that they are scared."

For the second year in a row, a disproportionate number of "highly effective" teachers are employed in affluent, white areas of the District, school officials confirmed.

In the world according to ALEC, competing firms in free markets are the only real source of social efficiency and wealth. Government contributes nothing but security. Outside of this function, it should be demonized, starved or privatized. Any force in civil society, especially labor, that contests the right of business to grab all social surplus for itself, and to treat people like roadkill and the earth like a sewer, should be crushed.

This scandal should serve as a wake-up call to proponents of test-driven reform policies: it's time to abandon high stakes testing in our schools. Decades of high-stakes testing has not brought improvement but has corrupted our schools. The cost is too high.  However, the proponents are not reflecting. They try to minimize the problem and reduce cheating to a technical instead of policy issue, suggesting technical fixes.

This focus on improving teaching is evident in recent grants. A new report on foundation activity, Critical Contributions: Philanthropic Investment in Teachers and Teaching (www.criticalcontributions.org), released today by the University of Georgia and Kronley & Associates, found that foundations directed $684 million to teachers and teaching between 2000 and 2008.

As a proud parent of three children who have found success in Atlanta Public Schools, I am horrified after reading through all 413 pages of the CRCT investigative report. It's clear that adults behaved badly and cheated the very children we pay them to serve. When that happens, our future has been cheated as well.

Students packed the lobby of Chicago Public Schools headquarters Thursday to deliver a critical report on school discipline policies that contends the district spends more than 14 times as much on school security as it does on student counseling.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/660009 This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. 

"The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place," said Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Other testing proponents offered similar suggestions. "A culture of integrity" is not easy because of the corruptive power of test-driven accountability as I have discussed in previous posts and "better security measures" will only incur more costs to tax payers without stop cheating.