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The latest report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows that the charter school boom is showing no signs of abating.  In six cities-New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; Detroit; Kansas City, Missouri; Flint, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana-more than 30 percent of students now attend charter schools. In New Orleans, an astounding 70 percent of students are enrolled in charters. But, when it comes down to the sheer number of students attending charters, Los Angeles takes the enrollment crown.

Over the last few weeks, a small team of New York City building inspectors descended upon UFT headquarters, responding to a mysterious 311 call. Our building has been placed under police surveillance, and at times police have been posted as guards at our doors. The One Percent appears to be a tad bit irritated by the UFT's support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

D.C. teacher Stephanie Black sent me an absorbing e-mail that began with a favorable review of my book "Work Hard. Be Nice" on KIPP school founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. Then she explained why her positive feelings about the KIPP charter school network had deepened her distaste for the D.C. teacher evaluation program, IMPACT.

In a post last week over at Flypaper, the Fordham Institute's Terry Ryan took a "frank look" at the ratings of the handful of Ohio charter schools that Fordham's Ohio branch manages. He noted that the Fordham schools didn't make a particularly strong showing, ranking 24th among the state's 47 charter authorizers in terms of the aggregate "performance index" among the schools it authorizes. Mr. Ryan takes the opportunity to offer a few valid explanations as to why Fordham ranked in the middle of the charter authorizer pack, such as the fact that the state's "dropout recovery schools," which accept especially hard-to-serve students who left public schools, aren't included (which would likely bump up Fordham's relative ranking).

DFER report.

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

A substantial literature documents large variation in teacher effectiveness at raising student achievement, providing motivation to identify highly effective and ineffective teachers early in their careers. Using data from New York City public schools, we estimate whether subjective evaluations of teacher effectiveness have predictive power for the achievement gains made by teachers' future students. We find that these subjective evaluations have substantial power, comparable with and complementary to objective measures of teacher effectiveness taken from a teacher's first year in the classroom.

While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have addressed what specific skills principals need to promote school success. This study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers and parents with rich administrative data to identify which principal skills matter most for school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill categories, yet only one of them, the principals' organization management skills, consistently predicts student achievement growth and other success measures. Analysis of evaluations of principals by assistant principals confirms this central result. Our analysis argues for a broad view of instructional leadership that includes general organizational management skills as a key complement to the work of supporting curriculum and instruction.

About two weeks ago, DOE officials released a list of twenty elementary and middle schools that they are considering closing.   According to the NY Times, "The schools on the list fit at least one of the following criteria: they got a D or F on their most recent progress report, or a C for a third consecutive year; they were on the state's list of persistently low-achieving schools last year; or they received a C or D from the teams of state and city officials who were sent to review them."

Success Charter Network founder and former Councilmember Eva Moskowitz faces multiple hurdles in her attempt to open a K-8 charter school in the Cobble Hill/ Boerum Hill area next fall.

I did a piece a short while back on TEAM Academy, a Charter school which I thus far admire in Newark, NJ. I admire the school because, while the data I've been able to gather from official sources still indicates that TEAM is far from a statistical match with its surroundings, and appears to have greater cohort attrition than I might like to see, I am, at this point, comfortable stating that TEAM Academy is more comparable than others to its surroundings than other Newark Charters.

It is an almost universal tribute offered about Michelle Rhee's 3 1/2 -year tenure of the Washington D.C. school district - that if she accomplished one thing, it was to instill a sense of urgency in the city about the need to fix broken schools that had failed children for decades. Actually, it was Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who hired Rhee and gave her carte blanche, who made school reform the city's top priority. Rhee got all the attention because Fenty wanted it that way.

Imagine you are David Tepper, a 54-year-old guy with $5 billion in the bank. You've played the Wall Street game all your adult life, and you've scored huge wins, over and over. Now what? Tepper, a hedge fund manager who lives in Livingston, has found his answer: He is jumping into the political game in New Jersey, promising to spend huge bucks over the long term to change the state of play on school reform, starting with tenure.

When it released the 2011 Progress Reports to the public last month, the DOE made a point of noting that charter schools received more A's than did their regular public school counterparts. Technically that's true, but technically is about as far as it goes. When we compare the charter middle school A's to the public middle school A's for example, we see that the Progress Reports offer little evidence of better student achievement. In fact, in spite of an uneven playing field that should have tilted the scores in favor of the charters, the Progress Reports actually indicate that when it comes to academics, the middle school charters that got A's did not do that well.

More than a third of the staff members at a Harlem charter school run by the Success Charter Network have left the school within the last several months, challenging an organization that prides itself on the training and support it offers its teachers.

The recent attention given to the character report cards being developed in KIPP charter schools raises yet another set of important questions about the wisdom of reducing human potential to a set of measurements. The report cards, based on character strengths identified by two prominent psychology professors, purport to gauge a student's strength of character in seven areas - self-control, optimism, grit, gratitude, zest, curiosity and 'social intelligence' (sample).

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. But the school's chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Following is another in my school finance geeky series of straight-up analyses of state school finance formulas. I wrote about New Jersey's funding formula few days ago. This analysis focuses specifically on the cuts levied across NY school districts for 2011-12 and the underfunding of the foundation formula for select districts.

Michael Mulgrew talks pension reform, the millionaires tax and Occupy Wall Street on NY1's "Inside City Hall" (Video)

Parents at a struggling Bedford-Stuyvesant public school say the city is playing favorites - pushing their children out so a charter school that's already in the building can expand.