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The push for school choice cleared its first major legislative hurdle - but not its last - when the state Senate voted Wednesday to provide taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers for impoverished students in failing public schools.

Annually, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools examines the growing student enrollment in public charter schools. This report describes which communities have the highest percentage and number of public school students enrolled in public charter schools

Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz cut short a pitch to Brownstone Brooklyn parents Saturday after dozens of protesters interrupted her presentation.

This week Eric Hanushek and Diane Ravitch debate the pros and cons of more concerted efforts to remove the lowest-performing teachers in schools.  Hanushek starts the discussion today, Ravitch responds tomorrow, and additional responses Wednesday and Thursday as well.

To say that the new Afterword in the paperback edition of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," picks up where Diane Ravitch left off would be misleading; since the book's original publication in March 2010, she hasn't stopped.

As I predicted, there was no miracle in DC under Michelle Rhee's reign. At least not one you can see on the NAEP scores for fourth or eighth grade students in reading and math.

...mounting evidence suggests that the seeming relationship between student demographics and teacher turnover is driven, not by teachers' responses to their students, but by the conditions in which they must teach and their students are obliged to learn.

To date, however, there has not been a comprehensive resource that addresses central questions related to New York City middle school teacher turnover and identifies important avenues for future research. The Research Alliance of New York City Schools aims to fill this gap through a three-year, mixed-methods study of New York City middle school teacher turnover.

I want to take a closer look at the corporate school reform movement because I think it can help expose where that movement is vulnerable to the most hopeful development of the past year, and that's the steady growth of a deep, broad and at times quite militant pushback against corporate reform.

Teacher bonuses will hinge on how well they engage parents in some south-central Idaho schools.

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.

I've commented in the past about the difficulties of obtaining reconcilable data on finances of New Jersey Charter Schools. What do I mean by reconcilable? Well, when I'm looking at financial data on charter schools in particular, I like to be able to see some relationship between expenditure and revenue data reported on IRS 990 filings (Tax returns of the non-profit boards/foundations/agencies that operate the charters) and state government (department of ed) reported expenditures and/or any annual financial report documents that might be required by charter authorizers. This really is an authorizer/accountability issue. A financial reporting requirement issue.

This article critically reviews the recent empirical literature on teacher recruitment and retention published in the United States. It examines the characteristics of individuals who enter and remain in the teaching profession, the characteristics of schools and districts that successfully recruit and retain teachers, and the types of policies that show evidence of efficacy in recruiting and retaining teachers. The goal of the article is to provide researchers and policymakers with a review that is comprehensive, evaluative, and up to date. The review of the empirical studies selected for discussion is intended to serve not only as a compendium of available recent research on teacher recruitment and retention but also as a guide to the merit and importance of these studies.

We investigate the effectiveness of Idaho charter schools relative to traditional public schools, using the average difference in test score gains in the two sectors as well as the student fixed effects estimator favored in the literature.  Our findings are quite sensitive to the choice of estimator.  When student fixed effects are included, charter schools appear more effective than traditional public schools in the elementary grades.  When student fixed effects are omitted, this is no longer true.  We attribute the difference to biases associated with heterogeneity in schools and in the quality of school-student matches when the fixed effects estimator is used.  We find much less evidence of selection bias, the standard rationale for the fixed effects estimator. 

Two years into work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve teacher effectiveness, city school officials have determined that the financial outlook has changed so much that the effort will be unsustainable without a major retooling. By revamping teacher salaries -- paying for test results instead of degrees or years of service -- Memphis City Schools leaders hope to find a big chunk of the $34 million a year it will take to keep going when the Gates money stops in 2015.

If charter school advocates had any concern that Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries wasn't on their side, he lay their worries to rest last night. Jeffries, a U.S. House of Representatives hopeful who has not always supported charter schools in his district, pledged his full-fledged support to charter school parents and backers at a town hall event hosted by the New York City Charter Center.

Last week the media gave some space to a report from the Illinois Policy Institute, a right-wing corporate think tank, that claimed that 48 percent of teachers in the state have their pension contributions paid for by their local board. What misleading nonsense.

There was a time, not very long ago, when I was an active volunteer alumni recruiter for TFA. And, as you might expect, I was great at it. One year, I think it was 1998, I did a recruitment session at Colorado College, a very small school, which brought the house down. A year later when TFA published the list of the most popular schools for TFA, Colorado College was listed alongside The University Of Michigan and all the other common TFA schools as one of the top twenty schools for that year.

Merit pay is the tool the corporate reformers are using to cut teacher pay. They are doing damage that will haunt us for years.

Waving signs and shouting out questions, parents from local schools interrupted an information session held Saturday by a charter school planning to move into Cobble Hill. The meeting, held at the Carroll Gardens library, broke up before head of Success Academy charter schools, former Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, could deliver her planned presentation.