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A recent Economist article on charter schools, though slightly more nuanced than most mainstream media treatments of the charter evidence, contains a very common, somewhat misleading argument that I'd like to address quickly. It's about the findings of the so-called "CREDO study," the important (albeit over-cited) 2009 national comparison of student achievement in charter and regular public schools in 16 states.

"The National Press Club Newsmaker Program holds a discussion on school choice programs in Washington, D.C. Speakers discuss whether the choice options work for students and how options such as charter schools, vouchers, online education and homeschooling compare to traditional public schools. They also examine what political candidates are saying about school choice options and whether their claims are true. Participants include: Dr. Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado and Dir. of the Natl. Education Policy Center; Dr. Gary Miron of Western Michigan University; Policy and Advocacy for the Natl. Association of Charter School Authorizers Vice President Alex Medler; Executive Director of the District of Columbia's 21st Century School Fund Mary Filardo; and Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute Policy Analyst Adam Schaeffer. Drs. Kevin Welner and Gary Miron are contributors to the book: Exploring the School Choice Universe: Evidence and Recommendations, being released this week. The book raises critical questions about the performance of choice programs."

"Advocacy that remains blind to evidence is a dangerous thing-especially in the pursuit of equity and democracy."

"Brookings recently released an evaluation of New York City's voucher program, called the School Choice Scholarship Foundation Program (SCSF), which was implemented in the late 1990s. Voucher offers were randomized, and the authors looked at the impact of being offered/accepting them on a very important medium-term outcome - college enrollment (they were also able to follow an unusually high proportion of the original voucher recipients to check this outcome). The short version of the story is that, overall, the vouchers didn't have any statistically discernible impact on college enrollment. But, as is often the case, there was some underlying variation in the results, including positive estimated impacts among African-American students, which certainly merit discussion.* Unfortunately, such nuance was not always evident in the coverage of and reaction to the report, with some voucher supporters (strangely, given the results) exclaiming that the program was an unqualified success, and some opponents questioning the affiliations of the researchers. For my part, I'd like to make a quick, not-particularly-original point about voucher studies in general: Even the best of them don't necessarily tell us much about whether "vouchers work.""

"One can't help but be moved by the characters and story portrayed in Walden Media's film "Won't Back Down." The film is successful in driving home the sense of urgency parents and educators feel to do everything they can to provide the best possible education for their children. That is abundantly evident in this film-it's what I hear as I visit schools across the country, and it's what I heard when I sat down with parent and community groups from across the country last week. We share that pain and frustration. And we firmly believe that every public school should be a school where every parent would want to send his or her child and where every teacher would want to teach. Unfortunately, using the most blatant stereotypes and caricatures I have ever seen-even worse than those in "Waiting for 'Superman'"-the film affixes blame on the wrong culprit: America's teachers unions."

"It was obviously too difficult for the authors of the 2012 Republican Party platform to hide their contempt for public education, because it is evident throughout the section on schooling."

"Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been pushing a school reform agenda backed by the Obama administration that is at the center of the strike that the Chicago Teachers Union is now waging in the third largest school district in the country. This is not about whether or not you think the union should have called a strike as it did on Monday, but rather about the central problem with the reforms that Emanuel has been advocating: There's no real proof that they systemically work, and in some cases, there is strong evidence that they may be harmful."

Following the blueprint from Gates and the other Business Roundtable education reform scammers, the Tennessee General Assembly passed laws last year that uncapped segregated corporate charter school expansion and opened the door to the fabulously-lucrative cyber school business, wherein underpaid adjunct teachers in their underwear monitor the "progress" of children working through stacks of 19th Century worksheets on their 21st Century IPads.  There is evidence, however, that citizens in Tennessee and elsewhere are coming to understand the economic and human costs of turning corporate America loose on their children to educate.  Work hard, be nice, indeed.  Recently the Blount County School Board unanimously rejected the county's first suburban charter school after 7 months of consideration and a final 5 hour meeting on August 2

This report carefully reviews high-quality empirical evidence from the last several years on the test score effects of three approaches to modifying the organization of schools: (1) starting schools later in the morning, (2) favoring K-8 grade configuration instead of junior high or middle school configurations, and (3) increasing teacher specialization by grade and subject. It estimates the earnings benefits of each intervention and, for interventions (1) and (2), compares monetary benefits to costs. The report concludes that benefits outweigh costs, although the rough cost estimates suggest that better data are required to draw definite conclusions. The report's main conclusion is that organizational reforms deserve a more prominent place in education debates, and that individual school districts should carefully consider them alongside more popular reform options. The review points to a few shortcomings but concludes that the report's analyses are solid and helpful and that the results are presented carefully and cautiously.

The Center For American Progress has published another report justifying the firing of teachers today, based on statistical models that may some day become valid. "Designing High Quality Evaluation Systems," by John Tyler, recounts the standard reasons why of educators do not trust high-stakes test-driven algorithms, and even contributes a couple of new insights into problems that are unique to high school test scores. An urban teacher reading Tyler's evidence would likely conclude that he has written an ironclad indictment of value-added models for high-stakes purposes. But, as is usually true of CAP's researchers, he concludes that the work of economists in improving value-added models is so impressive that education will benefit from their experiments if educators don't blow it.

The recent spate of cheating scandals in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington presents an interesting conundrum. Those opposed to education reform schemes tied to the evaluation of student test scores and teacher compensation, or "value added" evaluation, claim that the teachers and administrators who were caught cheating were the victims, compelled to cheat out of fear for their livelihoods. On the other hand, value-added advocates solemnly pronounce that there is no excuse for cheating and that, moreover, cheating teachers and administrators provide the very evidence that reform is necessary. Both positions are valid. Can we work our way out?

He is earning his teaching certificate through an online, for-profit alternative certification program, a nontraditional route to teaching that is becoming more common in Texas. Such programs, which can offer certification in three months to two years, are booming despite little more than anecdotal evidence of their success.

While it might seem encouraging for education and civil rights leaders to assert that poverty isn't an obstacle to higher student achievement, the evidence does not support such claims. Over 50 years, numerous studies have documented how poverty and related social conditions - such as lack of access to health care, early childhood education and stable housing - affect child development and student achievement.

A federal project designed to help schools "do more with less" relies overwhelmingly on speculative theorizing and other work that falls far short of the high-quality research available in the field, according to a new policy brief published today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The brief, entitled Productivity Research, the U.S. Department of Education, and High-Quality Evidence, concludes that although the current federal effort is fatally flawed, a well-done project of this type could be helpful. The brief offers recommendations for how the Department could move forward.

Diane Ravitch has again done the seemingly impossible. She prompted Education Sector's Kevin Carey to take a glance at the history of education. Even so, Carey's piece in The New Republic, "The Dissenter," indicates that he did not read carefully. Carey wrote that Ravitch "left a polarized history profession in her wake," as if she did not enter the field at a time when traditional historians were under siege. During the sixties, history was dominated by class-based analyses of theories on the oppressiveness of various power structures. History was dominated by genres, ranging from the New Social History to the various Marxist schools of thought, that sought evidence for or against ideological orthodoxies. Too many fell under the umbrella of "history with the people left out."

This article takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for such dismissals. With the cooperation of the CPS, I matched information on all teachers who were eligible for dismissal with records indicating which teachers were dismissed. With these data, I estimate the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics. I find evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

You'll often hear the argument that half or almost half of all beginning U.S. public school teachers leave the profession within five years. The implications of this statistic are, of course, that we are losing a huge proportion of our new teachers, creating a "revolving door" of sorts, with teachers constantly leaving the profession and having to be replaced. This is costly, both financially (it is expensive to recruit and train new teachers) and in terms of productivity (we are losing teachers before they reach their peak effectiveness). And this doesn't even include teachers who stay in the profession but switch schools and/or districts (i.e., teacher mobility).* Needless to say, some attrition is inevitable, and not all of it is necessarily harmful, Many new teachers, like all workers, leave (or are dismissed) because they are just aren't good at it - and, indeed, there is test-based evidence that novice leavers are, on average, less effective. But there are many other excellent teachers who exit due to working conditions or other negative factors that might be improved

But in all the acrimonious discussion surrounding NCLB, surprisingly little attention has been given to the actual impact of that legislation and other accountability systems on student performance. Now a reputable body, a committee set up by the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has reached a conclusion on this matter. In its report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, the committee says that NCLB and state accountability systems have been so ineffective at lifting student achievement that accountability as we know it should probably be dropped by federal and state governments alike. Further, the committee objects to state laws that require students to pass an examination for a high school diploma. There is no evidence that such tests boost student achievement, the committee says, and some students, about 2 percent, are not getting their diplomas because they can't-or think they can't-pass the test. The headline of the May 2011 NRC press release is frank and bold in the way committee reports seldom are: "Current test-based incentive programs have not consistently raised student achievement in U.S.; Improved approaches should be developed and evaluated."

The U.S. Education Department is offering the waivers to states that adopt an "index" system of multiple measures that go beyond annual test results in determining school performance. These include test score growth over time, graduation rates and other evidence that schools have produced students who are college- or career-ready. States also must show plans for evaluating teachers and principals by multiple measures.

With the publication of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, the education reform debate in the U.S. is moving into a second round of Finnish envy-the first being the corporate reformers' distorted claims about international comparisons and the new being calls to examine the full and complex picture of why Finland has achieved both social and education reform that has pushed them to the forefront of education quality. This second round, however, appears to be exposing a nonpartisan failure among all concerned with public education moreso than the needed turn away from corporate education agendas and toward democratic ideals seeking social justice and human agency. Education Week recently reprinted Erin Richards' piece (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) addressing Finland's education system, titled, "Better Teachers, Common Curriculum Are Hallmarks of Finnish Schools." While such coverage should signal the shift needed in discourse about international comparisons and what the U.S. should gain from Finland's social and educational commitments, the headline alone shows that we persist in seeing not what the evidence shows, but what we already assume about schools and reform.