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Wielding power under a new state law to modify union contracts, Detroit Public Schools emergency manager Roy Roberts this morning imposed a 10 percent wage cut on all employees and moved the district to a less costly benefits plan.

KIPP will no longer operate a charter school here. The school's board of directors has retained American Quality Schools to serve as its educational management organization.

This was written by George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, who this year is also taking on the role of superintendent of his small school district. He is executive director of the non-profit Forum for Education and Democracy, a collaboration of educators from around the country.

Is Diane Ravitch a "paid union spokesperson," her famous change of heart inspired by fees from the teachers union? The accusation, levied by the philanthropist and hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson recently, draws from a new book about the education reform movement by Steven Brill. But the suggestion that she was bought is simply not accurate, Ravitch told GothamSchools.

A few weeks after I criticized EdisonLearning's invitation to Indiana, Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels have welcomed yet another Jeb Bush crony, Jonathan Hage, CEO of Florida-based for-profit education management company Charter Schools USA (CS USA), to possibly administrate our so-called "failing schools." Although IDOE's Dale Chu testifies that plenty of "drilling" took place in selecting the turnaround companies which have landed on the final list, Jeb Bush's DNA is embedded in the deals.

n a whopping 437 pages, Steven Brill's Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (Simon & Schuster, 2011) recounts a dramatic and vicious battle between two education camps: on the one side, hedge fund managers, aggressive chancellors, determined charter school leaders, teachers who work endlessly, all fighting for reform as they define it; on the other, the big unions who use their clout to block, complicate, or slow down reform. The book has good guys, bad guys, and a surprise twist. Yet it does not stop to consider what education is, what it contains, or what ends it serves. This weakness is not particular to Brill or his book; it is at the core of the battles he describes. But Brill takes part uncritically.

Over the past several months, there has been much discussion and controversy surrounding the passage of a millionaire's tax in New Jersey. There has also been much talk from our governor about dismantling the public school system by creating private, for-profit, charter schools that will be managed by business people, but will be funded by taxpayer dollars.

This is an interesting article about the intersection of charter schools and hedge fund managers.

Last February, two very different narratives played out in Denver and Madison. In Madison, political vandals tried to take out one of the state's great civic institutions: public sector unions. Unions were radically reduced in their capacity to bring the wisdom of the practitioner voice to policy. They were loaded down with legal requirements designed to hobble them with an obsession with mere survival. They lost legal rights to speak for workers in any meaningful way. We know the story: it was big news. In Denver, overshadowed by events in Madison, the US Department of Education convened a Labor-Management Collaboration Conference. Here, a very different narrative played out. Unions were treated not as enemies to be destroyed, but as valued partners in the policy process. Twelve districts that had collaboratively integrated their union voice, and twelve locals who had responded with care and creativity were highlighted as models. Over 150 districts sent teams of administrators, political leaders, and union leaders to learn from these twelve districts.

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tony Bennett will recommend state takeover of four Indianapolis Public Schools. Under Bennett's plan, each would be run by an outside organization beginning with the 2012-13 school year. They are: Emma Donnan Middle School, Manual High School and T.C. Howe High School, all of which would be managed by Charter Schools USA. The Florida-based company operates 29 charter schools in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana.

Attorney and whistleblower Kathleen Carroll was fired by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing CTC in September 2010 after she began to expose the systemic corruption and cronyism at the agency. The commission plays a critical role in education in California certifying teachers and also approving education training programs. Carroll discovered that Agency officials and the board members were also involved in planning the systemic destruction of public education in California and how this agency operated to carry out this role. They were involved in spending millions of dollars on private charter schools that some staff had personal interests in. The commission managers also bullied the staff and created a reign of terror at the agency. This commission is also under the direct control of the Executive and Governor Jerry Brown but he has remained silent about the scandal.

PERHAPS THE VERY best thing about Steven Brill's new book is its title. The phrase "class warfare" has a double meaning, of course, and the book paints very clearly the deep economic cleavages that underlie the fierce education debates within the Democratic Party over such policy issues as charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and the role of poverty in achievement outcomes. In Brill's telling, the education class war pits a heroic group of entrepreneurial philanthropists, highly successful hedge fund billionaires, and idealistic Ivy Leaguers who join Teach for America against somewhat grubby and grasping rank-and-file public school teachers and their union leaders, who often put their own selfish interests above those of the children. In looking out for what is best for low-income and minority students, Brill contends, Wall Street hedge fund managers are a much more reliable ally than the middle-class teachers who educate schoolchildren every day. Brill's worldview is important to understand because it is typical of the outlook of the education "reform" community, including leaders of the Obama administration, and the president himself.

All three schools, which were founded by Edward Calderon-Melendez, the network's chief executive, have been under investigation by the office of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman of New York for several months because of questions about their financial management. They face closing if they do not follow the city and state's recommendations in the next year.

In his inaugural post for this blog, Robert Slavin wrote, "We did not manage our way to the moon, we invented our way to the moon." I hear echoes of this statement throughout my work. Like other national charter school leaders, I am committed to making sure innovation can blossom and spread, throughout our own network and public schools nationwide. But along with innovation we must insist on research and results. Across the 31 KIPP regions nationally, for example, we give schools autonomy to innovate as they see fit, as long as they can demonstrate that they are producing results for our students.

After a long summer involving layoff notices and late placements, Detroit Public School teachers are now faced with improper classroom assignments. In addition to the previous assignment of special education students to general classrooms, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts has placed special needs teachers in general education classes, where they are forced to provide instruction in areas where they don't have any experience.

Parent trigger laws, according to their proponents, give parents power. Gregory McGinity, managing director of policy for the Broad Education Foundation, calls them "a way for parents' voices to be heard." Sounds good. But is the parent trigger concept a way to put parents in charge of their kids' education, or is it part of a political agenda that will rob parents of even more control?

Roy Roberts, a former GM executive, says his first few months on the job as emergency manager of Detroit's public schools have been "like drinking from a fire hose." "I had five weeks to pull together a budget for 2012," he said in an interview. "That's not a simple process." So far, his tenure has entailed cutting salaries across the board by 10 percent; imposing $81 million in wage concessions; and announcing a new state-run educational authority to oversee Michigan's lowest-performing schools that will pilot in Detroit next year. He has also faced several lawsuits and seen 11 people charged with stealing from the city's schools.

The U.S. Department of Education announced today charter school grants totaling $25 million to replicate and expand high-quality charter schools that have demonstrated success. Today's grants will serve nearly 45,000 students in 124 new and 3 expanded charter schools over the next five years.

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).