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Governor Chris Christie, who just recently signed the Pension and Health Care Reform Bill that would cost 500,000 state workers thousands of additional dollars of out of pocket expenses each year, just cut almost $1 billion from the budget proposal handed to him by Democratic lawmakers.  This all occurred Thursday when Christie used his line-item veto power to slash funding for programs that help New Jersey's poorest while vetoing another millionaires tax bill. 

Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers. Unlike traditional public schools, charters may be shut down by their authorizers for poor performance. But how is charter school performance measured? What are the effects of charter schools on student achievement?

Advocates for poor and minority students, students with disabilities, and others sent a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., expressing deep concerns with legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act put forth today.

"Shut it down" sounds like a logical, if extreme, option when all else has failed, but a study by John Engberg from RAND and his colleagues presented some disturbing data about school closure. They found that students in schools that are closed due to poor performance actually do substantially worse on reading and math tests in the new school to which they are sent for at least a year, and then recover and end up doing about as well as they were doing at their original school. In other words, after all the expense, acrimony, and heartache involved in closing a school, the students involved do not benefit.

"Gov. Andrew Cuomo's forthcoming State of the State address is expected to focus on what can be done to improve public education across the state. If he is serious about the issue, he will have to move beyond peripheral concerns and political score-settling with the state teachers' union, which did not support his re-election, and go to the heart of the matter. And that means confronting and proposing remedies for the racial and economic segregation that has gripped the state's schools, as well as the inequality in school funding that prevents many poor districts from lifting their children up to state standards."

"Overall, schools in poorer districts spent $8,733 per pupil less in 2012 than those from wealthier ones, an inequity that grew by nearly 9% from before Cuomo took office in 2011, according to the study by a coalition of education advocacy groups opposing many of the reforms pushed by Cuomo."

"What they saw should chill the ardor of the most doctrinaire followers of Milton Friedman. Vouchers began in Milwaukee nearly 25 years ago based on the claim that they would save poor black children from "failing" public schools. Today, Milwaukee should be a national symbol of the failure of vouchers. Yet state after state is endorsing vouchers, egged on by the Friedman Foundation and rightwing think tanks. Let's be clear. Vouchers, charters, and choice have failed the children of Milwaukee. The city ranks near the bottom of all cities tested by the federal NAEP, barely ahead of Detroit. Black children in Milwaukee score behind their peers in most other cities and states. Study after study shows they don't get better test scores than their peers in public schools."

"In summary, then, the status fallacy is not just some innocent, isolated nitpick. It plays a highly consequential role in our national policy and debate about education. That is why, in this single speech, the fallacy could be found underlying several pretty substantial misinterpretations, and these misinterpretations seem to have influenced several of the cornerstones of the governor's education reform proposals going forward. Granted, it is very important to acknowledge here that Governor Cuomo is absolutely not the only person who makes these mistakes - they are endemic (the governor is, perhaps, more forceful in his expression of them, and more drastic in his policy reactions). Moreover, belief in the status fallacy does not necessarily mean that one's policy proposals are wrong or misguided. It does, however, put one at risk of misdiagnosing problems and making poor decisions about solutions, while also perpetuating the flawed measurement that was institutionalized under NCLB, and continues to pollute our education debate and policymaking."

"A judge said the state discriminates against poor and minority students by protecting the jobs of ineffective instructors. What will this mean for education?"

"Achievement gaps have also, however, taken on a very different role over the past 10 or so years. The sizes of gaps, and extent of "gap closing," are routinely used by reporters and advocates to judge the performance of schools, school districts, and states. In addition, gaps and gap trends are employed directly in formal accountability systems (e.g., states' school grading systems), in which they are conceptualized as performance measures. Although simple measures of the magnitude of or changes in achievement gaps are potentially very useful in several different contexts, they are poor gauges of school performance, and shouldn't be the basis for high-stakes rewards and punishments in any accountability system. Let's take a quick look at four problems with using gaps in the latter context."

Demographic imbalances between charter schools and traditional public schools have led experts to ask if charter schools are open to all students.

Florida lawmakers want to give parents the power to dictate the future of poorly performing public schools, sparking criticism from parent advocates and others that the effort is part of a continuing campaign to privatize education. Florida's version of a "parent trigger" law won favorable committee votes Tuesday in the Florida House and Senate. The bills would allow parents - if more than 50 percent agree - to determine a "turnaround plan" for a struggling school. That could include turning it into a charter school or allowing a private-management firm to run it.

"Yesterday, The U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved The Setting New Priorities in Education Spending Act (H.R. 1891), which was originally introduced by Congressman Duncan Hunter (CA-52), permanently eliminates 43 K-12 education programs including Reading Is Fundamental (RIF). Chairman Hunter describes all of these programs as "wasteful" and "ineffective"."

"When given the opportunity, many teachers choose to leave schools serving poor, low-performing, and nonwhite students. While a substantial research literature has documented this phenomenon, far less research effort has gone into understanding what features of the working conditions in these schools drive this relatively higher turnover rate. This paper explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers within the same school. Teachers' perceptions of the school administration have by far the greatest influence on teacher-retention decisions. This effect of administration is consistent for first-year teachers and the full sample of teachers and is confirmed by a survey of teachers who have recently left teaching in New York City."

Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can't demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

The disparate nature of the cuts - the biggest layoffs at any agency in the Bloomberg era - became apparent yesterday, when officials gave Local 372, which represents nonprofessional school employees, a detailed hit list. Under the plan, District 5 in Harlem and District 6 in Washington Heights will lose almost 8% of their school aides, parent coordinators and community workers - 77 out of a total of 998. At the same time, only five of 942 similar workers in Staten Island's District 31 - less than 1% - will get pink slips.

Principals tend to prefer working in schools with higher-achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. District leadership can also exacerbate principal turnover by implementing policies aimed at improving low-performing schools such as rotating school leaders. Using longitudinal data from one large urban school district we find principal turnover is detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains, which are particularly detrimental to students in high-poverty and failing school