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A couple of days ago I was surprised to find an insightful post in Forbes Magazine, offering us "The Single Best Idea for Reforming Education," by columnist and management expert Steve Denning. I wrote a post describing his idea, and also sent him some questions, because I think he offers some useful ways to reframe our concerns around the current direction of our schools. Here are his answers.

Today it seems that Boss Bluster's management style, tossing money at the problems and blaming other people for your failures, is alive and well in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York City Department of education. Maybe Steinbrenner's ghost is running the New York City school system.

There is a persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than do small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large, centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more effective at promoting higher-quality education. The answer to this question has profound implications for U.S. education policy, because reliably scaling up the best schools has proven to be a particularly difficult problem. If there are policies that would make it easier to replicate the most effective schools, systemwide educational quality could be improved substantially.

This was written by William J. Mathis is the managing director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a former Vermont school superintendent. This post is about a plan advanced by the Council of Chief State School Officers in June as a replacement for the school accountability system in No Child Left Behind. A few weeks ago Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that he would grant states waivers from key provisions of NCLB as long as they embrace education reform that he favors.

Denning made one central assertion in that interview with which teachers would seriously disagree, and I'd like to follow up by exploring that disagreement. I'm addressing primarily teachers, but also Steve Denning and businesspeople of good will. I'd like it if we could actually talk them over.

The charter bill is modeled almost entirely on the House's just-passed charter bill, except that it will also allow charter management organizations to compete directly for federal funds. Right now, only states or districts can compete for those funds; under this provision, a CMO like KIPP could compete for direct federal grants.

Everyone loves a bump in pay, extra time off, or other form of reward or recognition.  The problem is when managers start to rely on these types of extrinsic motivators too much and stop looking for the deeper intrinsic motivators that lead to long-term satisfaction and well-being at work.

Some of Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark school system will be given directly to public schoolteachers, one year after the Facebook founder announced the donation, said three people familiar with the plans. The foundation that manages the gift will announce Wednesday a two-year, $600,000 program that provides $10,000 grants to teachers or groups of teachers who come up with innovative classroom programs, these people said.

The past decade has seen increased testing of students and the concomitant proliferation of computer-based systems to store, manage, analyze, and report the data that comes from these tests. The research to date on teacher use of these data has mostly been qualitative and has mostly focused on the conditions that are necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) for effective use of data by teachers. Absent from the research base in this area is objective information on how much and in what ways teachers actually use student test data, even when supposed precursors of teacher data use are in place. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by analyzing usage data generated when teachers in one mid-size urban district log onto the web-based, district-provided data deliver and analytic tool. Based on information contained in the universe of web logs from the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 school years, I find relatively low levels of teacher interaction with pages on the web tool that contain student test information that could potentially inform practice. I also find no evidence that teacher usage of web-based student data is related student achievement, but there is reason to believe these estimates are downwardly biased.

Calls to reform teacher layoff policies have begun to appear with regularity in newspaper editorials, policy briefs, and statehouses-and for good reason. A growing body of research confirms that teacher quality is the most influential in-school factor driv­ing student achievement. That being the case, teacher dismissal policies and procedures can have profound implications for how much students learn.

In light of the problem in New Jersey and in other states as well, perhaps it's time to consider what is known as weighted student funding. The Summer 2011 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management contains a study by Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske titled "Weighted Student Funding in the Netherlands: A Model for the U.S.?" For the past quarter of a century, the Netherlands has been using a version of WSF for all its elementary schools serving children from ages 4 to 12.

Some teachers thrived. Others gritted their teeth and managed, while a few walked out the door.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is conducting an investigation into the finances of the Believe Charter School Network and the exorbitant management fees it charges its three Williamsburg based schools, Williamsburg Charter High School, Believe Northside High School and Believe Southside High School.

My interest was sparked by a June, 2011 notice on Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's website of a $500,000 grant to the Future Is Now Schools, (FIN) a charter schools management organization founded by Steve Barr. FIN has been recently re-branded (some say divorced) from the LA-based Green Dot Public Schools, founded by Barr, and from Green Dot America, an effort by Barr to open charter schools nationally. The purpose of the grant is "to provide national support for the use of a scaled-down collective bargaining contract and to amplify the voice of reform-minded teachers in select cities by sharing organizing expertise."

I am appalled by this malicious attack on teachers and teachers' unions by Jay Greene. He claims that teachers are engaging in mob-like behavior, are seething anger and are intimidating politicians. The irony is that I've met few teachers who are nearly as angry as Jay himself comes across.

I just read an insightful article in Stateline Weekly this morning. While teachers and parents grow increasingly concerned about falling revenues for public schools, many legislatures and governors, of both political stripes, are seizing the moment to shift toward business-inspired, performance-based models and "outsourcing" the traditional classroom to privately managed, publicly funded charter schools and on-line instruction. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and state chambers are advocating for this shift and getting their talking points from education-reform theorists, or ideologues depending on your perspective, like Richard Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.

School systems around the country are in transition. Propelled by a combination of evidence, logic, and intuition about the need for fundamental improvements in the content and management of public education, districts and states are continuing to exhibit an innovative drive that has in some ways been a hallmark of the American system since its beginnings nearly two centuries ago.

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).

There are lots of kids who can't or won't connect with the traditional high school setting. Many brilliant and talented among them drop out and wind up on the street. That's one of the reasons why we created the Small Schools Workshop 20 years ago, to help educators develop small, public, personalized, alternative models focused on areas of student interests, talents and passions. While many of the ideas of the early small schools movement were captured and distorted by the regressive currents of privately-managed charter schools, there are still lots of good small, alternative schools fighting to survive and flourish.