Not too often a forum for education reform, New York magazine ran a piece this week entitled, “Schools: The Disaster Movie”. The article features the upcoming release of the much anticipated film by An Inconvenient Truth director, Davis Guggenheim and what most certainly will be a rallying cry for reformers and an outrage for the Unions.“Superman” affectingly, movingly traces the stories of five children—all but one of them poor and black or Hispanic—and their parents as they seek to secure a decent education by gaining admission via lottery to high-performing charter schools. At the same time, the film is a withering indictment of the adults—in particular, those at the teachers unions—who have let the public-school system rot, and a paean to reformers such as Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee who has waged an epic campaign to overhaul the notoriously dysfunctional system.  Continue Reading...

Columnist Robert Samuelson is putting "school reform" on notice. "Few subjects inspire more intellectual dishonesty and political puffery than 'school reform,'" writes Samuelson in yesterday's Washington Post. Why the harsh words for such a popular issue?  Continue Reading...

UPDATE: Bret Schundler, fired from his post of education commissioner by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has admitted that the fatal error in his state's Race to the Top application was his and his alone.  Continue Reading...

Finalists in the second round of the Race to the Top (RTTT) program are preparing to present their cases to Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the RTTT peer reviewers who will adjust each state’s scores based on their presentations. Some speculate that the presentations during the first weeks of August won’t substantially alter the scores, because scores changed little after interviews in RTTT’s first round.  Continue Reading...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced today the eighteen states plus D.C. who have a chance to compete for the final round of the Race to the Top funding program. $3.4 billion is still up for grabs after Delaware and Tennessee received $600 million in round one.  Continue Reading...

Joyce Irvine is a casualty of bureaucratic necessity. A stellar principal by all accounts, Ms. Irvine was traded by her Burlington, Vermont school district for $3 million in federal stimulus funding. Despite a myriad of successes listed in a recent New York Times article, Ms. Irvine's couldn't significantly raise annual test scores during her six-year tenure as principal of Wheeler Elementary School. Under an Obama administration funding formula, Ms. Irvine has to lose her job if her school district is going to receive stimulus dollars.  Continue Reading...

At their annual convention held earlier this month, the National Education Association heard a series of new business items (NBIs) that display their distaste for the charter movement: NBI 91, which failed to pass after debate, sought to start a counter-campaign to a number of documentaries about education reform and charters that will be playing in theaters across the country this year  Continue Reading...

This month the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) released results of an ongoing study of 22 of its 82 schools done by Mathmatica Policy Research, Inc. The study examines student characteristics and achievement in the 22 schools as was designed to estimate KIPP’s effect on students.  Continue Reading...

As well as being National Teacher Appreciation Week, May 2-8, 2010, is National Charter Schools Week. Read President Obama's proclamation here.  Continue Reading...

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) has released a thorough, PowerPoint-style analysis of the first round of Race to the Top, complete with recommendations for the Department of Education. The report is detailed and few of our readers will have the time to read it all, but here are some interesting highlights:  Continue Reading...

Some of the feedback from education blogs about Delaware & Tennessee winning in phase 1 of the Race to the Top program:  Continue Reading...

The Obama administration announced that Delaware and Tennessee scored the highest on their Race to the Top proposals and will be awarded $100 million and $500 million, respectively. Both applications rely heavily on tracking student performance and linking it to teacher evaluation and even bonus pay.  Continue Reading...

Last week the Obama administration released a reauthorization blueprint for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, designed to advise lawmakers on reauthorization of his predecessor's signature education accomplishment: No Child Left Behind. Overdue for reauthorization since 2007, NCLB reform would fulfill a campaign promise and might offer an opportunity for bipartisanship after a grueling party-line health care reform battle.  Continue Reading...

3:41pm 3/11/2010  Continue Reading...

Professor emeritus and founding director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, Dr. Kevin Ryan published an editorial calling on the country to muster the courage to challenge the "eight hundred pound gorilla" preventing real reform in schools—the teacher unions:  Continue Reading...

According to an editorial in The Star-Ledger, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) has ensured that New Jersey will receive none of the $4 billion dollars available to states in the Race to the Top program. The NJEA "bristled" at charter school expansion and remains fundamentally opposed to merit pay, two reforms President Obama has emphasized in the program.  Continue Reading...

Today the Department of Education announced the states that will advance as finalists for phase 1 of the Race to the Top competition. Race to the Top is a $4.35 billion effort to reward reforms, such as   Continue Reading...

West Virginia State Sen. Erik Wells, a Democrat representing Kanawha, killed his own charter schools bill, criticizing the unions who opposed the legislation. "Who's standing up for students of this state?" Wells asked during his speech on the senate floor, "It's not AFT, it's not WVEA." Sen. Wells accused the unions of attacking his family because he sends his daughter to private school. Although Sen. Wells was elected in 2006 with union support, one teacher union has endorsed Wells' primary opponent.  Continue Reading...

An interesting New York Times article on early college high schools includes a dynamite quote from a 12th grader, Precious Holt, the daughter of a US Army Mechanic that captures the conflict and value of hard work:

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Newsweek and Washington Post contributing editor Robert Samuelson's latest opinion piece notes the good and bad news from the 2010 Statistical Abstract of the United States. Listed among the bad news he culls from the expansive report, Samuelson notes, "Since 1970, the student-teacher ratio in schools has declined dramatically, from 22-1 to 15-1 in 2007, with little effect on test results." Another interesting statistic revealed in the report: "Almost one-quarter of elementary and high school students are immigrants or have immigrant parents."  Continue Reading...