In early 2015 Stanford University's updated CREDO Report concluded that "urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers."

This single claim of success has a lot of people believing that charter schools really work. But there are good reasons to be skeptical. First of all, CREDO is funded and managed by reform advocates. It's part of theHoover Institution, a conservative and pro-business think tank funded in part by the Walton Foundation, and in partnership with Pearson, a leading developer of standardized testing materials. CREDO director Margaret Raymond is pro-charter and a free-market advocate.

 Diane Ravitch's devastating Arne Duncan critique: The education secretary earned his F by Diane Ravitch on the Salon.com site

  It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan's policies have inflicted on public education.

When Obama was elected, many educators and parents thought that Obama would bring a new vision of the federal role in education, one that freed schools from the test-and-punish mindset of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind. But Arne Duncan and Barack Obama had a vision no different from George W. Bush and doubled down on the importance of testing, while encouraging privatization and undermining the teaching profession with a $50 million grant to Teach for America to place more novice teachers in high-needs schools. Duncan never said a bad word about charters, no matter how many scandals and frauds were revealed.

  A year ago, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) issued a report demonstrating that charter schools in 15 states-about one-third of the states with charter schools-had experienced over $100 million in reported fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. This report offers further evidence that the money we know has been misused is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past 12 months, millions of dollars of new alleged and confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in charter schools have come to light, bringing the new total to over $200 million. a Despite the tremendous ongoing investment of public dollars to charter schools, government at all levels has failed to implement systems that proactively monitor charter schools for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. 
 

The Great Common Core Textbook Swindle  by Matt Collette  on the Daily Beast site

  Only one in eight Common Core-aligned textbooks actually meet Common Core standards-and none by textbook giants Pearson or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt-but they were repackaged and sold to public schools anyway, at taxpayers' expense.

Respecting that, here are 10 things you can do starting one minute from now that will greatly reduce your stress today.

1. To calm down, write it down
In order to avoid stress of having to remember something, then worry about forgetting it, apologizing for it or messing up, immediately write it down into your task list. If you have nothing to write on ask Siri and she'll do it for you.

2. When stress is on the rise, you must prioritize
You cannot do everything so prioritize your list and pare it down until it is doable. Practice the rule of five and only do things if they fall into your top five. If they don't then delegate and ask your husband/wife to do that thing you know they hate doing but you are sick of handling.

3. Multitasking leads to stress, step by step will clean this mess
Research shows that those who multi-task actually lower their IQ, decrease brain density and tend to be pissed off a lot more than those who do one thing at a time. Thus, quit thinking that you are a robot and take it slow.

4. Give stress a shove and rise above
Seriously, what will happen if you don't do everything on your list today? Can you stop thinking the world will end? Unless you lost the keys to the nukes or are performing surgery at the moment, just breathe and realize it's may not be as important as you perceive it.

5. Your stress will go with the TV show
Ever find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat not knowing which of your favorite characters is about to be killed? You are "killing" yourself by doing that because your brain cannot distinguish between a real threat and an imaginary one. So it turns on the stress response and pumps you chock full of cortisol and adrenaline.

6. It's good to wait and meditate
Meditating for just 20 min/day can rewire your brain and reduce stress by reversing the stress response. Thus meditate for 10 min right after waking up (don't even open your eyes and sit up) and 10 min right before you fall asleep (no lotus position required).

7. Let go of despair with tons of fresh air
Getting enough fresh air is vital to every part of your body but it also decreases stress. It does so through activating the parasympathetic system (reduces the stress hormones). Also the smells from the outside such as scent of pine trees for instance decrease stress and promote relaxation. So don't just be a tree hugger, be a tree smeller.

8. An Orange a day makes your stress go away 
Drink some orange juice, eat an orange, or smell an orange. This can reduce stress by up to 70 percent. It's due to Vitamin C which reduces cortisol levels in the body unlike coffee (sorry but that's the truth).

9. Stress is all gone when the music is on
10 minutes of music listening lowers your stress - so turn off News and Talk and turn on Mozart while commuting. Thirty to 60 beats per minute is best for stress reduction and relaxation. You get bonus points for finding music at 432 Hz (tuned with the Universe).

10. Get your life in order and drink lots of water 
Stress causes dehydration and dehydration causes stress -- lovely stress cycle. Thus it is important to drink lots of fresh water throughout the day and keep those cortisol levels low.

 Core Dilemmas Facing Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers (Part 1)  by Larry Cuban on the Cuban site

  Private kindergartens became public ones at the end of the 19th century. It is a reform that has stuck.

Yet what early childhood teachers do everyday in their kindergartens has been a mystery for years. Mary Dabney Davis's study, published by the National Education Association, was the first systematic examination of kindergarten teaching practices.

To get a sense of dominant teaching practices, Davis analyzed stenographic reports of observations done in 131 kindergartens.. These descriptions of 449 lessons in these kindergartens form the basis of the analysis. Of the selected kindergartens, three-quarters were located in public schools. Geographically, the sample was drawn from 34 states from every region of the nation. Nearly 40 percent of the children were immigrants and 3 percent were black.

 How Education Innovation is Going to Revitalize America and Transform the U.S. Economy  by Michael T. Moe, CFA Matthew P. Hanson, and Li Jiang Luben Pampoulov on the GSV site

Throughout history, whether in preindustrial or industrial times, great nations developed based on their access to physical resources or their ability to surmount physical barriers. England and Spain crossed oceans, Germany turned coal and iron into steel, and the United States exploited a wealth of agricultural and industrial resources to become the world's breadbasket and industrial superpower. The advent of the personal computer, the Internet, and the digital delivery of information has transformed the world from a manufacturing, physically-based economy to an electronic, knowledge-based economy. Whereas the resources of the physically-based economy were coal, oil, and steel, the resources of the new knowledge-based economy are brainpower and the ability to acquire, deliver and process information effectively. A college degree is the new high school diploma. Modern curriculum needs to reflect the modern economy and knowledge will become the currency for opportunity. 
"If investments in factories were the most important investments in the Industrial Age, the most important investments in an Information Age are surely investments in the human brain." - Larry Summers

How Do You Build Public Support for the Common Core? Strategic Communication   by  Anne O'Brien on the Learning First Alliance site