In 

Not only 3000 miles separate English teacher Erin Gruwell (in video) at Wilson High School in Long Beach (CA) in the film "Freedom Writers" from math teacher Roland Pryzbylewski (Mr. P.) at Edward J. Tilghman Middle School in Baltimore (MD) in HBO's "The Wire."

The Education Assassins  by Frank Bruni on the New York Times site

  A CONTEST for the least popular arm of the federal government would have many strong contenders. There's the soft, cuddly Internal Revenue Service. Also the National Security Agency, America's Peeping Tom. And let's not forget the Environmental Protection Agency, seen by many manufacturers as one big, mossy, bossy paean to regulation run amok.  But for politicians, in particular Republicans, another challenger comes into play: the Department of Education.

"Without federal involvement, states define their own standards of proficiency," said Joel Klein, the former chancellor for New York City public schools. "Some states will do good stuff, but there will also be laggards and a lot of happy talk."

 Defending the USED  Related to above article)  by Peter Greene on the  Curmudgucation site

For American pundits, China isn't a country. It's a fantasyland.  by James Palmer on the Washington Post site

   The air here might be deadly, the water undrinkable, the Internet patchy and the culture strangled, but I can always be reassured that China is beating America at something, whether it's cleanenergy, high-speed rail, education or even the military.

Over the past decade, American audiences have become accustomed to lectures about China, like a schoolboy whose mother compares him with an overachieving classmate. "That used to be us," Thomas Friedman writes,citing the "impressive" Tianjin Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center (thrown up in a few months) as an example of China's greatness and glacial U.S. construction projects as an example of America's decline. China is "kicking our butts" because the United States is "a nation of wusses," according to then-Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who in 2010 lamented his state's inability to handle snow.

The collateral damage of a district 'turnaround'  by Wendy Lecker on the Stamford Advocate site

   With their narrow focus on test scores, disruption and structural changes, such as firing staff, education reformers constantly push the notion of school and district "turnarounds." However, turnarounds been widely proven as ineffective in improving the longer-term educational quality of targeted schools.

The evidence shows that turnarounds result in, at best, temporary boosts in test scores that often fade after a few years. These policies also often do lasting damage to the school culture by getting rid of teachers and staff who know the students.

   First of all, the data show that, although the performance of poor and minority students improved after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, it was actually improving at a faster rate before the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.  Over the 15-year history of the No Child Left Behind Act, there is no data to show that it contributed to improved student performance for poor and minority students at the high school level, which is where it counts.

Those who argue that annual accountability testing of every child is essential for the advancement of poor and minority children ought to be able to show that poor and minority children perform better in education systems that have such requirements and worse in systems that don't have them.  But that is simply not the case.

 David Berliner's Views on the Teaching Profession  by Gene Glass 

  When a profession as large and necessary to society as teaching is insulted by state and federal Secretaries of Education, judged negatively by the nation's presidents and governors, see their pensions cut, receive salaries that do not keep up with inflation, often cannot afford to live in the communities they work in, cannot always practice their profession in ways that are ethical and efficacious, are asked to support policies that may do harm to children, are judged by student test scores that are insensitive to instruction and more often reflect social class differences rather than instructional quality, see public monies used to support discriminatory charter and private schools, yet still have a great deal of support from the parents of the children they teach, then there is a strategy for making teachers' lives better.

Comment about video:  GREAT LECTURE. It is better to have the kids collaborate and work together rather than compete against each other.  Why do we wait to have our students start doing this until college.  Masters level learning is predominately collaborative which makes it much more effective in my opinion.  Students learn a lot from peers working together which builds confidence and esteem.   It is important to get students involved and talking through class discussion and group collaborative work both of which provoke thought, interaction and creative problem solving. 

Re-Imagining Accountability in K-12 Education: A Behavioral Science Perspective  by Brian P. Gill, Jennifer S. Lerner, and Paul Meosky on the Mathematica Policy Research site

Accountability in the form of high-stakes testing is now pervasive, even as its efficacy is hotly contested. The design of accountability regimes in schooling merits particular attention now, as Congress considers policy changes in re-authorizing the federal law that became, in its most-recent iteration, NCLB. We argue that the policy debate can be informed by an extensive literature from behavioral science on accountability.  That literature makes clear, first, that accountability comes in many forms that activate different mechanisms, and second, that accountability can produce positive or negative effects, depending on the accountability type, the decision context, and the nature of the task. 

 Does the Common Core Matter?  by Tom Loveless  on the Education Week site

The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education includes a study of the Common Core State Standards project. It attempts to predict the effect of the common core on student achievement.

Critics of the study make several points. The most popular is that no one should be surprised that standards by themselves are inconsequential. Standards that simply sit on a shelf are certain to have no effect. Solid curricula, excellent teaching, good assessment, sound accountability systems, and many other things must fall into place for the promise of standards to be realized.
 

 On its website, the Gates Foundation makes it clear that it often initiates contact with organizations to apply for specific grants and that it does not fund what it does not consider a Gates Foundation "priority."

The assertiveness of the Gates Foundation in funding its approved version of education reform takes on head-tilting meaning when one considers the organizations that Gates funds "for general operating support."

That means that the Gates Foundation has decided to that it wants to keep such organizations in business. So, it gives them money to stay afloat, like Dad shelling out an allowance to the kids.

Most recent on the Gates operating support payout list is the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) for $800,000 in April 2015. In March 2012 and September 2010, Gates gave CCSA $1 million for general operating support each time.  Two of the largest Gates grants toward charter schools were for $3 million each, one in June 2014 and one, in June 2012, to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (total $6 million).

Like any myth, the assertion has some basis in truth. Some principals provide poor leadership and, while it is rare in my experience, concentrations of poor teaching can mire a school in mediocrity.

But the main reason the myth is attractive is because it is an easy way to avoid looking at systemic problems. Research demonstrates that the scale of New York's "failing schools" is caused by district policies that lead to concentrations of highly mobile, low-achieving students. Too often, New York City has pre-determined "winners" in its school policies without admitting that other schools will lose in a trumped-up competition to cast the central administration in a positive light.

 The Horace Mann League  on the The Horace Mann league site