The big problem with most analysis/conversation about public charter schools is that too many people are trying to make sweeping generalizations about what is in practice a state-by-state policy with high variance.

Fordham helps shed some light on the question of charter autonomy, state-by-state, with a new report that’s well worth your time if you follow the issue.

Some action on the proposed new teachers’ contract in D.C.  The city’s CFO won’t certify it because of outstanding financial questions. 

WashPost ed board sees a way through on one outstanding  issue, whether private foundations can make their funding contingent.  That issue strikes me as easily resolvable, too.   It’s not unreasonable for grants to be conditioned on the continuation and stability of a program and there is middle ground there.  Paying for the overall contract and the moving target budget issues seem the bigger obstacle at this point.

Needless to say, big implications depending on how this plays out, and not just in D.C.

The Piscalnator wants to know if teachers’ unions want to organize and help charter schools, or destroy them.

TNTP’s Weisberg is not bought in to the RTT buy-in myth.  More on that here.

Have any other groups besides the Ed Trust taken the commonsense position that if states want more money to avert teacher layoffs they ought to have to do sensible things like end purely seniority based (last hired first let go) layoff policies in exchange for getting it?  The Trust deserves credit for stepping out on this one, who is with them?

In a sign ‘o the times Deb Gist makes the Time 100...for reform in Rhode Island.

New Orleans isn’t all fun and oil.  There is some important education work down there and if you have a strong operations background here’s a great way you can contribute (pdf).

This will be a good briefing on pre-K policy, innovation, and promise and RTT opportunities if you’re in D.C. next week.  These guys know what they’re doing.

Core knowledge:  E.D. Hirsch reviews Ravitch in The New York Review of Books.

Lights out?  At the NYT the Mind of Medina writes up the KIPP – union decertification story. This is a big deal because KIPP basically has some non-negotiables that they believe are integral to running highly effective schools.  The UFT apparently could not meet them.   Big implications from that in terms of the whole charter – union conversation.

Peterson recants!   Per this post, Paul Peterson has changed his views! But he thinks my cynicism to age ratio is out of whack.   Let’s hope he’s right.

Mile high: The Johnston teacher bill in Colorado seems to be picking up momentum.  Score one for RTT?

Some real progress in New Haven, a new teacher evaluation system coming on line. Not as ambitious as DC but important nonetheless, and a credit to the new teachers’ contract there.

And, the education school at University of Michigan will partner with Teach For America.  The University of Michigan has been an enormous provider of Teach for America corps members so this linkage will deepen that connection and directly benefit students in Detroit.

Via Dutko, everything you want to know about all the races for governor this year in one place.

More on the KIPP NY decertification issue. Backstory/primary docs are here.

Paul Peterson offers a spirited, lively, and completely convincing defense against my suggestion that he’s changed his views on school choice. I yield!

Except, I never suggested that.  In fact I invited him to debate Diane Ravitch here on Eduwonk precisely because he hasn’t changed his mind and his new book is quite interesting on that front.

Per all the back and forth and debate below, California officials are closing the Stanford University charter school.   The vote was last night.

Stanford officials say they were surprised.  One can only assume that means they were not paying attention given the data as well as the fact that pretty much everyone in the education community out there saw this problem coming and has been chattering about it for the last 18 months and speculating about what the authorizer would do.  Hopefully good options can be found for the students in the lower-school via existing or new schools.   The upper-school remains open until students graduate or it can find a new authorizer.  Keep an eye on that.  Venue shopping by struggling schools is a charter authorizing problem in several states.

The bold act of leadership and accountability on the part of the Stanford ed school would be to invite a proven operator in to help the high school.   Aspire Public Schools is the logical choice.   Their schools all around California, and in this community, serve similar students and are not getting closed for performance.   Aspire was there at the inception of this school.  They parted ways over concerns about the academic focus and now seems like an ideal time to patch that up.

I’ve noted our field’s unhealthy (and unhelpful) hostility to Teach For America rather than a desire to learn from them where possible.  Here’s a refreshing counter-example from North Carolina via a slide deck on teacher prep there. The state is trying to figure out why TFA teachers are high performers relative to other paths and what aspects can be built into policy.

A lot of speculation about what Deb Gist does or doesn’t think about this or that.   Hear it from her in her state of the state’s education address (pdf).

Richard Whimire writes-up an interesting initiative to help with college transitions at Northern VA Community College (pdf).

Teachers’ unions in a bunch of states, most recently CO, IN, and MA fighting hard on Race to the Top.   MN, too, now don’t ya know.  But while everyone is focused on the trivial issue of musical chairs at the recent state hearing there, an actual debate is brewing…

Last Sunday’s Washington Post had a myth-busting feature about the Catholic abuse scandal. One aspect caught my eye:

Sexual abuse of minors is not the province of the Catholic Church alone. About 4 percent of priests committed an act of sexual abuse on a minor between 1950 and 2002, according to a study being conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. That is roughly consistent with data on many similar professions.

An extensive 2007 investigation by the Associated Press showed that sexual abuse of children in U.S. schools was “widespread,” and most of it was never reported or punished. And in Portland, Ore., last week, a jury reached a $1.4 million verdict against the Boy Scouts of America in a trial that showed that since the 1920s, Scouts officials kept “perversion files” on suspected abusers but kept them secret.

It seems an awkward pivot from a study based on actual data to the AP project that, while valuable for exposing how porous the system for policing educators for these problems is, doesn’t produce a real estimate that can be extrapolated across the teaching profession.  And the numbers AP did come up with don’t get you to 4 percent.

Applying the lens of common sense,  I’m guessing that if close to one in twenty teachers were sexually abusing kids we’d be hearing about it and that the actual figure is lower than that but amplified by the large number of schoolteachers across the country.  In other words, many more teachers than priests.

That’s not to say that sexual abuse isn’t a problem in schools.  It’s a big one and a lot of what I saw as a state board of education member dealing with licensure issues was shocking.  But, I don’t think this particular assertion as to the scale is responsible or holds up.

Update: Lively debate about this on Twitter. But even Charol Shakeshaft points out in the comments that there is no hard evidence on the number/percent of teachers and that the priest/teacher comparison itself is a lousy one.  Self-reporting in her data aside, I do think that her definitions cloud rather than clarify the extent of this problem because they are so broad and somewhat ambiguous.   With issues like this, once  you start seeing it everywhere you see it nowhere and that hinders solutions.  And per my original post above, this is a real problem.  If you haven’t read the AP story it’s worth checking out.

Finally, I do know of one project in the works on this that should shed more empirical light when it’s done.

Turnaround teaching jobs in Boston via Teach Plus.

Teacher voice?  Teachers at the KIPP school in New York that was all the rage for wanting to have a union, have now decided they don’t.  De-certification filing is here (pdf). Keep an eye on this one.

Backstory here. Bet that UFT might end up with no KIPP schools when the dust settles looking better…

Achievement First is heading into Rhode Island…and hiring.

Here’s an interesting case study of Green Dot’s scale-up and the challenges. The serious underfunding of charters in California is an old, if not well understood, story but this case gets at the scaling/fidelity challenge via interviews with a variety of Green Dot players.

Sandy Kress is spelunking through CA’s data in this debate over the Stanford charter school.

Don’t miss John Merrow on Brian Betts, the principal murdered in D.C.   A tragedy on multiple levels.

It’s not the Ipad but a bunch of implications from this one:

Charter School Growth Fund has acquired DreamBox Learning in a deal financed by CA education maven (and in his day job Netflix founder) Reed Hastings.  NYT on it here, Techcrunch is here.

Rocketship Education, a leading hybrid bricks and clicks cmo venture will serve as an R & D lab for some of the ideas DreamBox is working on.  So it’s an interesting public-private venture and a genuine R & D initiative, of which there are too few in this field.

My take on the Stanford charter school situation is below.  Punchline: This is sad in some powerful ways, it’s not funny.

But the New York Times story demands a bit more discussion.   (Plus it buries the lede…check out the Shalvey quote)

In the story Linda Darling Hammond points out that the Stanford school takes all kids.   Sure, but so do many other public schools (including some in the community including Aspire Public Schools, a network of public charters established by a former CA school superintendent) that have better results.  More on that below.  That uncomfortable reality  also makes Diane Ravitch’s quote in the story really curious.  This situation doesn’t illustrate much about the debate about schools and poverty overall, but it does again show that there are big differences among schools serving similar kids and that powerful and intentional instruction matters.

Here’s one screen shot from Educational Results Partnership, more data there you can check out yourself.   Despite the variety of additional resources (fiscal and otherwise) the school had at its disposal, it substantially under-performs similar schools on a variety of measures – so demographics are not an acceptable excuse here.

Smart Tom Vander Ark post on where things stand with state Race to the Top.

Here’s Joel Klein on NYC’s “rubber room” deal, curriculum, and Florida on MSNBC.

And here’s a new RTT television ad that is running in New York.

Has not received the same attention as the state competition or i3, but keep an eye on the Race to the Top assessment competition…could be good for business for a guy like Rick Hess if he hasn’t worn himself out making noise about the state competition.   And big equity concerns if this isn’t done right, so stay tuned for that, too.

The criteria are good and the need enormous.  It’s just going to be a tough process to manage from now through implementation.

In the ill-fated George Miller No Child Left Behind reauthorization proposal there was a small assessment innovation pilot.  This is a much more ambitious idea.