Two companies with forward-looking businesses making moves today:

Gates Foundation just announced a $2 million investment in Inigral, it’s a company that produces applications to create networks inside of Facebook.  Obvious education applications.

And Docufide just secured a big round of funding ($4.5 million), is bringing in a new CEO, and is moving to Arizona. Docufide focuses on electronic education records.

Blue Engine’s update email today is worth reading because (a) this is an important and potentially high-impact non-profit you should know about and (b) it’s delightfully quirky and fun to read because they haven’t had the quirk beaten out of them yet!

Smart take on the “Akron mom” saga from Ohio Gadfly. Background can be found here.

Good look at charter schooling in Missouri, status quo and policy recommendations for improvement (pdf), from NAPCS.

Lively event on higher ed policy (yes you read that right) at AEI next week.

Some good jobs at Mass Insight’s School Turnaround Group. And jobs in Louisiana, good internships with the state among other jobs and a development job with the state charter association.

New paper on charter school finance from Bellwether out today (pdf). Press release can be found here and The Wall Street Journal editorial page weighs-in on it here.

Basically, Chris Lozier and I wanted to look at the disparities in funding between charter schools and other public schools through the lens of an actual high-performing charter school network in California.  Although there has been a great deal of talk about the sustainability of charter schools and CMOs there has been very little actual empirical analysis of their finances.

For this project Aspire Public Schools allowed us full access to their books and complete editorial freedom, and for that we’re grateful to their entire team, especially Mike Barr and James Willcox.  What we found is that the generic disparities in finance documented by a variety of researchers have a substantial impact on the finances of a CMO like Aspire and that Aspire’s finances would likely look very different (and mostly better) in different states.  In other words, but for its current location, Aspire might already be a compelling example of a high-performing network of public schools that can replicate and serve more students even more than it does now.

The analysis is pretty straightforward.  We used the data from the Ball State charter finance study, created indexes for costs and wages and estimated what Aspire’s actual finances would look like in 23 other states and D.C. (the places we had data for).  Punchline:  Much better in most.  That finding has implications for public policy, philanthropy and the larger conversation about charter school finance.

What’s more, because all public schools in California are underfunded, so charters there essentially receive an underfunding of an underfunding,  and because so many charter networks (and in particular name-brand ones like Aspire, KIPP, ICEF, and others) are in California, we think that examples and anecdotes from California are skewing the debate about charter sustainability.

Read the entire thing, it’s not long, here (pdf).

I also want to thank Exemplar Strategic Communications’ Patrick Riccards for helping on media with this project.  As I’ve noted before with other releases, he’s hard to beat for this kind of work.

Richard Whitmire writes about “last in, first out” policies for laying off teachers.  Money line: “We haven’t heard any good defense from union officials of last-hired-first-fired — perhaps because there aren’t any.”

And the U.S. Department of Education wants to launch a DARPA-like entity. Good as far as it goes but worth remembering the extent to which i3 (and Race to the Top) showed the limitations of what Department of Education can do now absent some changes to current policy.  In this paper we wrote for Brookings in 2008 Sara Mead and I look at DARPA and implications and cautions for education (pdf). This is a potentially powerful idea but not unless it’s set up to work.

In an unusually lame effort to key off the Super Bowl to malign Teach For America Washington Post national education reporter Valerie Strauss managed to find someone who apparently knows next to nothing about either education or football. Hit ‘em with some Kenny G?  If you want to know more on the football backstory diehard Buckeye Kevin Huffman has it for you.

Per today’s TIME column about the NFL and schools that is  linked and described below a lot of great stuff in the Brendan Daly – Tim Daly interview that couldn’t make it into the column because of space.  As you watch the game on Sunday, here’s one thing to ponder:  What’s education’s equivalent of the playoffs or the Super Bowl in terms of a high-prestige event?  A lot of NFL players, especially the marquee players, make less for playing in the postseason than they do for each game 1-16 during the regular season.  Yet as Brendan Daly put it, “The playoffs are the ultimate goal.  If you talk to the great players and great coaches in this league they’re not motivated by the money they can earn, they’re motivated by being the best they can as an individual and a team.   The whole regular and postseason is set up to win a Super Bowl.”

In education  we do very little to recognize the best or even differentiate by performance.  The measures we have end up being pretty weak soup.  Proponents of National Board certification, for example, have gone from touting it as a way to recognize and reward the best to saying it’s more like the CPA exam – a measure that everyone should pass – as the results have show that it’s a relatively weak measure to differentiate excellence.

Here’s Tim Daly:

In the NFL lasting fame and prestige are related to reaching the playoffs and succeeding there. In education there are not the same parallels of gaining esteem for having been part of an outstanding faculty. In many cases prestige is conferred by teaching kids who have high absolute test scores, regardless of whether you’re creating gains. And in the NFL some of the greatest fame is reserved for players who turned around franchises. That’s not the case in education. Instead, we tend to compensate each incremental increase in work in a micro-way. Each incremental unit of time rather than prestige being a value.

A few years ago we were involved in a pilot to reward outstanding teachers. The reaction of the teachers we contacted was not about the money they would get but about the recognition of it. They were more touched by someone taking note of what they were doing than the specific opportunity to participate in this program.

That’s a technical and cultural issue worth thinking about and addressing.

Update: I’m a Redskins guy (though ownership makes it hard these days) but in addition to being grateful to the Rams’ media people for making Brendan Daly available for an interview, I also think Tim Daly is right-on about their improvement in his comment below. But, worth noting, the things Brendan was talking about are not unique to the Rams, these are strategies and methods used across the league.

If you’re into Montessori and Oakland here are a few edujobs tailor made for you. And here’s a great job in TN, Executive Director at Tennessee Score.

Wondering what the education leadership at Carnegie Corporation thinks about the human capital agenda?  Wonder no more, here they are in the Boston Globe with a straight ahead piece laying it out.

Are you ready for some football?  The “School of Thought” column at TIME is this Super Bowl week.  A few weeks ago we had some debate here about what schools could learn from the NFL.  So I decided to talk with an expert – Brendan Daly, defensive coach for the St. Louis Rams.  By happy coincidence his brother is Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project.  They’re both also former public school teachers.  So it really doesn’t set up much better than that does it? Regular readers may recall the Daly brothers discussed a Malcolm Gladwell article here in 2008 when Brendan was coaching for the Vikings.

From TIME:

NFL analogies get tossed around all the time in the education world. And they get fumbled too. The most recent example: In December Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was talking about giving teachers feedback about their performance when she said, “Football teams do this all the time. They look at the tape after every game. Sometimes they do it during the game.” Not exactly. It’s against NFL rules to use video during a game. But Weingarten was onto something important: “They’re constantly deconstructing what is working and what isn’t working,” she said of pro teams. The heavy use of data and performance evaluations is indeed key to success in the NFL. But unfortunately, very few schools are good at this kind of thing.

For a deeper look at what educators might be able to learn from pro football, I talked with Tim Daly, a leading education reformer and president of the New Teacher Project, which trains teachers and conducts research and policy analysis, and his brother Brendan Daly, a former teacher who coaches the defensive line for the St. Louis Rams.

Read the entire interview here.

Also at TIME today on education a look at school lunch policy. Rev Foods Kristin/Kirsten duo were on the 11 for 11 list at TIME in January.

Patrick Riccards sees this episode as “one of those moments where struggling school districts start realizing that their customers – the families – just aren’t going to accept a sub-par product any more.”  On the other hand Washington Post national education reporter Valerie Strauss is consistently with the little guy – except when the little guy runs afoul of the public school establishment:

“Williams-Bolar didn’t take a public stand, nor did she decide to give up her public housing subsidy and move in with her father so her children could legally go to the school she preferred.”

Didn’t give up her public housing subsidy? Seriously?

For all the haters out there, here’s the 2009 video of “Staten Island Chuck” biting Mayor Bloomberg.

Kids, poem on your pet

Could win a grand scholarship

Info via this link

It’s obviously not Egypt but the state here is not always open and accommodating to change and losing power either, as charter schools in MD and VA illustrate.

Andrea Mitchell interviews UVA’s* Bob Pianta about teacher evaluation.

The Mind Trust’s* Education Entrepreneur’s Fellowship is open again.  Two good edujobs at Center for Charter School Excellence in Tennessee.  COO and Director of Talent Recruitment.

And over at Ed Next they’re debating (and it’s a good debate) the last decade of education reform.

Updates: 50Can is looking for a VP for growth strategy, VP for new site development, and a VP for development.

*Disc: On boards for both.