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On Friday, The Center on Reinventing Public Education and Education Sector released a new report detailing how federal, state and local school funding policies conspire to enrich schools that already have money and further impoverish schools that don't.

The report begins with a comparison of two elementary schools of similar size that enroll mostly low-income students: Cameron Elementary School in Virginia and Ponderosa Elementary in North Carolina. One crucial difference between the schools: Cameron receives approximately $14,040 in combined federal, state and local per-pupil funding, and Ponderosa receives only $6,773. Not surprisingly, Cameron teachers earn much more money than their counterparts at Ponderosa, Cameron attracts and retains many more experienced teachers, Cameron's average class size is substantially smaller, and Cameron's students fare far better on state assessments, meeting or exceeding state averages in mathematics and science. ...

I've been following Ed in '08's Blogger's Summit out of the corner of my eye. A sentence from Alexander Russo's most recent posting from the Summit caught my attention: "Blogger, teacher, and author Dan Brown has asked the most intense questions so far--one about high stakes testing and the about the dangers of taking an extreme de-Bathification approach to bypassing educators."

While the "de-baathification" reference raises an unwelcome comparison between educators and Iraqi Baathists, the broader point--the danger of attempts to pursue education reform without the educators--deserves attention. I look forward to reading about the answers to Brown's questions.

Update (5/16/08)
Well, I expected to read a flood of blog postings on Dan Brown's question, but, as Assorted Stuff remarks, the Edin08 Blogger Summit spawned precious few blog postings--and next to nothing on "de-Baathification." I guess I'll have have to ask Dan himself.  Bear with me. ...

The National Association of Secondary School Principals has just released a new position statement on "Professional Compensation for Teachers."  Though the statement's authors carefully avoid openly endorsing such systems, they describe their statement as "a template for states and districts considering the implementation of such systems."

The statement's guiding principles are too numerous to list here, but at least three warrant special notice: ...

Our friends at ASCD's Whole Child Initiative just fired off an email newsletter describing the astonishing success of Thomas Edison Elementary School in Port Chester, New York.  (School success seems to be contagious in Port Chester, whose middle school has won national acclaim for similar strides in the past 10 years.)

Edison owes its achievements to an education approach that addresses the social, physical and academic needs of its largely poor student body.  To quote ASCD's newsletter: ...