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In the week since the New York Times published a conversation on education philanthropy entitled How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System, some high-profile bloggers have characterized the piece as an unintentionally sad commentary on the state of education funding.  The  transcript of a conversation among NYT Magazine editor Paul Tough and five education talking heads: Green Dot Charter School Founder Steve Barr, American Enterprise Institute education impresario Frederick Hess, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Venture Philanthropist Vanessa Kirsch and former Gates Foundation education head Tom Vander Ark.

To Diane Ravitch, the article confirms that the champions of corporate-style education reform have nothing but disdain for those "ordinary educators who toil in the classroom.... Only those untainted by actual direct experience of education have the insight to 'fix' the school system."  ...

Rounding out our two-week celebration of NEA's Read Across America this year is Public School Insights' telephone interview with Don Deshler, one of the nation's most respected experts on adolescent literacy.  Deshler is well known for linking policy to practice.  As director of the Center for Research on Learning at the University of Kansas, he has been providing specialized training to secondary special education teachers for over 20 years

In the interview, Deshler discusses strategies for building schools' capacity to address the very specific needs of struggling adolescent readers.  He urges schools to make adolescent literacy a school-wide focus, arguing that adolescent students with serious reading difficulties require both high quality and "high dosages" of instruction. ...

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Michael de Vito and Carmen Macchia of Port Chester Middle School, one of the many successful schools we feature on this site.

De Vito and Macchia told me the remarkable story of how they and their colleagues created a safe and positive school climate, a richer, broader curriculum focused on literacy and aligned to state assessments, a commitment to literacy across the curriculum, intensive collaboration among school staff, and strong support for teachers' work.

A central piece of their strategy: a focus on reading across the curriculum. DeVito and Macchia describe how their school-wide commitment to literacy has actually enriched their curriculum, rather than narrowing it.

One of Principal Macchia's insights bears repeating: It takes time to effect real transformation in schools. Though the political environment may favor instant turnaround, Macchia urges educators to settle in for a much longer haul. He advocates for multi-year plans to effect true systemic change.

Do you have a story about your school's transformation? Leave us a comment below, or share it through our story tool. ...

In my title, I paraphrase Sylvia Allegretto, an author of a grim new Economic Policy Institute report on the steady deterioration of teacher pay over recent decades.

Teachers, it seems, are among the only professionals who get shafted at both the best of times and the worst of times.  Over the past decade, Allegretto and her co-authors find, the compensation gap separating teachers and similarly-educated professionals in other fields has grown by almost 11 percent.  What's worse, the gap is especially large for experienced teachers:  "The brunt... has fallen on senior teachers (45-54), whose pay deficit within their age group has grown by 18.0 percentage points among women (who comprise the vast majority of teachers) since 1996." ...