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Recently the Wall Street Journal featured an interview with Bill Gates in which Gates conceded some missteps in his philanthropic efforts toward public education. $5 billion dollars after his debut into public education affairs, Gates admits “It’s been about a decade of learning.” It’s a common concern that private dollars toward education can actually be counterproductive when they direct attention and commitment to misplaced priorities, and so it’s somewhat gratifying to hear Gates acknowledging this.

Gates offered a more tempered view on education than the WSJ interviewer (who in the article described public education in cities as “dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider”), but despite his avowed learning from past mistakes,  he still seems naïve in some respects. ...

Last week I had the chance to attend the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) annual conference. For those who don’t know, National Board Certification is an advanced teaching credential, achieved through successful completion of a voluntary assessment program designed to recognize effective and accomplished teachers who meet the high standards set by the National Board. The program appears to do a good job of recognizing talent (though of course there are a large number of amazing teachers who have not undergone this certification process) - as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pointed out to the group, while “National Board Certified teachers [NBCTs] are only 3% of the teaching force, you account for fully 20% of the 2011 Teachers of the Year.”

But especially given that the conference was a gathering of some of America’s best teachers, I was dismayed about some of the frustrations that they expressed. ...

Education news coming out of Texas lately seems to depict a large-scale comedy of errors. There are misplaced funding priorities (here, here and here) and hard-fought battles to include mainstream science curriculum. Texas is the lone (star) state to pull out of a significant education council that collaborates on state-directed (optional) common standards, and it does not ascribe to the trend to more specifically delineate student racial demographic information for data and research purposes. But at least the most recent debacle may provide a silver(ado) lining: according to Edweek, in explaining the need for the new Supportive School Discipline Initiative, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the numbers from a recent study finding that 60 percent of Texas school children are suspended or expelled between 7^th grade and graduation “are a kind of wake up call,” and that “it’s obvious we can do better.”

In short, the initiative is a joint undertaking by the Departments of Justice and Education, and it targets curbing school discipline policies that push students into ...

Last week I was lucky enough to participate in a gathering called America’s Imagination Summit convened by the Lincoln Center Institute (the education arm of the Performing Arts Center), and held at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.  The Summit was the culmination of a series of Imagination Conversations that had been conducted around the country to bring local leaders together to consider the role that imagination and creativity can and should play in improving the education experience for all our children in a variety of settings.  With a few notable exceptions, the Summit avoided the now popular activity of bashing public schools and the professionals who work in them. Instead it concentrated on the role that imagination, i.e.” the capacity to see what is not,” plays in problem solving and how that approach can support our working together to ensure that a rich educational experience is offered to all our students, regardless of their social or economic station in life.

What follows are a few of the inspirational and thought-provoking moments from the speakers and panels: ...

In two recent Salon.com articles (here and here) political commentator David Sirota has pointed out key differences between Finland and the U.S. that he believes account for education discrepancies between these nations. It essentially boils down to differences in: 1) systemic equity, 2) incentives for and recruitment and support of teachers 3) focus on standardized testing, and 4) bipartisan support among all relevant stakeholders.

To open Sirota asks, “How has one industrialized country created one of the world's most successful education systems in a way that is completely hostile to testing”—and, I’ll add, that does not even attach consequence-based evaluation to teachers or schools? For answers, he refers readers to the documentary film "The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System” which paints the picture of an educational system that completely contrasts with what he calls “the test-obsessed, teacher-demonizing orthodoxy of education ‘reform’ that now dominates America's political debate.”

Some background to set the stage:

It’s clear by now that while the U.S. tests students more than any other nation, our students perform significantly worse in math and science than students in other industrialized countries. Nevertheless, Sirota points out that ...

Over the past few years, the idea of paying teachers a bonus based on student performance (typically on standardized tests) has been called into question for a number of reasons. Some education organizations have expressed concern about the focus it puts on tests they are not convinced accurately reflect student learning. They also question the underlying theory: That teachers can be motivated to work harder for more money; in other words, that they are not already working as hard as they can.

Some outside the education industry share this skepticism. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely expresses concern that these pay systems create odd incentives for teachers and points out that “If you teach, you want to focus on teaching and not on how your salary is changing every day. Not on your chance for a bonus.” Business writer Dan Pink questions how they motivate, believing that educators more than most respect the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Research also challenges the effectiveness of these systems. Last year, in what many considered the first controlled study of the issue, researchers found that Tennessee’s Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT), which awarded bonuses of up to $15,000 to teachers who raised student standardized test scores, had no overall impact on student performance – “It simply did not do much of anything.”

This week we got further evidence suggesting that perhaps this is not the path to improved student performance, with a new study by RAND.

In evaluating New York City’s Schoolwide Performance Bonus System (SPBP), RAND found no positive effects of bonuses on student achievement (as measured by performance on ...

The American Prospect recently featured an article by Sharon Lerner that details an exemplary pioneering effort to combat racial segregation in schools in Omaha, Nebraska, called the Learning Community. It pools resources and allows student movement to help make schools more socioeconomically diverse. But while Lerner argues that this “radical experiment” could serve to be a national model, local resistance may be indicative of potential animosity to similar efforts in other places. If better racial integration in schools is a focus we want to make to improve public education (and I think it should be), this situation provides a prime example of why appropriate legislation, funding, and winning hearts and minds are all integral to success. ...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the first day of the AFTs' 2011 TEACH (Together Educating America's Children) conference. In addition to inspiring opening remarks by DC Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (who got the crowd fired up – especially her comment that no one could be madder than she is, the representative of the only district in the nation that Congress has mandated have a school voucher program) and AFT President Randi Weingarten, and attending a conference workshop addressing a theme I’ve discussed many times [Changing the Narrative about Public Schools: Lessons from the Field], I got to hear from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Krugman, who is a professor of economics and international affairs, shared his views on the current state of the American economy. If you are familiar with his work, you might know that he is skeptical of the path we are attempting to take out of the economic recession…and even more skeptical of the path that some are proposing we go down (such as lower taxes and increased deregulation).

I was interested to see how Krugman would target his message for a large audience of unionized teachers…and I came away with some ...

Benefits of high-quality early learning programs are clear, particularly for the country’s neediest children. For one, research into brain development shows that the period between preschool and third grade is critical for learning language skills, developing the ability to self-regulate behavior, and being able to work with peers. For another, there is the alarming number of children not proficient in reading by the end of third grade—a benchmark increasingly considered important. Further, fewer students are referred to special education programs when they receive proper early learning backgrounds, and research indicates a significant association between a poor early child educational experience, and dropping out of middle or high school. ...

Late last week, David Brooks wrote a New York Times piece that is quite critical of education historian Diane Ravitch. [She has since responded].

Aside from what seems a personal attack on Ravitch (of whom I am a fan), the gist of the piece is that Brooks recognizes standardized testing can be problematic, giving schools “an incentive to drop the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals — like history, poetry, art and sports” and to “game the system by easing out kids who might bring the average scores down, for example.” He doesn't mention the widespread cheating scandal in Atlanta (brought more fully to light this week after his piece posted), or the one suspected in Washington, DC, or the concern that scoring on the Regents in New York is not exactly accurate, but one could argue that those too are caused by perverse incentives created by the testing environment.

Given such incentives, one could also argue (like Ravitch often does) that we should pause in our rush to use test scores to judge school, teacher and even student performance until we have worked some of these issues out.

Instead, Brooks points out that:

[T]he schools that best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But these schools are also ...