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NBC is to be commended for its support of the third annual Education Nation Summit, a gathering of leaders from government, education and business in New York City this week to consider the challenges and future outlook for America’s public education system.  And, to be sure, included in this year’s event were a handful of case studies of real schools and districts that are successfully addressing challenging problems and finding solutions that support student growth and success.  For me, the most impressive and knowledgeable presenters about public schooling, student achievement and local realities were the educators themselves, who displayed a thoughtful, articulate approach to their work and provided practical, solution-oriented initiatives that are proving successful in meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student population.

So, the good news is that the Summit featured impressive public educators and education researchers who provided real world information and experience to the event.  On the down side, too many of the program presenters were people famous in other walks of life whose contributions to the education conversation provided little value.  This is not to say that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice doesn’t have a compelling personal story about ...

By Rocío Inclán, Director of the Human and Civil Rights Department of the National Education Association

October is Bullying Prevention month, and this year we see signs of progress in the national effort to stop bullying in our schools.

For example, the recently released 2011 National School Climate Survey from the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) shows for the first time decreased levels of victimization based on sexual orientation. It also found increased levels of student access to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) school resources and support.

This is excellent news. LGBT students have been a major target of bullying in schools.  But the fact that 8 out of 10 LGBT students still experienced harassment in the past year because of their sexual orientation reminds us we have a long way to go.

Here is another encouraging sign: Bullying prevention resources are far more widely available today than in the past. Google “bullying prevention,” and a plethora of resources will open up to you.  Indeed, there is so much anti-bullying material out there, it is hard to ...

The civic mission of schools has a tendency to get lost in the din of other debates surrounding our nation’s education system. Beyond the uproar over teacher evaluations, standardized testing and the role of government, we must keep in mind the fundamental purposes of public education, the heart and soul of a public system.

This civic purpose of public education seeks to empower our nation’s children, and future leaders, with a deep seated understanding of citizenship, civic duty and societal needs. It aims to provide the very tools needed for future generations to participate in the debates surrounding not just education policy, but other critical issues we as a nation – and member of the global community – face in the twenty first century.  Education is more than just factual knowledge, and civic engagement and participation depend on a deeper understanding of our culture, society and history. ...

The purple shaded area in a Venn diagram of two overlapping circles – one blue and one red – is the sometimes uneasy but always necessary connection between traditional public schools and the business community. The extent to which healthy public-private partnerships develop depends entirely on how those partnerships are ultimately managed by those at the local level.

It’s not surprising that public schools and businesses may have an inherent distrust of each other. After all, their missions are very different; public schools exist to provide every child a quality education and businesses exist to make a profit. But the economic recession is forcing schools to do more with less, which is in turn pushing more districts to look at ways to finance their operations, including by forming partnerships with businesses and other community stakeholders that may not have existed in the past. ...

It seems everyone has an opinion about the teacher strike currently taking place in Chicago.  I do too, but it’s not about who’s to blame.  There’s plenty of that to go around.  What I do know is that regardless of how this strike ends, nobody will have won—

• Students will have missed valuable learning time
• Teachers and their union will be vilified for selfishness
• The mayor and school board’s judgment will be suspect
• Parents will be disappointed and frazzled with child care challenges
• The President’s “reform” agenda will be questioned
• The citizens of Chicago will be embarrassed and dismayed for their city

While I have followed the events as they’ve unfolded in Chicago between the mayor, the school board he appointed, and the teachers’ union, the facts I’m able to glean from public sources only raise questions in my mind as to what’s really going on.  I do know that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are under-resourced and that ...

Leadership matters. Principals set the tone of a school and can inspire students and teachers alike to reach new heights. They are second only to teachers among the in-school influences on student success.

Yet we don’t hear much about how to measure a principal’s performance. And the little research that exists on principal evaluation suggests that current systems do not accurately judge performance, do not provide information that is useful for professional growth, and often aren’t even used.

The federal government has begun to take note, making changes to principal evaluations a condition of Race to the Top funds, School Improvement Grants, and waivers to some of the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, they are often requiring that the evaluations be based in significant part on student performance on standardized assessments. As we all know, test scores represent a very narrow definition of ...

Did you know that each year more than three million students are suspended from school?

While some of these suspensions are the result of violent or other extreme behavior, others are the result of relatively minor infractions – dress code violations, being late for school and so on.

Should we really be putting students through suspension for a minor infraction? Out-of-school suspension does not benefit schools in terms of test scores or graduation rates. And it can have a very negative impact on individual children. In addition to immediate academic consequences stemming from time out of the classroom (we all know the phrase, “you can’t teach to an empty desk”), suspension is a leading indicator of whether a child will drop out of school. It is also related to risk for future incarceration, part of the school-to-prison pipeline that we often hear about.

And these impacts are not spread equally throughout the student population. A recent report from the Civil Rights Project found that Black, Latino and Native American students are much more likely than their White and Asian American peers to be suspended. Seventeen percent of Black students – that is one out of every six enrolled in K-12 education – were suspended at least once in ...

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Phi Delta Kappa International (PDK, an LFA member) & Gallup recently released the 2012 Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Learn Americans' thoughts on local schools, teacher evaluation, workforce readiness and more.

The Democratic National Convention is currently taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina and the Republican National Convention just wrapped in Tampa last week.  It’s a presidential election year and the majority of dialogue, consequently, revolves around the national political scene – from the implications of veep picks and endorsements to super PAC contributions and the influence of political ads. Certainly, inside the Beltway, organizations and entities are caught up in a fierce dialogue around  two competing visions for the country. Local contests, school board elections for instance, are just one casualty of the national hype, yet they are crucial to the vitality of our democracy.

We know that only a very small percent of registered voters typically participate in local school board elections.  Lack of information is a significant explanatory factor for low voter participation in school board elections. First, what do school boards do? Who can be elected? And when are elections? (You might not be able to vote for your school board at the same time as you vote for President.) It’s not unusual, according to ...

In the August 19, 2012, edition of my home town paper The Washington Post, the Opinion page featured a column by James C. Roumell, founder of Roumell Asset Management, LLC, titled “What I built with government help.” 

In his column, Roumell described growing up in a working class family in Detroit with a single mother who supported them with a unionized job with decent pay made possible by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.  Roumell subsequently went to college with the help of Pell Grants and government loans made possible by the Higher Education Act of 1965. His now successful business was made possible by the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. ...