Subscribe to the Dropout Nation Twitter feed for up-to-the-minute news and commentary. Check out what followers read yesterday:

• In D.C., Grassroots Education Project needs volunteers to work w/Tubman Elementary School students. Learn more: http://bit.ly/aWElRX #DCPS #
• RT @Edubeat: Two unions willing to negotiate a cut in #LAUnified school year: http://bit.ly/b3S0t5 Shouldn’t be a discussion. Understand… #
• that the district is open more days than required. But still, unless #LAUnified increases instructional time in schools, cuts in school… #
• seems counterproductive to improving student learning. #
• RT @MarcSean86: #Edweek N.J. Leg. Panel to Consider School Choice Measure — http://bit.ly/a70VHX #edreform #ChrisChristie #
• RT @MarcSean86: Thanks to Parent Revolution, CA parents now have a voice in the schools — now its CT’s turn http://bit.ly/aRabn9 #edreform #
• Cato’s @Andrew_Coulson rightly fisks @Myglesias/M. McCardle for touting “anti-lemon” study. Shoddy #edresearch http://bit.ly/aNLAb5 #
• In D.C., #MichelleRhee considers extending #DCPS year to make up for snow closings. May even extend instructional day. http://bit.ly/bWUVIw #
• Dallas already engages in school research, so #HISD wants to do so too, according to HouChron http://bit.ly/bpx6TO #edreform #edresearch #
• RT @tvanderark: 2 important #teacherquality articles: Klein’s op-ed and LA Daily’ News http://bit.ly/amGa1P #edreform #edpolicy #edequality #
• RT @MarcSean86: Funny but kinda true — 5 phrases black people must abolish if we are ever to get ahead — http://bit.ly/dB3MDP #
• Do parents know best? Not always. Have teachers/school districts failed to show they can do better? Well… #parentpower #edreform #
• A child’s education is like a house. Parents are architects; teachers/admins are the contractors/builders… #parentpower #edreform #
• And the child is ultimately the client. #parentpower #edreform #
• RT @linkstoliteracy @GraphicNovels: Best Graphic Novels 4 Kids February 2010 http://bit.ly/b4dgwd #literacy #education #
• RT @ibeatcancrtwice: True character is revealed by how we treat people who can do nothing for us. ~ unknown Too true. #
• RT @lioncaller: @davidwlocke I think #edreform is also motivated by uneven access/quality among classes/races. #
• RT @lioncaller: @davidwlocke No, the conversation now about #edreform is about trying to make sure everyone gets a good education. #
• RT @EdEquality: DO NOT MISS THIS NYer tribute to the civil rights mt w/ photos and audio. (Tx @alexanderrusso) http://bit.ly/dC21hp #edgap #
• RT @Eduflack: RT @saramead Education policy lessons from health care reform http://alturl.com/iuak #edreform #edpolicy #NoChild #
• RT @josephlawler: SCOTUS campaign finance decision may tilt political field in favor of young folks, help reform SS http://nyti.ms/cZYQZl #
• BTW Citizens United decision may also help spur #edreform into the 2010 congressional, state races. #
• RT @DrStevePerry: Discussing Merit Pay for Teachers on CNN: http://tiny.cc/m29jo – What do YOU think? #TeacherQuality #edreform #

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More of what’s going on in the dropout nation today:

1. Kevin Carey reviews the decision by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to skip Race to the Top. His thoughts? “. This is just Rick Perry running for re-election against a legitimate primary opponent in Kay Bailey Hutchinson by pandering to the strain of bizarre and archaic separatism that is apparently still alive and well in the Texas body politic.” Ouch.
2. Andy Smarick offers more thoughts on Race to the Top, courtesy of his latest Education Next article. Writes he, the reform effort will only work if the district gets tough. His Fordham cohort, Smooth Mike, hopes that the recent Democrat debacle in the Bay State will force federal ed spending to decline. By the way: The Education Writers Association has just launched its new site tracking federal stimulus spending in education. Check it out.
3. Ed Week reports on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s first year in office. Predictably, Diane Ravitch, as usual, has few kind words to say. Why? Basically because she shares the same thoughts on Duncan’s focus on charters, standardized testing and teacher quality as Randi Weingarten.
4. A University of California research coalition releases a report detailing how poor families are struggling — both in school and in the economy — courtesy of the recession. Whether schools can actually solve such issues — or should — is questionable. But interesting report nonetheless. (HT-John Fensterwald)
5. Speaking of new stuff, educator Kevin Washburn’s new book is out. (HT-Chad Ratliff)
6. Matthew Ladner goes all off education and writes about the U.S. Supreme Court’s strike down of campaign finance limits on corporate donations. This could become a major factor in education, especially as the NEA and AFT have doubled the number of campaign donations raised from their rank-and-file thusfar. I’ll talk more about this and the impact of Scott Brown’s election on education reform tomorrow in The American Spectator.
7. In the Beltway ed reform world, Big Ed Reform Andy No. 1 and Kim Smith are teaming up to form a consultancy. Rotherham’s former Education Sector colleague, Sara Mead, is joining.
8. Outside the Beltway, L.A. Unified’s reform effort continues. Here are the collection of proposals from the charter school operators, teachers union groups and mayoral offices. Enjoy.
9. And for some thoughts on teacher performance pay, check out Dropout Nation‘s video featuring Jason Kamras of D.C. Public Schools.

If only if this was the Redskins instead of the Jets. Photo courtesy of ESPN.

What’s happening in the dropout nation that doesn’t involve pigskin:

1. In New York, Randi Weingarten’s successor as head of the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City local is using the language of Gary Orfield and Richard Kahlenberg in his opposition to the lifting of New York State’s charter school cap. In the Daily News , United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew declares that “charter schools are actually becoming a separate and unequal branch of public education”, citing the low levels of ELL students in some charters. Could it be that the parents of these students, mostly immigrants themselves, don’t have the sophistication or access to information about charters to make a different choice than send their kids to traditional public schools? Or could it be that, like parents of special ed students, ELL parents tend to think that traditional public schools can handle those children better than charters, even though the evidence of this is sparse (and often, would lean against that conclusion)? Mulgrew doesn’t ponder either of these matters. But certainly he wouldn’t. Mulgrew isn’t thinking about equality or integration. Or even about the kids under the care of his rank-and-file.  He’s thinking about the best interests of his union.
2. Meanwhile in Albany, the notoriously dysfunctional state legislature is looking to strip the State University of New York of its power to authorize charters, according to Cara Matthews. This is the price Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (and his ally, the AFT’s New York State affiliate, which opposes charters altogether) hope to extract in exchange for lifting the cap on charters. As you would expect, Gov. David Paterson and charter school advocates oppose this exercise in school reform futility. This isn’t exactly New York’s Race to the Top.
3. Even worse, as the New York Times reports, the New York City Department of Education, one of the most-aggressive charter authorizers, would also lose the authorizing role under the plan. Apparently, Silver and the AFT’s New York State local wants to make sure that either New York State is out of Race to the Top or that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chief, Joel Klein, lose as much as possible under the plan. Although I am generally against allowing school districts to have authorizing power (mostly because they tend to never use it and keep out charters), New York City has been the exception and should keep the authorizing ability. As usual, this is typical teachers union/Sheldon Silver politics. Neither are worthy of respect.
4. Meanwhile Paterson proposes to give SUNY and the City University of New York freedom from state budgeting, reports the Press & Sun-Bulletin. This includes allowing the universities to raise tuition without legislative approval. As I’ve noted in a 2008 Hechinger Institute report, such freedom tends to not work out well for college affordability or for expanding access to higher ed among poor students.
5. As for higher ed, InsideHigherEd reports that public funding for state universities is on a “historic” decline. Now this depends on what you mean by decline. As their chart notes, higher ed funding has still increased by more than 19 percent (and a 29 percent increase, if you add federal stimulus funds into the equation). Cry me a river.
6. San Diego Union-Tribune writer Dean Calbreath looks at the recent Alliance for Excellent Education, EdWeek and Bureau of Labor Statistics data and concludes that dropping out equals fewer job opportunities.
7. The L.A. Times opines about the Matthew Kim teacher termination saga and concludes that the entire system of teacher hiring and compensation needs an overhaul.
8. Speaking of teacher compensation: Battles over teachers pensions and retirement benefits are starting to heat up. Vermont is the battleground this time around. The NEA’s Vermont affiliate is already on the warpath.
9. John Fensterwald reports on the growing opposition to Common Core Standards, especially among mathematicians. This battling over the value of a national curriculum — some would say it already exists — is going to be an undercurrent in the battle over the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.
10. Entrepreneur Sramana Mitra takes a look at how technology can be deployed to improve education.
11. EducationNews‘ Michael Shaughnessy interviews Anthony Rao, who looks at how schools teach boys and girls and how it may contribute to the former’s achievement gap issues.
12. Jay Mathews thinks the Brookings Institution’s recent study on education news coverage overstates the problem of mainstream reporting on ed news.
13. Don’t forget to check out this week’s Dropout Nation podcast. The commentary focuses on the need to improve leadership throughout school districts. Sure, teachers unions are part of the problem. But leadership at the district and school levels are also the reasons why so many school districts are in academic and bureaucratic freefall.
14. And given this is Martin Luther King day (and courtesy of Eduflack), don’t forget to listen to the famed ” Have a Dream” speech today. And remember, when it comes to education, we are far away from fulfilling either the dream and even further from the Promised Land. But we will get there soon.

Scenes of the Season: New York's Waldorf-Astoria at Christmastime

Merry Christmas to each and every one of you and your families. And to those celebrating other holidays: Happy holidays to you and the ones you love.

Here is what’s going on in the dropout nation:

1. The NEA’s Los Angeles local is suing L.A. Unified over its school reform plans. John Fensterwald’s response? The suit is merely “an attempt to preserve dues-paying members.”
2. By the way: Check out my latest report, this on the pressures forcing the American Federation of Teachers to make some (small) moves towards embracing school reform, in The American Spectator.
3. Tom Vander Ark offers more thoughts on the role of entrepreneurism in education and how it can improve education for all students. He also discusses some of the changes that need to come to education philanthropy.
4. While some parents and teachers in the New York City borough of Queens are battling the closure of Jamaica High School, schools Chancellor Joel Klein isn’t backing down. Says he: “I would like to know — who would send their kid to a school that has a lower than 50 percent graduation rate. Well, if your kids wouldn’t go there, whose kids should go there?” He’s got a point.
5. The Merced Sun-Star isn’t too thrilled with the California legislature’s struggle to pass a second round of Race to the Top-related legislation. Meanwhile, in Maryland, a former state board of education member accuses Gov. Martin O’Malley of being more-interested in teachers union votes than in take advantage of the federal money to improve academic achievement.
6. And in Indiana, the state Department of Education has unveiled its plan for competing for Race to the Top dollars. It admits that it doesn’t meet many of the data system requirements. It will also require school districts to fully embrace reform in order to receive whatever RttT money the Hoosier State can muster. At least the state’s making some progress on the teacher quality front.
7. For those looking for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act data on education stimulus spending, here is the state and program data for this month (in Excel spreadsheets).
8. In Rochester, the mayor there wants to take over the city’s atrocious school district. He’ll likely have more success than his colleague in Milwaukee has had this year.
9. At EducationNews, teacher Marion Brady accuses Arne Duncan, the charter school movement and education philanthropists of attempting to “hasten the destruction of… universal, free, public schooling.” But then, Brady offers suggested reforms that would fully alter traditional public education as we know it. Enjoy.
10. Heritage Foundation’s Dan Lips reads Walter Williams’ discontent with graduation rates for blacks, then offers examples of how to improve educational achievement.
11. The Economist discusses how technology disrupted the media business — in 1845. The interesting question for education policy types and teachers should be: What technologies will disrupt education policy as we know it today.
12. U.S News & World Report looks at the role of post-Katrina New Orleans as the epicenter of the charter school movement and education reform. Slowly, the city’s education model is starting to resemble the Hollywood Model for education I touted some years ago.
13. Edurati Review offers up its best posts of 2009. One of them: A well-thought explanation of why American public education must be reformed.

Sign up for the Twitter feed for up-to-the-minute news. Also, check out Dropout Nation’s featured reports:

1. Making Families Consumers — and Kings — in Education
2. Ability Tracking: Outmoded Idea in the New Education Paradigm
3. Voices of the Dropout Nation: Walter Dozier on Education and Violence

The Los Angeles Unified School District has long been renowned for its academic failure and bureaucratic intransigence. But, as I report today in National Review, the dysfunctional district is now looking to bring school choice of a sort to the district. Read more and check out the special gallery with statistics on the district’s academic and bureaucratic troubles.

Leading a parent revolution.

Back in 2003, when I was a reporter in Los Angeles, I had begun work on a piece about Steve Barr, whose Green Dot Charter Schools was simply a handful of charter schools in Tinseltown’s gritty neighborhoods. What was fascinating at the time — which my editors could never fully grasp at that time — was the revolutionary (for L.A.) ideas he espoused: That city’s Latino students, often cast off as future gang-bangers, potential Chicano revolutionaries or likely cleaning staff, could actually achieve academic excellence, graduate from college and become contributors to the city’s — and nation’s — socioeconomic fabric; and that L.A. Unified and its sister school districts owed their taxpayers far better than substandard teaching and curricula.

These days, it seems difficult to realize how dispirited most were about the possibilities of achieving a high quality education in L.A. schools. The gamesmanship of maintaining a residence in Beverly Hills to attend the schools, as shown in the film Slums of Beverly Hills was no movie fantasy. For the poorest parents, many of whom were (and still are) undocumented immigrants, the struggle to achieve the American dream on behalf of their children and themselves made such activity the last thing on their minds. The simple idea that every neighborhood should have a great school, a concept that had already taken hold in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and New York through the charter school movement and school district overhauls, was not even considered in L.A. Unified, a district which managed to squash Jaime Escalantes and Richard Riordans alike. Especially odd given that California was the second state to legislate charters into existence.

Barr wanted to make this happen by gathering parents and focusing them on the basics. Back then, he had a few believers, notably boxing legend Oscar De La Hoya (the namesake of one of Green Dot’s schools) and the parents left behind by the region’s educational establishment. This was two years before Barr and his crew began staring down L.A. Unified, first in an unsuccessful attempt to convert Thomas Jefferson High into a charter school — and four years before he and parents at Locke High finally wrested control of that school from the district’s bureaucracy. And certainly long before national attention noted that in the City of Angels, another model for education reform — one both eschewed the inside-the-Beltway game and evolved independent of the Teach For America school — was coming to fore.

Now, with L.A. Unified talking and (mostly) walking school choice and accountability, one can now fully get what Steve Barr was doing. And as he leaves the board of the charter school organization he founded, it will be interesting to see what he does next.

By the way: More on L.A. Unified will appear in National Review Online this week.