(To read more about the development, see these stories from the Los Angeles Times and Colorlines.)

A judge deemed that organizers in Adelanto had gathered valid signatures from more than 50 percent of parents. The decision marks the most successful execution of the law to date, although the school district can still appeal.

First introduced in California two years ago, so-called “parent-trigger” laws have since spread to other states. There are now variations on the law in Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas.

The Adelanto school in question, Desert Trails Elementary, had been classified as low-performing for years. Compared to schools with similar demographics, Desert Trails falls in the bottom 30 percent of schools in California when it comes to standardized test scores.

The Hechinger Report compiled comments from leading thinkers on the decision, pro and con.

John Rogers, an associate professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA), said in an interview:

“There have been millions of dollars pumped into this initiative and parent trigger ideas thus far. After all of that you have this one contentious and unclear result. It’s hard to imagine that this points to an idea that’s going to spread rapidly … The parent trigger has offered an appearance of empowering parents by focusing on a model of parent mobilization that does not promise the sort of deep development and community-wide formation of strong parent organizations that alternative processes have proven to develop.”

The nonprofit group Parents Across America, which advocates for greater parent involvement in public education policy, said in a release:

“Although Parents Across America strongly supports true parent empowerment, we oppose the Parent Trigger process. While the Parent Trigger allows parents to voice discontent with a school, it gives them no opportunity to choose among more positive reforms, and fails to promote the best practices for parent involvement from the ground up.”

Blogger RiShawn Biddle, who edits the website Dropout Nation, wrote:

“The fact that the families are actually looking to transform Desert Trails into a charter school they will operate on their own — instead of simply looking to hand off the school to a chain — is also a strong stand for families taking … powerful roles in shaping teaching, curricula, and school cultures on behalf of their kids.”

Ben Boychuk, a policy advisor at The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit that seeks free-market solutions to social and economic problems, said in an interview:

“The main thing is that proponents of the parent trigger needed to get a real win on the board and I think the court decision in the Adelanto case is a solid win.”

As Sean Cavanagh of Education Week wrote last week, parent-trigger laws are headed to the silver screen this fall. “On Sept. 28, the movie ‘Won’t Back Down,’ a fictional account of frustrated parents seeking to transform a school in Pittsburgh, will open in theaters around the country. The trailer to the film (see the clip below) says that it is ‘inspired by actual events,’ leading to speculation that it will closely mirror real-life examples of parents attempting to use trigger policies to take control of low-performing schools in Compton and Adelanto, Calif. The movie, distributed by 20th Century Fox and produced by Walden Media, stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a parent and Viola Davis as a teacher who work together to marshal support in the community for a petition to overhaul the school and resuscitate it academically.”

Students in the Empire State took a new, longer standardized exam this spring as part of the state’s five-year, $32 million contract with Pearson. The contract mandates field-testing, which is the common practice of testing questions out on students before using them on actual exams.

That hasn’t sat well with some parents, especially in the wake of recent criticism of Pearson, after it was revealed in April that one of its tests included a seemingly nonsensical passage about a talking pineapple.

“Our kids should not be their guinea pigs to test their tests,” said Jayne Wexler, a mother who attended the protest with her third-grade son Justice. “Our kids just went through six days of really hard testing and months of preparation. Let them compensate people to do it, or find a better way.”

The protest included puppets representing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Chancellor of the State Board of Regents, Merryl H. Tisch; and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Nationally, the question of whether value-added calculations should be included in teacher evaluations remains controversial. Critics of value-added models argue that they’re not reliable enough to be used in high-stakes decisions, and that the tests on which they’re based are themselves a poor measure of student achievement.

In the latest issue of Education Next, the study’s authors present their findings. Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff write that the students of teachers with high value-added scores “are more likely to attend college, attend higher-quality colleges, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children during their teenage years.”

The authors analyzed two decades of test-score data on more than 1 million children in grades 4 through 8.

“I think we’ve shown pretty convincingly that there is likely a role for student tests in teacher evaluation,” said Rockoff, a professor at Columbia Business School. “However, nothing we’ve said in our paper says that the role has to be very large.”

Having a teacher with a high value-added score increases a student’s cumulative lifetime earnings by $50,000, according to the researchers. Teen pregnancy rates were also found to be lower, on average, for the students of teachers with high value-added scores.

“We can say that the teachers who tend to raise their students’ test-scores also provide them with something that is going to help them down the road,” said Rockoff.

Though he doesn’t believe value-added scores should be the sole measure of a teacher’s quality, Rockoff said he takes offense at “people who say it should go down to zero.”

The study adds to a growing body of research on the validity and reliability of value-added modeling, as educators and policymakers work to change how teachers are evaluated across the country. Many schools are in the midst of overhauling their evaluation systems as part of the federal School Improvement Grants program.

Rockoff and his colleagues acknowledge some of the potential pitfalls that could come with a greater focus on value-added scores, such as greater teaching to the test and cheating. Rockoff also said that knowing one’s value-added score doesn’t do much to help a given teacher improve his or her teaching.

“One really important reason why value-added can’t be the only component in evaluations is that it provides no feedback to teachers,” Rockoff said. “It’s like telling a baseball player what [his] batting average is. You know you batted .320 last year and that’s good, but it doesn’t tell you what you did that made you do poorly or do well, or what you have to change to get better.”

Students at Democracy Prep charter school in Harlem (Photo by Sarah Garland)

The charter-school movement reached a milestone this week: Charter schools, which are publicly funded but typically privately managed, now educate more than two million students, up from around 1.8 million last year. Despite the heated debate over charter schools, the number is still relatively small considering the size of the K-12 student population in U.S. schools: 55.4 million, according to the federal government’s most recent “Digest of Education Statistics.”

The announcement, made by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), comes as some states are lifting caps on the number of charter schools, and as major charter-management organizations (CMOs) like KIPP and Rocketship Education are receiving federal dollars to expand their programs.

“To some extent, there’s a muscling aside of the small mom-and-pop-type charters by the more networked charter-management-organization-run charters that depend on a larger scale,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has studied charters. “A lot of them started early on at lower grade levels with adding a grade a year, so this is a building-out that’s been reasonable to anticipate.”

More than 500 charters opened for the first time in the 2011-12 school year, the greatest growth since the charter movement began in Minnesota in 1992. According to NAPCS, more than 200,000 students are attending a brand-new charter school this fall, and 400,000 more are on waiting lists. Nearly half of the country’s 5,600 charter schools are concentrated in just five states: Arizona, California (where 20 percent of them are located), Florida, Ohio and Texas.

While a record number of charter schools have opened this year, 150 were shuttered for either low enrollment, financial troubles or weak academic performance, according to NAPCS. Charter critics often point to data showing that only 17 percent of charters outperform nearby traditional public schools, but proponents say closures are evidence that charter-school laws are working.

Henig explains that while he thinks charters will continue to see their enrollments grow, “two million is still a drop in the bucket for the overall public-school population.” He says that successful CMOs are sometimes pressured by the U.S. Department of Education and philanthropic foundations into expanding more quickly than they’d like.

“It’s pretty clear charters are a reform that’s here to stay,” says Henig. “And all of that despite the fact that the evidence of their greater effectiveness is limited.”

Fourth- and eighth-graders’ scores showed modest improvement and racial achievement gaps narrowed on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” which was released Tuesday. The gap between disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers remained largely unchanged, however, and widened in fourth-grade reading.

Compared to 2009, this year’s NAEP scores rose by one point in fourth- and eighth-grade math and eighth-grade reading, but stayed flat in fourth-grade reading. Since 1992, the year NAEP began, math scores have risen substantially, but reading scores have seen only minimal gains.

The black-white score gap closed by one point in both fourth- and eighth-grade math, and the Hispanic-white gap narrowed by one point in fourth-grade math and four points in eighth-grade math. In fourth-grade reading, however, the black-white gap widened.

Perhaps most interesting, there were gains in both reading and math across all income levels, even as the number of people living at or below the poverty line has grown and income gaps widened.

This year’s math results are the highest ever in both fourth and eighth grade. There were also gains in reading, especially among students who receive free- or reduced-price lunch, the indicator used by NAEP to identify poverty status.

Overall, both students living in poverty and more affluent students saw score increases in fourth-grade reading, but six states — Oregon, Washington, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine — and the District of Columbia saw the income gap widen.

Race and Income Achievement Gap Trends (Courtesy of Sean Reardon; based on analysis reported in "Whither opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances")

Sean Reardon, a professor and researcher at the Stanford University School of Education who studies the income achievement gap, says that the widening of the gap in these states could be due to a number of factors, including increased segregation, differences in teacher quality at poor and affluent schools, and varying No Child Left Behind requirements by state. He is currently conducting research to examine how state policy and demographic shifts may influence the income gap.

Reardon also said NAEP’s data on poverty may not be completely reliable because it is self-reported by students and leaves out many other factors.

“It won’t be a complete story,” Reardon said. “Because NAEP doesn’t do a good job of providing detail on income.”

While modest gains were seen in many areas, this year’s results pale in comparison to the gains made in the 1990s, a cause for worry according to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

“The modest increases in NAEP scores are reason for concern as much as optimism,” Duncan said in a statement. “It’s clear that achievement is not accelerating fast enough for our nation’s children to compete in the knowledge economy of the 21st Century.”

President Barack Obama’s announcement this week that he will reduce student-loan payments comes as Americans are approaching one trillion dollars in student-loan debt and the number of people defaulting on their college loans is steadily rising. The College Board reported yesterday that higher-education costs, including for public universities, are at an all-time high.

But while the  “Pay as You Earn” plan will make payments more manageable in the short term, graduates will end up paying more in the long run as interest accrues over a longer period of time, said a U.S. Department of Education spokesperson.

The president’s proposal, which amends the Income-Based Repayment initiative that President George W. Bush signed into law in 2007, allows for even lower monthly payments for up to six million graduates.

Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said they are also making efforts to provide more transparent information to families before they borrow money for college. The Department of Education created a website that shows the schools charging the highest tuition and those with the fastest-growing tuition.

Unlike the American Jobs Act, a bill that would allocate $60 billion for refurbishing schools and paying teacher salaries, “Pay as You Earn” is an executive order that doesn’t require Congressional approval.

Graph from the NCES report

Sen. Tom Harkin’s ( D-Iowa) new proposal to reform No Child Left Behind is the latest attempt by policy makers to fix the country’s  “dropout factories,” identified in the bill as schools with lower than a 60-percent graduation rate. But a new report has found a silver lining amid the crisis: The number of dropouts is already on the decline.

A new National Center for Education Statistics report on dropout rates has found that while there has been an overall decline in dropouts since 1972, there are still 3 million students between the ages of 16 and 24 without a high school diploma, a disproportionate number of whom are minority and poor.

RiShawn Biddle, who writes the conservative blog Dropout Nation, warned against lowering accountability and said the new bill was contrary to traditional Republican views on education.

“Stepping back accountability at the federal level — especially when congressional leaders are unwilling to force states to adopt Common Core standards in reading and mathematics — means setting back reforms, especially the very school choice measures Republicans and conservatives proclaim they support,” Biddle wrote. “But these days, when it comes to No Child, the plans being offered for its re-authorization merely declare that helping all children succeed in school and life is not in anyone’s thoughts.”

The national teachers unions, The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, both came out in support of the new legislation. The AFT released a statement saying it recognizes the need for higher standards and more robust teacher evaluation systems.

The AFT: “The Harkin-Enzi proposal attempts to address a broken accountability system and acknowledges the importance of adopting higher standards, including the Common Core State Standards.”

Education Sector, a think tank, praised the elimination of the “unattainable target like 100% proficiency by 2014” under AYP, but was disappointed that there is  “no new accountability yardstick in place.” It also offered an initial analysis of other elements of the bill here.

Bob Wise, president of The Alliance for Quality Education, thought that the bill was a step in the right direction, especially in how it will deal with “dropout factories.”

“The legislation unveiled today by Senators Harkin and Enzi is especially important for the nation’s high schools. For too long, high schools have been overlooked by federal education policy. This proposal would concentrate improvement efforts on high schools with graduation rates below 60 percent, often referred to as ‘dropout factories.’ It would establish a common, accurate calculation of graduation rates, helping to ensure that the nation’s high schools are held accountable for preparing students for college and careers. It would also support comprehensive efforts by states to strengthen the literacy skills of all students, including young people in high school.”

Six organizations, The Education Trust, Children’s Defense Fund, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, The National Council of La Raza, The Center for American Progress Action Fund and The National Center for Learning Disabilities sent a joint letter to Senator Harkin expressing their concerns that the bill’s achievement goals are vague and could harm special-needs students.

“The loss of goals and progress targets would dismantle the positive aspects of NCLB’s accountability system and be a significant step backward that we can ill afford to take,” the letter said. “Your proposal contains much that could help low-income students, students with disabilities, students of color and English-language learners. But without goals and progress targets it is all but impossible to ensure that these good intentions will actually add up to better outcomes for students.”

Grover Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times:

“Harkin’s bill would return control to the state departments of education and the local school districts, and they’re the ones that got us into the mess that No Child was designed to fix,” Whitehurst said. “Districts and states have not been effective in delivering quality education to children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, so why should we think they’ll be effective this time around?”

A graphic from the report showing suspension rates. Click to enlarge.

A report released today argues racial disparities in suspension and expulsion rates are hurting academics for minority students.

The report, by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, combines information gathered from a variety of recently released studies. It shows that black male middle school students are nearly three times more likely than their white counterparts to be suspended. Suspension rates for black female middle-schoolers are four times higher than those for their white peers.

Data obtained in North Carolina, for example, showed schools suspended first-time offenders who were black far more often for committing the same minor offenses as white students.

Aside from greater suspension rates, the study shows that black students are suspended more often for behavior that is seen as subjective, such as being disrespectful, making excessive noise or exhibiting threatening behavior, while white students are punished for more objective transgressions like smoking, vandalism, or using obscene language.

Out-of-school suspensions, which are also more common with first-offender black students, can not only be disruptive to the student’s progress in school, but also add hardship to a student’s family, the report’s author, Daniel Losen, argued.

The report discourages excluding kids who misbehave, calling it “unwise and unproductive,” and suggested some solutions moving forward:

– that schools be more transparent with their suspension data, which Losen argued should be reported by race, gender and disability status.

– that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act include positive incentives for schools, districts and states that reduce their suspension rates.

– that the federal and state government count out-of-school suspensions in measuring a school’s effectiveness.

U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan speaking at NBC's Education Nation earlier this week. (Photo by Nick Pandolfo)

The Obama administration thinks states aren’t being aggressive enough in tracking how teachers are prepared and making education schools accountable for results. Education Secretary Arne Duncan laid out an ambitious three-part plan this morning that the administration hopes will radically change how states measure the effectiveness of their teacher preparation programs, provide additional scholarship money for teachers in training and fund programs that aim to diversify the teaching workforce.

“Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation support they need so that every student can have the effective teacher they deserve,” Duncan said. “But unfortunately, we all know that the quality of teacher preparation programs today is very, very uneven. The current system that prepares our nation’s teachers offers no guarantees of quality for anyone.”

Duncan said the plan, called “Our Future, Our Teachers,” was inspired by research finding that nearly two-thirds of new teachers feel unprepared for the classroom and that only 15 percent of teachers in high poverty schools come from the top third of college graduates.

The administration wants measurement of a teacher training program’s effectiveness to move more toward outcome-based data like student performance on standardized tests, job placement and teacher retention rates. Duncan also said the plan would encourage states to ask education schools to get feedback on their programs from graduates and their principals.

Louisiana and Tennessee, both of which have state-wide data systems that track academic growth of a teacher’s  students by the preparation program they attended, were called out as potential models for the rest of the country.

“It’s the outcomes that matter,” Duncan said at Education Sector, a non-partisan think tank that hosted a panel discussion where Duncan made the announcement. “For decades teacher preparation programs have had virtually no feedback loop to identify where their programs prepare well for the classroom and where they need to improve.”

Under this new plan, the Department of Education will assist states in developing more comprehensive data systems, reward good programs and help them scale up, but also help states reshape or close low performing programs.

Labeling a teacher training program ineffective is something that rarely happens. In 2010, Duncan noted that only 37 of more than 1,500 teacher preparation programs across America were deemed low performing, with more than half of states claiming to have no poor programs.

Our Future, Our Teachers was widely welcomed as a huge step in the right direction by groups with different agendas. Dennis Van Roekel, president of National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, called it “a good day.” This sentiment was echoed by Wendy Kopp, CEO and founder of Teach For America, an alternative certification program for teachers, and heads of education schools and national organizations like The National Center for Teacher Quality.

“It’s a nice change of tone,” Van Roekel said. “To talk about building up the profession instead of tearing it down.”

The new plan will give high achieving students up to $10,000 in the last year of their teacher preparation program.

The final element of the plan is a $40 million dollar proposal that would support teacher training programs in minority-serving institutions. It will fund Augustus Hawkins Centers of Excellence across the country with up to $2 million to diversify a teaching workforce that has become whiter and more female in recent years.