This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch, a research professor at New York University and author of the bestselling “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” a critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement. Ravitch was an assistant secretary of education in the administration of former president George H.W. Bush. This first appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser .

By Diane Ravitch

Former D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee has sent her followers to Alabama to promote charter schools, but Alabama should say “no, thanks.” The District of Columbia is no model for school reform.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is the gold standard of education testing, shows that Washington D.C. has the biggest achievement gap between black and white students in the nation, double the size of Alabama’s. Alabama should not take lessons from one of the nation’s lowest performing districts.

Charter schools haven’t helped other states and they won’t help Alabama. Here are the reasons why:

This was written by Mark Phillips, professor emeritus of secondary education at San Francisco State University and author of a monthly column on education for the Marin Independent Journal .

By Mark Phillips

There is a very important controversy related to children that is flying under the radar of most educators and parents that affects schoolchildren nationwide.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders. It is used by mental health professionals, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and policy makers. There have been a number of revisions since it was first published in 1952, and each revision has added to the number of conditions labeled as mental disorders.

Some disputes are taking place related to the latest revision, the DSM-5, scheduled for release in May 2013. Drafted by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association, the revision would change the diagnosis of “mental disorders” in a number of major categories, including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Here’s a problem that has somehow been ignored by nearly every school district in the country: Cross-gender dressing. But now a Virginia school district is considering a ban against it and that could start a whole new trend.

The school board in Suffolk, a district with about 14,400 students about 20 miles from Norfolk, is expected to vote next month on a dress code that would prohibit students from clothing “not in keeping with a student’s gender” and that “causes a disruption and/or distracts others from the education process or poses a health or safety concern,” Reuters reported.

Why is this coming up now?

Here is a eulogy for a pioneering scientist that says more about the lifelong effects of a dynamic teacher on his students than any “value-added” formula ever could.

The eulogy was delivered by Jeffrey Ravetch, head of the Leonard Wagner Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology at Rockefeller University in New York, at a memorial service last week for his former teacher and mentor, Norton Zinder, a ground-breaking geneticist and microbiologist. Zinder, who was my brother-in-law’s father, died this month at age 83.

In an era in which it is popular to make the assessment of teachers more “scientific” by using mathematical equations to determine a teacher’s worth, Ravetch’s tribute shows just how much of an art the process of teaching and mentoring really is. It’s a human exercise, not a numbers game.

Norton Zinder’s life story was classically inspirational. He was born in New York to parents who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. His father valued nothing more than education but could not afford to finish his own. He worked as a children’s dress salesman to feed his family, swearing that he would ensure his children were fully educated. He did.

Obviously brilliant as a child, Norton graduated from the Bronx High School of Science at age 15, and studied day and night to graduate from Columbia University at age 18. Then he joined Joshua Lederberg ’s famous laboratory at the University of Wisconsin as a graduate student. There he led the charge in the discovery of bacterial transduction, a process through which viruses transfer genes from one bacterium to another, one of the principal achievements for which Lederberg was awarded a Nobel Prize.

This was written by Andrew Ganim, a Philadelphia resident who shared a version of this story as testimony to the School Reform Commission last month. This first appeared on the The Philadelphia Public School Notebook blog.

By Andrew Ganim

Talk to teachers in Philadelphia, and you’ll hear more than a few complaints about walkthrough teams. These are the groups of educators sent each month to struggling schools to see how well teachers are following the details of the mandated curriculum, down to such items as how desks are arranged and what’s on classroom walls.

One of these walkthrough teams came into my wife’s 3rd grade classroom in Lea Elementary School, took one look at a lovingly assembled reading corner, and determined it was “clutter.” As if that were not enough, the District then paid someone to come in over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend to remove it.

Does the headline “Walkthrough team deems reading area ‘clutter,’ removes it,” sound more like something you would expect to read in the Notebook, or in The Onion?

Unfortunately, it actually happened.