9:00PM -
Be sure to join us right back here bright and early tomorrow morning for more live Education Nation coverage. Good night!

8:58PM-
Get mad and get busy - pledge to see Waiting for Superman when it hits a theater near you!

8:55PM-
Rhee hammers home the fact that words are all well and good, but it takes action to make a change. It can’t happen district by district, it has to go big and it has to happen now!

8:53PM-
Rhee –> Weingarten (et al.): Charter schools are public schools!

8:51PM-
Deborah Kenny: What happens when schools and teachers are given freedom - charter schools.

8:36PM-
(@ MSNBC crew): Knowing the odds as you watch Waiting for Superman (or any of the great education reform films out now) makes the experience all the more (potentially) crushing.

8:32PM-
Another live take, including great Reality Checks on the MSNBC town hall discussion:
http://bit.ly/aHt2or

8:30PM-
Attack of the blurry audience phone camera..

8:25PM-
(@ Randi Weingarten): If you are so proud of the teachers contract in DC, how was it your local affiliate turned right around and sued DCPS after they implemented the changes your members approved?

8:16PM-
Joe –> Randi: “You say no one wants lousy teachers, but there are a lot of lousy teachers protected by this system!”

8:10PM-
(@ Randi Weingarten): Is it a noble notion to want to fix a system that was broken by your own obstruction?

8:07PM-
Canada: “If we don’t fix this, we cannot remain a great country.”

8:05PM-
Michelle Rhee and Geoffrey Canada - even though (or perhaps because) they see scenes like the one playing on screen now every day, they can’t turn away.

7:50PM -

7:30PM -
Shot a quick video of the set-up for the town hall discussion @ Rockefeller Plaza:
http://bit.ly/biQaBW

Join us here tonight @ 8pm for a live rundown of all the chatter from MSNBC’s town hall discussion of Waiting for Superman…

And you thought Oprah was a big deal last Monday.

Wait until you catch a glimpse of what NBC has in store for Education Nation next week.

Presidents and Grammy winners and The BLOB, oh my!

Your intrepid Edspresso team will be bringing you all the sights, sounds, bloopers and hijinx, live as they happen (or, at least, as soon as we can get to a decent wi-fi connection).

We’re going behind the scenes to show you, well, behind the scenes.

PIctures? Check. Video? Check. Interviews? Check.

Be sure to bookmark our Ustream Channel for live video (for as long as our batteries last).

And follow @edreform on Twitter for updates and deep thoughts…

Waiting for Superman has energized reformers and citizens long frustrated with the pace of improvement of American schools. It’s vindicated choice proponents (like me!) who started screaming more than two dozen years ago that attention be paid to the problems that pervade urban and suburban education. Finally, there’s movie - an entertaining, non-wonky, but incredibly smart, movie - that tells it like it is. College students cry when they see the trailer, grown people cry when they see the movie, and a national campaign is on to promote its findings and its solutions.

There’s only one big problem in the entire movie. It uses flawed data to characterize charter schools, leaving viewers confused about why, if charters are only marginally good, is this being touted as a solution?

The answer of course is that most charter schools are more than marginally good. In fact, in 25 of 40 states with charter schools in the 2009-2010 school year, charter schools outperformed their public school counterparts in most measures of achievement, including the gateway and foundational courses of reading and math. States where this does not happen either have lousy laws (school boards are in control - only) or lousy authorizers (the now famed Ohio example where small theatre groups with no credibility could “authorize” a charter).

There is much more to it, of course, and we’ve written tomes proving that great laws make for great schools. But the movie doesn’t tell the truth about the achievement of charter schools because it relies on the findings of one group’s one study (which is riddled with methodology and data origination flaws). We’ve rebuffed it before and will continue to do so. And, hey it’s easier to quote the New York Times quoting one study than it is to ask state by state how charters are doing. The reality is that real, objective data can only be derived from meaningful apples to apples comparisons of students in states, using state assessments (which is the predominant means of assessing student achievement anyway).

So before the movie airs publicly, we’d humbly suggest the producers take one more look at the data they are using, lest they confuse and undermine their goal of telling their audiences that there is more than one way to deliver good education and help children succeed, that branding a child by zip code is like mandating everyone eat eggs for breakfast, and that without real quality options (which do indeed exist at a rate of three times 17%) we will not change the landscape, nor the skies above it, and we’ll be waiting for Superman for more decades to come.

*(image: 2007, User:S Sepp, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

Not to belabor the point, but charter schools did not come out winners in the ‘Race to the Top.’ In fact, they were hardly a factor at all. They counted for next to nothing (a possible 40 out of 500 points could be awarded for “ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools“) and states without strong charter laws (Maryland, Hawaii) fared just as well as those with them (Florida, DC).

Advocates and the Department of Education say that 15 states raised caps and strengthened laws during the ‘Race’, thus causing the public - and policymakers - to think much of the hard work has been done.

Take a look at this list and decide for yourself whether such actions merit the rhetoric…

California: Eliminated their annual cap of 100 new schools per year, but have only ever approved between 70 and 90 charters a year. Their cap didn’t inhibit existing growth at all.

Connecticut: Eliminated enrollment restrictions only on high-performing charters, but left a cap on the number of schools allowed to operate and still limits enrollment in most schools.

Delaware: Simply allowed a moratorium on the creation of new charters to expire and did nothing to proactively help or promote charter schools. A new moratorium could be enacted at any time.

More “Tall Tales”

The news is just breaking that Commissioner Bret Schundler has been asked to step down from his position after several missteps over New Jersey’s ‘Race to the Top’ application.

(You can get the back story here.)

We have been pleased to work with our good friend over the past several months to further Gov. Christie’s education agenda for the Garden State, and no doubt, this news will be perplexing to many reformers.

You can bet that Governor Christie will find a great substitute and we applaud the high standards to which he holds himself and his Administration; an attribute lacking in far too many public officials.