If you ever doubt the ability of community organizing to influence debates on public education reform, check out some of these recent success stories. From Pennsylvania to Florida, parent, students and educators across the country are influencing public will and making their voices heard in their local governments. 

Value-added teacher rating models fail to account for the vast number of factors that influence student test scores from one year to the next. Since they can't control for factors like class size, home and community challenges, summer learning loss (which disproportionately affects low-income students), then there is no way they can provide an accurate picture of how effective a teacher is in raising student test scores. 

The Montgomery County public school district is a model for collaboration between teacher unions and administrators, and it provides a strong argument against corporate-style reform efforts that antagonize and seek to dismantle unions.

Updated with new resources - No good news from Washington this week as the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights released unsettling new data that paints a stark picture of the opportunity gap facing students of color. From school discipline policies and teacher equity to grade retention and access to and participation in algebra classes and gifted programs, students of color are disproportionately - and negatively - affected.

With teachers and the teaching profession being attacked and denigrated by politicians across the country, we're lucky teacher job satisfaction has only dropped 15 percent on the annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher.

Targeting one of the most dire inequalities facing our nation - access to quality education - the Occupy Movement is holding a national day of action focused on education. From Albany to Sacramento, students, parents and educators across the country are staging walkouts and marches to departments of education on behalf of equitable funding to provide all students with an equal opportunity to learn. 

Tanya McDowell, the Connecticut mother who was accused of fraudulently enrolling her son in a better school, only wanted what was best for her child in a world where ethnicity and local income are strongly linked to the quality of schools and opportunities available to students. 

This insightful infographic from the Children's Defense Funds lays out a child's access, or lack thereof, to full-day kindergarten in every state, breaking down early childhood education programs by availability and whether the programs are funded by the state or out of pocket by parents.

While the Schott Foundation is pleased that Kentucky legislators are reviewing its data to address the alarming low graduation rate of African American males, we are concerned that they are considering the wrong solution to the problem: charter schools.