“Communities For Excellent Public Schools” has just come out with a useful report. This is how they describe themselves:

Communities For Excellent Public Schools is a newly formed coalition supported by 24 local, state and national parent and community organizing groups across the country. CEPS has launched a national campaign calling for dramatic action to improve low performing schools by emphasizing parent, student and community engagement and research-based educational practices.

On July 28, 2010 CEPS issued a report, Our Communities Left Behind: An Analysis of the Administration’s School Turnaround Policies, with the support of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University documenting that students in schools identified under the U.S. Department of Education’s school turnaround program are overwhelmingly poor, African American and Hispanic and that the majority of schools are in our nation’s cities. The report, and our accompanying proposal for Sustainable School Transformation, critique the Administration’s school turnaround policies for focusing too much on who runs and works in schools and not enough on what needs to happen within classrooms and school buildings and for lacking an adequate research-base in formulating policy option.

You can find English and Spanish versions of the report on their website.

This report comes out the same week a different critique of the administration’s policies were issued by civil right groups (see Good Ideas In Proposal From Civil Rights Groups). Unfortunately, if you scroll down to the middle of this Ed Week article, it took about a day for that coalition to implode.

I know several of the community organizing groups in the CEPS organization, and don’t anticipate seeing similar problems with them.