Powerful Problem-Solving … For Teachers and Students

By Kristin Gray June 24, 2015 12:00 pm

Football or Music? What's the Best K-12 Investment?

• Ed Week

In a perfect world, all high school activities would be fully funded. But to educators struggling to find the financial means to establish and pay for educational priorities, it is clear that we…

Vergara: careful what you wish for

A new article by Kevin Welner from the National Education Policy Center weighs whether the Vergara plaintiffs, in their eagerness to take on teacher unions, have invited litigation from policy and reform rivals. When the Vergara decision was first handed down, it was celebrated by advocates who sought a revision of the teacher dismissal process, particularly of teachers with low results from value-added models of student…

Too demanding too soon?

Do the Common Core Standards ask too much of 5- and 6-year-olds in reading? asks Liana Heiten in Education Week. The debate is heated, at its heart the standard stating kindergartners should be able to "read emergent-reader tests with purpose and understanding." Experts agree it's a more advanced expectation than previously, but have less agreement about whether it's an overreach. Critics argue the standard is not "developmentally…

To play or not to play

As American classrooms focus on test scores, younger students have gotten more instruction and less time in sandboxes, writes Motoko Rich for The New York Times. Nationally, schools have curtailed arts and recess in favor of longer blocks for reading and math. A study by the University of Virginia comparing federal surveys of kindergarten teachers in 1998 and 2010 found the number of teachers whose students had daily art and music…

The Opt-Out Movement Is Gaining Momentum

• Ed Week

While addressing a group of state schools superintendents in 2013, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described…

Excellence Should Not Be Isolated…

Vicki Cobb: The Demise of the Artist-Teacher…

New York: Dissident Group of Regents Offers Alternative Vision of Teacher Evaluation…

To Boost Reading Skills, Restore the Liberal Arts to Elementary School By Robert Pondiscio…

Common Core’s First Breakout Hit? By Robert Pondiscio…

The NYSED Meetings: Leading to Change or More of the Same?…

Emotions are contagious…

SPED data and accessibility

A new report from the National Center for Educational Outcomes analyzes whether states publicly report data for students with disabilities with the same frequency, and in the same detail, as it reports on the assessment of nondisabled children, as required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It also assesses reporting of performance gaps across years, and ease of access to public reporting of participation and…

Common Core's next problem

As California districts finish administering new Smarter Balanced online Common Core assessments, educators face the next hurdle: sharing data with millions of parents about how their children fared, writes Sarah Tully for EdSource. It's anticipated that fewer students will meet proficiency standards compared to the earlier California Standards Tests in 2013 and before. New scores break down into four categories: "standard exceeded,"…