The Hampton Roads (VA) Virginian Pilot (1/21, Hulette, Newsome) reports that the tax deduction for teachers’ personal spending for school expenses expired this year. But “Mary Kusler, director of government relations for the National Education Association, said this isn’t the first time the tax break has expired. Each time, it has come back, she said, and it probably will again.”
The Washington Post (1/19, Strauss) “Answer Sheet” blog features an address by Diane Ravitch to the Modern Language Association about the Common Core standards, in which she explains “why so many educators and parents are now opposed to the standards and are reacting angrily to the testing that accompanies them.” She argues that NCLB and RTTT have “has produced a massive demoralization of educators; an unprecedented exodus of experienced educators ... the closure of many public schools,” and “the opening of thousands of privately managed charters,” which she says were often “low-quality for-profit charter schools” or “low-quality online charter schools.” She further claims that the agenda of the Common Core as well as that of NCLB and RTTT is not improved education, but is instead “cutting costs, standardizing education,” and “eliminating unions and pensions.”
The Sacramento (CA) Bee (1/17, Kalb, Lambert) reports that yesterday, the California Board of Education unanimously “approved emergency rules” that will govern “a historic overhaul of school spending designed to direct money to the state’s neediest students.” The new formula “proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown and approved by legislators” would award funds according to a school district’s “share of low-income students, English-language learners and foster children.”
The San Mateo (CA) Daily Journal (1/14, Swartz) reports on California state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg’s Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2014, which proposes spending $198 million annually towards offering pre-k for all four-year-olds. The program would take five years to reach all eligible children. The plan includes “a model of both a morning and afternoon session for two-teacher teams.”
Education Week (1/10, Gewertz) reports on efforts to implement the Common Core by the ten California Office to Reform Education districts. The story notes that ED “recently granted eight of the CORE districts a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act that essentially allows the group to set up its own accountability system.” As a result, the group has “created performance assessments that are intended to be complex, nuanced gauges of how students are doing as they’re learning, and to serve simultaneously as instructionally valuable exercises in and of themselves.”
Education Week (1/9) has released its 18th annual “Quality Counts” report, titled “District Disruption & Revival.” The report is a package of articles exploring the budgetary, social, and academic pressures that are changing public schools at the district level. The package includes a report on how several districts are coping with “fiscal and educational pressures demanding a break from business as usual,” a profile of Memphis and how educators there are working to implement a variety of rival education models, and a piece on how districts are adjusting to financial realities as the nation slowly rebounds from the recession.
EdSource Today (1/10) reports that though it has “largely steered clear of making education grants in California over the past half-decade,” the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is considering a series of grants to help with Common Core-related professional development in the state. The article notes that the foundation has given the Fresno and Long Beach USDs $5 million grants “for innovative ways to pursue training in the new math and English language arts standards.” The piece says that the foundation is “impressed with Fresno’s and Long Beach’s proposals” and “will decide by late spring whether to expand that initiative to networks of districts that may affect 25 percent to 30 percent of California’s 6 million students.”
The Los Angeles Times (1/8, Megerian) reports on a proposal in the California state Senate to “use an upcoming jump in education funding to make transitional kindergarten available to every 4-year-old in California,” calling the plan by Democratic lawmakers “another sign of the state’s rebounding financial health.” The Times reports that the plan would cost nearly $1 billion when it is “fully phased in by 2020.” Noting that Superintendent Tom Torlakson is on board with the plan, the Times adds that it would “would fund the hiring of 8,000 more teachers” and raise the number of students eligible for transitional kindergarten from 120,000 to 470,000.
The Los Angeles Times (1/6, Ceasar) reports that GED Testing Service has released “a revamped computer-only” version of its General Educational Development test, noting that the move “has spurred competition from two other test providers letting students decide which format they prefer.” Noting that the new GED is “meant to be more rigorous and places a greater focus on job readiness than high school equivalency,” the Times reports that some states are moving to the competitors’ exams, citing “cost and accessibility concerns with the elimination of the pencil-to-paper test.”
The Wall Street Journal (1/7, A3, Banchero, Subscription Publication) reports that a report from EducationSuperHighway finds that 72% of public schools have Internet connections that are too slow to take full advantage of new online education opportunities. It is increasingly a problem as teachers use the Internet to pull lesson plans and utilize demanding software. The Journal says that the states that have adopted the Common Core standards face an additional challenge dealing with new online assessments next year.
The AP (1/6, Elliott) reports on the “relentless warnings” from Common Core critics, who “say they were written in private and never tested in real classrooms, and that educators aren’t familiar enough with” them. Moreover, critics also cite the “multi-billion dollar price tag” that come with the standards. Opponents also pan the unfamiliar classroom content, but supporters say that such “worries are overblown and miss nuances” of the standards. Critics also “argue that states were pressured to sign onto the Common Core standards to get federal economic stimulus money to keep teachers on the job.” The article notes, near the end, that Education Secretary Arne Duncan “has little patience for the criticism,” noting that he has pushed back against accusations that the Common Core constitutes a “federal takeover of the curriculum.”
The AP (1/4, Elliott) reports that both opposition to and support for the Common Core Standards have “yielded strange bedfellows,” noting that teachers unions are “linking arms with tea partyers” in opposition, while President Obama is “working in tandem with the US Chamber of Commerce and energy giant Exxon.” Meanwhile, the AP reports that there has been significant GOP infighting over the standards, reporting that once small-government desiring tea party activists gained prominence, “they targeted the standards and forced lawmakers to choose between the business wing of the Republican Party and them.”
A Hechinger Report (1/3) article profiles Laurel Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, which has high poverty levels and where some 60 percent of students are English language learners. The piece notes that students at the school tend to perform better at math than they do at language arts because math is “a kind of transitional language for” ELL students. However, the piece notes that teachers at the school are concerned that the transition to the Common Core Standards may erode that edge because of the increased focus on language. The article quotes Ben Sanders of the California Office to Reform Education saying, “The language demands of the Common Core are enormous. This is absolutely going to be a big challenge to English learners.”
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (1/3, Stotsky, Subscription Publication), Sandra Stotsky, a former member of the Common Core Validation Committee, writes that despite the Common Core’s lofty goals related to improved critical thinking skills and elevated standards, the math standards do not prepare students for studying STEM subjects in college. She states that the Common Core math standards intentionally omit a heavy focus on trigonometry and precalculus, noting that a number of states had such standards in the past.
Christina Samuels writes at the Education Week (12/31) “On Special Education” blog that special-needs educators focused their attention on the Common Core Standards in 2013, noting that the post on the blog about the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers seeking public comments “on proposed accommodations drew high readership, as did follow-up blog posts” about PARCC issuing rules on accommodation for special needs students. Moreover, a post on PowerUp WHAT WORKS, “a federally-funded collaboration that offers common-core themed lesson plans for special education teachers,” was also heavily visited.
Valerie Strauss writes at the Washington Post (12/28) “Answer Sheet” blog about California Gov. Jerry Brown’s vocal opposition to “the standardized-testing obsession that has come to dominate the school reform movement,” noting that he “refused to give in to threats by Education Secretary Arne Duncan to withhold” funding when Brown planned to abandon state testing in favor of Common Core-aligned field tests. The cites media reports in which Brown “said he opposes national education standards because ‘that’s just a form of national control.’” Strauss relates an anecdote in which Brown recently described a high school assignment “in which he had to write his impressions of a green leaf,” and quotes him saying, “You can’t put that on a standardized test.”
Amid technical “hiccups,” officials are “scrambling to avoid its own version of a full-scale HealthCare.gov meltdown when millions of students pilot new digital Common Core tests this spring,” Politico (12/28, Emma) reports. Although “the tests have been designed to go easy on schools’ Internet infrastructure,” experts anticipate significant problems due to the “massive scale” of the testing effort.
Valerie Strauss writes at the Washington Post (12/17) “Answer Sheet” blog that, according to a study conducted by MIT neuroscientists, strategies employed by schools to “boost scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams did nothing to help students improve in the development of what is called ‘fluid intelligence’ skills, or cognitive gains.” Researchers arrived at this conclusion after examining data on some “1,400 eighth-grade students in Boston’s traditional,” private and charter schools. Strauss suggests that the results “should give pause to backers of standardized test-based school reform.”
Valerie Strauss writes at the Washington Post (12/15) “Answer Sheet” blog that DePaul University Associate Vice President Jon Boeckenstedt has analyzed National Center for education Statistics data and complied it into a state-b-state list of average teacher salaries. The post includes graphs and other visual representations of the data. Meanwhile, a number of media outlets from around the country are running articles about how their state measured up. Examples include the Philadelphia Inquirer (12/17), the Lawrence (KS) Journal World (12/16), the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger (12/17), MLive (12/17) and the MinnPost (12/17).
The Boston Globe (12/16, Crawford) reports that University of Illinois education professors Christopher and Sarah Lubienski conducted an “in-depth” study of standardized test data, which found to their surprise that “public schools seemed to be producing better test scores than private” or charter schools. The researchers cited “private-school autonomy” as the reason, arguing that “independence and competition may actually be holding back achievement at private and charter schools.” The researchers, the Globe reports, describe their findings in a new book titled “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.”