July 5, 2016
By: Stephanie Wang
Source: chalkbeat.org One of the best, most sought-after public schools in Indiana is nestled in a failing urban school district. This school, Center for Inquiry School 84, stands above the tumultuous reputation of Indianapolis Public Schools. It boasts an intensely rigorous curriculum. Experienced teachers. National awards for excellence. But, even though it’s […]
July 5, 2016
By: Jay Mathews
Source: washingtonpost.com Broward County, Fla., launched a remarkable experiment a decade ago. Instead of depending on teachers and parents to nominate children for IQ testing leading to gifted designations, the district gave a preliminary giftedness test to all second-graders. Most of us assume the way we select gifted children catches nearly all […]
July 5, 2016
By: Trenton Goble
Source: edsurge.com The Pitfalls of End-of-Level Testing High stakes end-of-level testing is nigh-ubiquitous in American society. Its roots can be traced back to the 1990s when Congress reauthorized Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) required the development or adoption of state assessments and tied them to […]
July 5, 2016
By: Anya Kamentz
Source: npr.org “Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?” When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just because.” You can explain: “Red is for stop and green is for go.” Or, you can turn the question back […]
July 5, 2016
By: Kendra Yoshinaga
Source: npr.org Today’s generation of schoolchildren looks much different than one just a few decades ago. Nonwhites are expected to become the majority of the nation’s children by 2020, as our colleague Bill Chappell reported last year. This is now the reality among the very youngest Americans: babies. Babies of color now […]
June 30, 2016
By: WDET
Source: wdet.org A couple weeks ago on Detroit Today we talked about the achievement gaps suffered in suburban school districts between white and black students. Even the most affluent districts struggle to narrow the achievement gap that students of color face. Brian O’ Connor is a Detroit News columnist, as well as a parent of a special education student […]
June 30, 2016
By: Monica Disare
Source: chalkbeat.org With almost no public warning and little board discussion, a 17-member policymaking body wiped out one of the main elements of the state’s teacher evaluation law late last year. A few months later, the same body, the New York State Board of Regents, passed a regulation that enabled thousands of […]
June 30, 2016
By: Alexia Campbell
Source: theatlantic.com Much has been written about how a child’s environment can hurt or help their development in the first crucial years of life. Researchers have established that poor children who grow up in poor neighborhoods are less likely to succeed than poor children who grow up in wealthier neighborhoods, and last […]
June 30, 2016
By: Eric Westervelt
Source: npr.org After some 10,000 online tutorials in 10 years, Sal Khan still starts most days at his office desk in Silicon Valley, recording himself solving math problems for his Khan Academy YouTube channel. “OK, let F of X equal A times X to the N plus,” he says cheerfully as he […]
June 30, 2016
By: Christina Samuels
Source: blogs.edweek.org The U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights announced Wednesday that it has settled complaints in seven states and one territory over issues related to websites that are not accessible to people with certain disabilities. The department had found that websites were not using text descriptions, also known as […]