Alexander Russo

Only A Quarter Of D.C. Students Ready For College And Career, Per New Test WAMU: A quarter of all third- to eighth-graders in D.C. public and charter schools are considered “on track” for college or a career, according to the results of new, more rigorous tests in English and math. See also Washington Post, Washington Post. Paying […]

Recent NJTV interview above. Sara Neufeld has been in and (briefly) out of education journalism for a while now, but all of sudden this fall it seems like she’s everywhere. The book version of her Newark school reporting came out online – The Hechinger Report’s first such effort. A series on a new high school in […]

Student Debt in America NYT: How a teacher ended up $410,000 in debt reveals the deep contradictions in the federal government’s approach to student loans. To build a better teacher, Harvard launches program aimed at quality  Washington Post: As the country debates the best way to improve the quality of teachers in struggling public schools, Harvard University is […]

Things have begun to look pretty bad for the multistate assessment known as PARCC in Massachusetts, according to a November 21 New York Times story: State education chief Mitch Chester was “walking away” from the Common Core-aligned tests he helped create. The state would now “go it alone” rather than using one of the multistate […]

There’s lots of attention lately on immigrant education, which is a good and important thing for education reporters to be thinking about. The US school population has recently become majority-minority, including immigrant and refugee students. Asian-American students are projected to outnumber black and Latino students in the not too distant future. Unaccompanied students from Central […]

US falls behind other nations in the global knowledge economy, says 46-country report Hechinger Report: The United States continues to fall behind internationally in producing a college-educated workforce as other nations send more of their citizens to university. And in the very early years, many countries are now sending a much higher percentage of their kids to […]

I was reminded last week that the Washington Post’s Emma Brown wrote a pretty amazing story about one district’s attempt to fire a veteran teacher (Violet Nichols, pictured above): Teacher tenure: a Fairfax schools firing case. Three years later, as districts and schools continue to try and figure out how to evaluate teachers fairly — and […]

The fight over K-12 education appears headed back to the states Washington Post: A new education law would shift fight over teacher evaluations, testing from federal government to 50 state capitals. Accountability and the ESEA Reauthorization Deal: Your Cheat Sheet PK12: The compromise agreed to by a congressional conference committee is, in many key ways, a U-turn from the […]

BEST OF THE WEEK WSJ: Unions Eye L.A. Charter Schools http://ow.ly/ULVLt BuzzFeed: A College Watchdog Finally Barked, So The Colleges Got A New Dog http://ow.ly/URqhv  NYT: A Daunting Trip to School for Some Homeless Children http://ow.ly/UI10e EdWeek: Tracking 2014-15 Common Core Test Results http://ow.ly/UTATm Washington Post: 41 years. $3 billion. Inside the Clinton donor network http://pllqt.it/kAKKQ7  The Atlantic: Bill […]

“On the other hand we could join forces and attack the Media” pic.twitter.com/E5NABK4Tax — RockinTX (@jonisfrontporch) November 9, 2015 “On the other hand we could join forces and attack the Media”