The Grade

What’s been most interesting about the coverage of the report from the Council of Great City Schools and the proposal from the White House and USDE is how much coverage — most of it quite dutiful — it’s generated since Saturday when the embargo on the story was lifted, and how much we still don’t know […]

Arne Duncan, John King: Don’t Cap Testing at the Expense of Testing Quality PK12: “Everybody has had a hand in what our current testing system looks like—this situation was not created by just one entity,” said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools. See also Washington Post, EdWeek, PBS NewsHour. USDA Sees […]

If you’re going to leave education journalism, you might as well go out with a bang. That’s what just-departed MinnPost reporter Beth Hawkins seems to be doing with a reflection on her stint working eight years at the alternative outlet and a massive piece on how difficult state education officials make it to figure out […]

Obama encouraging limits on standardized student testsAP: Hillary Rodham Clinton embraced the principles laid out by Obama. “We should be ruthless in looking at tests and eliminating them if they do not actually help us move our kids forward,” she said in a statement. See other coverage here. The Online College That’s Helping Undocumented Students NPR: There are […]

  BEST OF THE WEEK LA Times: Meet the teacher lobby behind Hillary Clinton that’s not the teachers union http://ow.ly/TMfeo ChalkbeatNY: For two sharply divided Manhattan schools, an uncertain path to integration http://ow.ly/TMfnY NPR: A Year Later, The School System That Welcomed Unaccompanied Minors http://ow.ly/TGa0p  CityLab: Report: Studying at a Diverse School Doesn’t Hurt White Kids’ Test […]

*See correction at bottom of this piece. Media criticism is fun, important, and seems easy. That’s why everyone wants to do it.  But it doesn’t work very well (in terms of being taken seriously) when done as a form of advocacy or when the organizations doing it face some of the same challenges as the […]

Screengrab of Success Academies email. While at least one FERPA expert believes that Success Academies may have violated federal privacy law in releasing disciplinary details that could be linked to a student’s name, Success Academies believes that it is protected by the First Amendment. Whether that’s so or not is under some dispute, but the head […]

Who might head L.A. Unified, and what are officials looking for in a leader? LA Times: In its search for a new superintendent, the Los Angeles Board of Education is out to find that rare leader who can tame political turmoil, manage a multibillion-dollar organization and somehow drive academic achievement upward. See also KPCC. Sesame Street Reveals […]

It’s been quite a week for the PBS NewsHour’s education coverage, what with the controversy surrounding the segment on Success Academies charter schools (below) and complaints more recently about Gwen Ifill’s profile of Seattle teacher and testing critic Jesse Hagopian (above). Will Ragland, of the Center on American Progress, wrote a critique of the segment here that […]

I still don’t have anything definitive but at least one student privacy expert suggests that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies network of charters may have erred in releasing details about a student’s disciplinary record — even though they never name the student in the document.  As you may already know, the charter network released information about […]