The Grade

The latest education news includes lots of questions about what happens next now that Gov. Christie has reversed course on Common Core standards, plus the announcement that Chicago’s embattled school superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett has resigned her post: Former Md. Gov. Martin O’Malley Joins Democrats’ Race for White House PK12: Among his education achievements as governor was signing […]

The Atlantic’s recent piece The Ongoing Struggle of Teacher Retention describes the many challenges of getting and keeping great teachers in the schools that need them most. Part first-person memoir, the piece by writer Paul Barnwell describes his woefully inadequate preparation and untimely departure from the school to which he was first assigned. Barnwell goes through […]

Three more things about that post (NYT Includes Squishy Miami-Dade Layoff Figures) I wrote the other day: a request for a correction, an apology, and a remaining mystery over staffing numbers. THE BACKSTORY As you may recall, it highlighted how some of the Miami-Dade County school employment numbers cited in a New York Times article about […]

The big news from this morning’s education news roundup is the completion of NJ Gov. Chris Christie’s Common Core flip-flop (which will make little substantive difference to what’s happening on the ground), plus last night’s Spelling Bee contest. Christie Calls for End to Common Core Standards in NJ WNYC: Left untouched in the Governor’s reform is the controversial […]

  Conventional wisdom is that parents who are opting their kids out of standardized tests are generally white and suburban. So I was surprised to hear education correspondent John Merrow point out that Jersey City, NJ had more than 5 percent of students opting out during this recent PBS NewsHour segment on the spring testing season. Not […]

Last week at the Atlantic/Aspen New York Ideas Festival, journalist Amanda Ripley (right) interviewed Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz (left). A former City Council member and possible mayoral candidate, Moskowitz is a lightning rod for charter school critics and has expanded her charter network outside of low-income, high minority neighborhoods that charters typically serve. A reluctant […]

Today’s big story is the latest Condition of Education report from Washington (and the speculation that Gov. Chris Christie will walk back some of his support for Common Core later today): Key Numbers From a Report to Congress on US Education AP: More U.S. school-age kids live in poverty and need English-language services, according to a […]

They’re all familiar names: RAND, Urban Institute, Brookings. AEI. Heritage. CAP. New America. Cato. And when journalists cite them or their experts, we’re supposed to be at least inclined towards believing what they say. But are we — and journalists who rely on them — being lazy and sometimes getting led down the primrose path? […]

Today’s big news is the appointment of a state schools chief that unions and pro-charter reformers think that they can work with: Former Tampa Schools Boss MaryEllen Elia Named N.Y. K-12 Chief EdWeek: The former superintendent of Florida’s Hillsborough County schools is poised to become New York state’s next K-12 commissioner, according to reports. See also NYT […]

There doesn’t seem much doubt that the recession hit black workers across all sectors of the economy, or that those in the public sector might have been hit particularly hard — as this NYT story (Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard) describes: Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, […]