Afternoon Announcements: July 5, 2012

Hi and happy Mond- err, Thursday. It just feels like Monday here at the Alliance. How about where you are? We hope that you enjoyed the fireworks and festivities wherever you were yesterday. Today we’ve got a couple of announcements for you, and we’ll have some belated Stats That Stick a little later!

Let’s get right down to it.

Education Week reports that a part of Georgia’s Race to the Top grant has been put on high-risk status by the U.S. Department of Education. $33 million of the state’s $400 million grants is in jeopardy because the Department think that Georgia has “strayed too far from the vision it originally outlined in its winning application,” specifically in the area of their plan dealing with teacher evaluation.

The Huffington Post has an excerpt from a new book titled The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America's Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing that examines the U.S.’s education performance compared to that of other wealthy nations. The except here discusses the correlation seen between the length of the school year and performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The excerpt notes, “Although correlation doesn't mean causation, as every statistician knows, the strength of the relationship seen in the graph does seem to buttress the logic of more days in schools driving better performance, so it becomes hard to resist arguing that a longer school year would improve American academic performance.”

The First State was just awarded a grant to improve its statewide longitudinal data systems, according to Delaware Online. The $4.6 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences was one of a number given to 20 other states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands totaling $97 million. Delaware’s grant will “help the state respond to the needs of teachers and schools, adding to the analytic and reporting capabilities of the state’s data system.”

Finally, in a bit of non-education news, did you see the fireworks debacle in San Diego last night? A technical malfunction caused an entire 18 minutes worth of fireworks to launch and explode in about 15 seconds. The Los Angeles Times has the story and video. Better luck next year!

See you in just a bit for Stats That Stick!