Morning Announcements: September 8, 2011

The National Education Association is waiting anxiously to hear President Obama’s jobs creation plan tonight. According to Education Week, the president spoke with Dennis Van Roekel, president of the NEA, and told him school modernization and jobs will be highlights of the speech tonight. It is unclear how much money will be awarded to education.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan continued his bus tour of the Great Lakes region, speaking first in Pittsburgh, a city he called a national model for school reform. He traveled to Ohio yesterday, will be in Detroit and Indiana today, and then will move on Wisconsin and Illinois. According to the Huffington Post, Duncan is trying to spread his message of teacher accountability, pushing education reform in the face of massive state budget cuts and his own recent decision to unilaterally waive components of the federal No Child Left Behind education law.

The New York Times reports New York City schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott is trying to move away his predecessor Joel I. Klein’s approach of working on school reform in the spotlight. With the country deeply divided over the best way to improve education, Walcott plans to quietly go about his initiatives in the New York City reform spectrum.

The U.S. Department of Education released rules for its next Race to the Top competition: states will have to show they are committed to education redesign by making progress on data systems, standards and assesments, turning around low-performing schools, and boosting teacher quality, according to Education Week.

The Detroit Free Press reports Michigan Senate Republicans want to put more power in the hands of parents -- and teachers -- to turn around low-performing schools by letting them petition to force the conversion of those schools into charters. The proposed law, dubbed a "parent trigger law" in other parts of the country, is part of a comprehensive package of bills introduced today in the Senate.

Idaho public schools chief Tom Luna submitted a spending plan to the governor’s office Wednesday asking for about one third of the project $180 million budget surplus Idaho is expected to carry nito the next fiscal year, according to the Associated Press.