Morning Announcements: July 21, 2011

In the aftermath of the Atlanta cheating scandal and recent cheating allegations in other school districts across the country, the Washington Post’s “On Leadership” convened a roundtable on how best to approach teacher incentives in the U.S. education system. Respondent U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan indicates despite the cheating scandals, testing and teaching are not at odds.

Education Week writes about how the fallout from the debt debate could affect education.

California has more homeless students than any other state in the nation. In 2009, nearly one-third of all homeless students nationwide lived in California, according to the U.S. Department of Education; and those students are struggling academically, reports California Watch.

For homeless students who go on to college, every expense is a mountain to be climbed; the Washington Post asks readers for thoughts on how to make it work.

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Report Round-Up

Competitive Grant Making and Education Reform: Assessing Race to the Top's Current Impact and Future Prospects by the American Enterprise Institute. This report argues that federal policymakers could learn from Race to the Top’s strengths and weaknesses before diving into new competitive grant programs in the future.

International Benchmarking: State Education Performance Standards from the American Institutes for Research. This report uses international benchmarking to examine the expectations gap between what students are expected to learn in some states and what students are expected to learn in others.

Student Learning Expectations Gap Can Be Twice the Size of National Black-White Achievement Gap from the American Institutes for Research. This report finds that the gap in what students are expected to know in each state varies so greatly that the difference in student expectations between the states with the most rigorous assessments and those with the least stringent is twice the size of the national black-white achievement gap.

Degree Completion Beyond Institutional Borders: Responding to the New Reality of Mobile and Nontraditional Learners from the Center for American Progress. This report describes the avenues that colleges, states, and other organizations take to recognize prior learning and transfer credit, and it points out the flaws in these policies that block students from efficiently garnering credit as they move through and among higher education institutions.

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