Afternoon Announcements: September 21, 2011

Here are today's announcements!

Detroit Public Schools expects to shed nearly 40 percent of its teachers in the next four years to help close a $327 million deficit, yet projects a loss of just 6,000 students under a state-approved fiscal blueprint, according to the Detroit News. The district would cut more than 1,500 teachers by fall 2015.

Education Week reports that a group of 20 states will lead the development of a new set of common standards in science, according to an announcement today from Achieve, a Washington-based nonprofit managing the effort. Participating states span the country, from California and Arizona to Michigan and Maryland. They will help craft what have been dubbed the Next Generation Science Standards based on a framework developed by a panel of the National Research Council earlier this summer.

According to US News & World Report, a large number of America's highest-performing middle school students regress during high school, according to a new study released Tuesday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an educational research firm.

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Morning Announcements: April 21, 2011

In an op-ed in Inside Higher Ed, a faculty member of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies writes about remediation education being at a crossroads. He asks will we, “ truly seize this moment and create for underprepared students a rich education in literacy and numeracy, or make some partial changes -- more online instruction, shortened course sequences -- but leave the remedial model intact”? 

Eighth-Grade Students Learn More Through Direct Instruction, according to Education Next.

The Michigan Department of Education today released a full list of schools where students are succeeding academically compared to peer schools, despite such factors as poverty, low funding or having an urban or rural location, the Detroit Free Press reports.

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Report Round-Up

Community College Estimated Growth: Fall 2010 from the American Association of Community Colleges. This report provides enrollment counts for credit enrollment 2000–2010 and finds that although enrollment has continued to increase, the rate of increase has slowed in comparison to previous years.

Data for Action 2010 from Data Quality Campaign. This report finds that despite progress in recent years, 11 states still cannot link data from schools with information from colleges.

Improving Middle Grades Mathematics Performance from EdSource. This analysis examines the relationship between students' 7th grade math scores on the California Standards Tests (CSTs), their 8th grade mathematics placements, and their subsequent performance on either the Algebra I CST or the General Mathematics CST.

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California Middle School Pushes Digital-Text Initiative Forward

This Education Week video shows how Riverside Unified School in California is making progress towards adopting Governor Schwarzenegger’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative. The initiative was created to ensure that California schools know which digital textbooks meet the state’s academic content standards.  Read Entire Post

Morning Announcements: February 9, 2011

The Associated Press reports that the George W. Bush Institute has introduced a new initiative, Middle School Matters, an effort to increase graduation rates by focusing on middle school student performance.

An op-ed in the Los Angeles Business Journal explains the community benefits of improving the high school graduation rate.

U.S. News & World Report is planning on assigning letter grades to teacher colleges around the country according to the New York Times.

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Key Pieces of High School Legislation

Wondering what are the key pieces of legislation affecting high school students?

Check out this recently updated fact sheet from the Alliance for Excellent Education. It includes details on:

• Literacy Education for All, Results for the Nation (LEARN) Act
• Graduation Promise Act (GPA)
• Every Student Counts Act
• Linked Learning Pathways Affording College and Career Success Act
• Innovation and Research: Secondary School Innovation Fund Act
• Middle School Improvement: Success in the Middle Act
• Improving Use of Data: Measuring and Evaluating Trends for Reliability, Integrity, and Continued Success (METRICS) Act

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Morning Announcements: October 14, 2010

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes an excellent column on what the Arab country of Oman can teach us about the power of education. Politics Daily asks, Did the White House Abandon Michelle Rhee, Education's Superwoman? And the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post editorial boards discuss Rhee’s resignation and the appointment of Kaya Henderson as interim chancellor of DC public schools.

The Los Angeles Times reports that an effort to lessen layoffs at three middle schools has became a vehicle to propel fundamental changes, such as requiring layoffs at the same rate campus by campus. It also sidestepped teachers union resistance.

In New York, overcowding in some of Queens' large, generalized high schools appears to be up this fall - and the culprit could be the borough's high number of struggling schools, according to the New York Daily News.

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Report Round-Up: September 24, 2010

The Federal Role in Confronting the Crisis in Adolescent Literacy from the Alliance for Excellent Education. This report calls for the federal government needs to substantially step up its role in promoting strong literacy skills at the middle and high school levels.

Segregation and Exposure to High-Poverty Schools in Large Metropolitan Areas: 2008-09 from study by faculty at the Institute on Urban Health Research at Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences. The report ranks racial/ethnic segregation and exposure to high-poverty schools for public, primary school students in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, revealing that black and Hispanic children attend very different schools than do white children and are disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty schools.

Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching by Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller of McKinsey & Company. This report examines teaching programs and strategies in some of the world’s best-performing nations and seeks to outline how adapting those strategies for practice in the United States might reap enormous benefits for the U.S. economy.

 

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