Last night 60 minutes aired a special on how many families are newly homeless due to the recession. According to CBS, it is estimated that the povery rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent. The segment discussed how for many kids, learning and socializing are being cruelly complicated by homelessness.
Read Entire Post
Whites continued to decline as a share of the American population in 2009, and they now represent less than half of all 3-year-olds. -Brookings Institution
Underscoring the deepening impact of the state's budget crisis, nearly 60 percent of California school districts have reduced the length of the school year, and 30 percent have shrunk it to 175 days. -California Watch
Of New York City’s 1,600 schools, 1,043 owe a collective $2.5 million to the Education Department for meals served in the first three months of this school year. That puts them on track to be $8 million behind by the end of the school year. -New York Times
Read Entire Post
Closing the Expectations Gap 2011 by Achieve. This report finds that in the six years since the National Governors Association and Achieve co-sponsored the National Education Summit on high schools, the goal of aligning the expectations for high school graduates with the demands of college and the workplace is the new norm across the United States.
Breaking New Ground: Building a National Workforce Skills Credentialing System from ACT. This report introduces the need and associated benefits for establishing a national workforce credentialing system and emphasizes the importance of getting a critical mass of state, national, and public and private workforce leaders to co-construct a foundational framework to address our national workforce challenges.
Turning Around the Nation’s Lowest-Performing Schools from the Center for American Progress. This report focuses on five steps that low-performing school districts can take to improve their chances of success.
Read Entire PostHow Well Are American Students Learning? from the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute. This report tackles the question - How well does the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) match up with the Common Core standards in mathematics?
Quality Counts from Education Week. This report grades states based on their education and performance and policy. It finds that although economists have officially declared the “Great Recession” to be over, the nation and states continue to struggle back from the most severe economic downturn in generations and face new challenges in delivering a high-quality education to all students.
School Passports: Making the Stimulus Pay Off for Students and State Budgets from the Foundation for Educational Choice. This report proposes a school voucher alternative to federal reform programs like Race to the Top that would provide some relief to cash-strapped states. The initiative would provide thousands of students the opportunity to attend private schools, effectively lowering public school enrollment and reducing state aid obligations.
Read Entire PostCompetitive 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.
Read Entire PostThe unemployment rate for high school dropouts aged twenty-five or older soared by 10 percent in September, meanwhile, the unemployment rate for college graduates actually dropped. -U.S. Department of Labor. Read more about these numbers in Jason Amos’ latest blog post.
Minnesota has become the 38th state to adopt the common standards, but only in English/language arts, not in math. –Education Week
More than $9 billion was spent by state and federal governments to support students at four-year colleges and universities who left school before their sophomore year during a five-year period. -American Institutes for Research. To find out more, check out this blog post.
Although the recession technically ended in 2009, district budgets are not expected to regain their pre-recession (2008) funding levels until late in the decade. –The Center for Public Education
Read Entire Post
