Friday’s ed news
1. How Common Core uses private student data to assert government control.
2. Here’s a 20-year history of K-12 education.
3. Pressure builds for Common Core holdout Nebraska to join the national education standards.
4. Is the Wisconsin education department trying to stamp out five voucher schools?
5. A Saint Louis Democrat wants to make it easier for schools to get rid of incompetent teachers.
6. DC activists promise a school closure lawsuit.
7. Missouri’s governor signs a bill allowing student-led prayer in schools.
8. North Carolina will shift to digital textbooks in the next 4 years.
9. Teen parents can get time off from school without becoming dropouts under a New Mexico bill.
10. A professor discusses why publishing academic papers is a waste of his time.
Thursday’s ed news
1. Alabama’s Supreme Court rules the governor can sign a controversial tax-credit voucher bill.
2. A Tennessee lawmaker proposes giving vouchers to families that earn $74,000 a year, and having vouchers available statewide in three years.
3. Alabama Republicans kill a bill to withdraw from Common Core national education standards.
4. Ohio schools start saying “no” to federal money because it costs them more than the money to comply with its conditions.
5. Nearly all states have filed for a No Child Left Behind waiver: “The law has lost all credibility.”
6. California’s board of education has overturned promoting algebra in eighth grade to better align with Common Core’s lower standards.
7. Lawmakers are considering ditching a set of formulas that currently decide what teachers get hired where in West Virginia.
8. A Utah lawmaker wants all student data to stream through one online portal.
9. A Milwaukee voucher school has all graduates off to college for the second year in a row.
10. Preschool can’t overcome bad parenting, says a Nebraskan.
Wednesday’s ed news
1. A bill to withdraw Alabama from the Common Core has been amended so it doesn’t require legislative oversight of future standards.
2. Parents react to a Connecticut bill to require behavioral health evaluations of public, private, and home schooled children.
3. The median DC charter school outperforms the median DC public school, a study finds.
4. Even with more details, the president’s preschool proposal will be high-cost, and of dubious effect.
5. Less than a third of Kentucky kids enter kindergarten knowing shapes, letters, and right from left.
6. A California bill would relieve overcrowding in state university classes by offering them online.
7. How to find school chiefs bilking taxpayers two ways at once.
8. Utah’s Senate passes a slew of education technology bills, including online K-6 math and teacher evaluting software.
9. How government subsidies have made a college degree worth less.
10. Retired teachers have significant power within teachers unions.
Tuesday’s ed news
1. A tax-credit scholarship bill enters the Idaho House.
2. Alabama’s surprise tax-credit scholarships are likely to become law, despite a court controversy.
3. Arizona’s House votes to let schools that do not receive federal funding opt out of most federal mandates.
4. Why many anti-bullying measures are counterproductive. How this relates to Pop-Tart guns.
5. A Florida town converts some of its schools into charter schools. The kids and town thrive.
6. Why tax-credit scholarships are better than vouchers and a government K-12 monopoly.
7. A New Hampshire town rejects union-negotiated raises for teachers: “There’s a lot of people out here that haven’t gotten raises for a number of years, so I just think that saying ‘for the children’ is getting a little too old.”
8. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s track record on education is weak, says Andrew Rotherham.
9. A New York City panel reaffirms its school closures plan amid protests.
10. An Alaska bill would lengthen the time it takes a teacher to get tenure from three to six years.
Monday’s ed news
How to give children a vibrant education without ditching accountability.
“Charter schools are keeping a lot of the middle class in cities,” says a Massachusetts Democrat sponsoring legislation to lift the state’s charter school limit.
South Dakota becomes the first state to explicitly allow teachers to carry guns in school.
California is likely to put more regulations on a streamlined entry into teaching.
Glenn Beck gives an overview of controversial Texas curriculum CSCOPE, where teachers are locked into nondisclosure contracts, parents can’t view curriculum, and kids are apparently told all sorts of politically outrageous things.
New Mexico‘s legislature spends 2.5 hours questioning the state education secretary without voting to confirm or fire her.
Ohio school districts encourage staff to collect tax-paid pensions and salaries at the same time.
Michigan school districts and universities are doing an end-run around the state’s new right-to-work law by signing extended union contracts.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell signs up to help raise money for tax-credit scholarships.
Colorado teachers and administrators try to get a handle on the state’s changing teacher evaluation system.
For last week’s School Reform News roundup, click here.
For other top-notch school reform news selections, visit:
Image by Mo Riza.
Joy Pullmann is a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute and managing editor of The Federalist, a web magazine on politics, policy, and culture.
