Nine states win early education grants

The goal of the grants is to get more children from birth to age 5 ready for kindergarten.

Nine states have won a collective $500 million from the federal government to help make pre-kindergarten and other early learning programs more accessible and better capable of narrowing the achievement gap between those who start kindergarten without any formal schooling and those who do.

California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Washington state were announced as winners at the White House on Dec. 16.

“Nothing is more important than getting our babies off to a good start,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.…Read More

With online testing on the horizon, infrastructure could be a challenge

Within a few years, school districts in most states will have to have enough computers to allow students to take multiple tests online throughout the school year.

With new online tests being designed to reflect the Common Core standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, school districts in these states will have to replace pencil-and-paper testing with the new online exams as soon as the 2014-15 school year. But school leaders are unsure how the computers and software needed for such a move will be funded.

Last year, the federal Education Department doled out more than $300 million in Race to the Top funding to two groups of states to create next-generation assessments tied to the Common Core standards.

One of these groups, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), includes 23 states and the District of Columbia. The other group, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, includes 28 states. For now, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina belong to both consortia—and Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia belong to neither.…Read More

Sen. Shelby questions education grant competition

The “Race to the Top” program extends the reach of the federal government too far into states’ public schools operations, a leading Republican senator said on Wednesday, Reuters reports. The Obama administration also risks neglecting poorer states by moving toward competitive education funding, Sen. Richard Shelby, the most powerful Republican on the Banking Committee, said at a hearing on education spending.

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Education grants made available for nine states

According to Reuters, nine states will be eligible to compete for education grants of up to $50 million through President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program, the federal government said on Wednesday. The states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and South Carolina — were picked in the third round of grant competition after they failed to win funding in their first two tries…

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Report: U.S. should model education system after other countries

Teacher quality is "only ... as good as the system that recruits, prepares, and compensates the nation’s teachers,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The U.S. must mirror the educational practices of top-performing countries if it is to regain its competitive advantage, according to a new report from the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE).

One of the major discrepancies between the U.S. and countries that are outperforming it educationally is the performance differences between students from high- and low-income families.

The NCEE hosted a May 24 symposium to discuss the findings of its report, called “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform.”…Read More

Feds announce $500M for early learning competition

New federal grants will encourage states to develop high-quality early childhood learning programs.

A new state-level grant competition will direct $500 million in federal funding to improve child care and early childhood learning as part of the Obama administration’s signature Race to the Top program.

The Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge encourages states to make the best possible use of current federal and state investments in early childhood learning by creating comprehensive plans to transform early learning centers with better coordination and clearer learning standards.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whose departments will administer the competition jointly, challenged the broader innovation community—including leading researchers, high-tech entrepreneurs, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and others—to engage with the early childhood learning community to close the school readiness gap.…Read More

The top 10 ed-tech stories of 2010: No. 2

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he was optimistic the Republican election victories wouldn’t derail the administration’s plans, but conceded: “There’s no guarantee our agenda will continue to move.”

The controversial documentary film Waiting for ‘Superman’ has shined a national spotlight on the need for school reform, while sparking intense debate over how best to achieve this goal.

The film portrays teachers’ unions as the primary obstacle to reform, and it espouses fixes—such as using test scores to measure teacher quality, and merit pay to encourage better teaching—that are contentious issues. Critics of the film say it provides a shallow view of the problems plaguing public education while ignoring other challenges altogether.

Paul Heckman, associate dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Davis, said teachers have come to represent both the unit of change and the unit of blame in education.…Read More

States that lost school money face reform dilemmas

Many states won't be able to implement their reform plans.

It’s like buying a fancy dress but having no date to the prom–dozens of states that crafted new education policies to compete for a share of the $3.4 billion “Race to the Top” school reform grant prizes were shut out.

Now, as the 11 winning states and the District of Columbia set about spending their awards, the losing states are left wondering what to do with ambitious reform plans they planned to fund with the money.

In Colorado, for example, lawmakers had the prize in mind earlier this year when they adopted a contentious plan to pay teachers based on student performance. Now, state educators are obligated to come up with a new evaluation for teachers–with no new money to pay for it.…Read More

With divided Congress, school reform faces a tough road ahead

Duncan said the Republican election victories wouldn't derail the administration's plans.

The Obama administration has pushed an ambitious education agenda in the last two years, sending $100 billion to states thorough the stimulus package and spurring reform in many locations through the Race to the Top competition.

But none of the major initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been bipartisan. Most were approved through large spending bills that Republicans opposed.

Politicians and experts say the big Republican gains in Congress will serve as a roadblock to further Democrat-led education reform efforts, including a likely decrease in big-ticket spending as the GOP seeks greater fiscal restraint.…Read More

Putting our ideas of assessment to the test

 

How we evaluate students, and teachers, is at a crossroads.
How we evaluate students, and teachers, is at a crossroads.

 

Default Lines column, October 2010 issue of eSchool News—Here’s a pop quiz: What are the skills that today’s students will need to be successful in tomorrow’s workplace?…Read More