A lot of news today at RealClearEducation.
Department of interesting and fresh voices: Kai-leé Berke on the impact of early childhood educators. And here’s the story of Escuela de la Raza Unida.
The Secretary of Education is in US Weekly.
In a big loss to the D.C. policy scene but big win for Baltimore Sonja Santelises is becoming schools CEO there.
Ed Navigator’s Tim Daly on school grades and what they don’t reveal:
What is a good school?
There’s no simple answer. Families have different priorities. Children have different needs. A school that’s perfect for one student may be perfectly awful for another.
This is a real challenge when it comes to rating schools, which aren’t good or bad in an absolute sense, typically. If we can’t capture everything a family might value, should we not rate schools at all? We could go that way. But then how would families make informed choices about where to send their kids?
Write up on the recent DC luncheon for Afghan educator Sakena Yacoobi.
Gap years in the news: Gap year pros and cons.
California school’s prom king and queen election becoming a flashpoint:
Even though she and her girlfriend were nominated to become this year’s prom king and queen, Lack, who enjoys overwhelming support from fellow students, has been told by school administrators that she’s ineligible, according to the Redding Record Searchlight.
The reason, administrators told the paper, is that having two members of one gender would exclude the other.
“Their argument doesn’t make sense to me,” Lack told the Searchlight. “We don’t need a female on the football team or a male cheerleader to be fair — why do we need a guy when the couple nominated is a female couple?”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is the apparent comfort level of the students juxtaposed with the school administration’s response. Hello generational change.
The crime rate in schools is not going up up up up up! Here’s an AEI take on the charter autonomy debate in Louisiana. Here’s EdBuild on resource disparities in education. The Hindu American Foundation has a guide out on common misconceptions you find in school curriculum about Hindus. This is purely anecdotal, but in some public processes I’ve been involved in, officials snap to for the usual panoply of education interest groups but blow stuff like this off when it’s raised.
The ESSA fiscal fight is now joined. Andrew Ujifusa looks at the money at stake.
