NNPA ESSA AWARENESS CAMPAIGN — This month, my organization, the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools released its highly-anticipated report, “Identity and Charter School Leadership: Profiles of Leaders of Color Building an Effective Staff” which examined the ways that school leaders of color’s experiences and perspectives influence how they build school culture, parent and community relationships, and effective staff.

EDUCATION WEEK — U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced that she had approved Georgia and North Carolina to try out new assessment methods for the 2019-20 school year, joining Louisiana and New Hampshire as states to successfully apply to participate in this pilot.

The final straw broke in November when Aimy Steele got a call from the central office asking her to find space for five more classrooms.

https://youtu.be/-Hr9TiK7hhM How does an individual’s decision to drop out of high school affect the rest of us? And, conversely, how does a student graduating from high school benefit all of us? Those were the questions...

As state election officials counted votes in West Virginia’s primary races last week and the results were broadcast on local TV stations, West Virginia’s teachers felt something unfamiliar but wonderful.

Allison Kerley Townsend, a third-grade teacher at Barnwell Elementary School in Fulton County, is the 2019 Georgia Teacher of the Year, State School Superintendent Richard Woods announced tonight. As Georgia Teacher of the Year, Townsend will serve as an advocate for public education in Georgia.

EDUCATION WEEK — This week, Education Week is bringing its trademark analysis to the remaining state plans for fulfilling requirements of the Every Student Succeeds law. On Monday, we had a look at the states’ proposed “school quality” indicators, €”the required but nonacademic portion of each state’s plan to judge schools. Today, we’re going to take a look at states’ goals for raising student achievement and their timelines for doing so in the plans awaiting federal approval.

THE CHARLESTON CHRONICLE — Submitted by Jesse Williams, Rep. Marvin Pendarvis & Dr. Carol Tempel When voting to build a new Center for Advanced Studies at North Charleston High School, instead of Garrett Academy of Technology, board members added that they would continue to invest in improving the quality of education at Garrett. In order to hold the school…

AMSTERDAM NEWS — Mounting student debt is a nagging problem for most families these days. As the cost of higher education rises, borrowing to cover those costs often becomes a family concern across multiple generations including the student, parents, and even grandparents or other relatives.

The U.S. Department of Education staffers seem to be burning the midnight oil on feedback letters lately. Four other states—Georgia, Maryland, Puerto Rico, and Utah—got responses last week. Every state has submitted a plan to implement ESSA. And 16 states and the District of Columbia have had their plans approved.

Back during the Obama administration, many states were working to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores, in part to get a piece of the $4 billion Race to the Top fund, or to get flexibility from the No Child Left Behind Act.

In 2011, Arizona became the first state to adopt the most flexible school reform yet, an education savings account (ESA) plan. It provides parents who believe their child is poorly served in the local public school with an annual budget they can spend on a wide variety of accredited alternatives—not just private or parochial schools, but tutoring, online academies, special-needs services, and even computer equipment for home schooling.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told a roomful of state education chiefs Tuesday that he’ll push to fund the new block grant Congress created under the Every Student Succeeds Act to help districts cover the cost of health, safety, technology programs, and moer. And he said he looks forward to the kind of innovation and change the new law can bring to states.

We know that most pre-kindergarten programs do a good job of improving ‘ specific skills like phonics and counting, as well as broader social and emotional behaviors, by the time students enter kindergarten. Just this week, a study looking at more than 20,000 students in a state-funded preschool program in Virginia found that kids made large improvements in their alphabet recognition skills.

For the past five months, we have followed the development of Minnesota’s state accountability plan as mandated by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). While the US Department of Education (USDE) has defined what must be included in four of the plans’ required indicators, states have the freedom to choose which measures they will include in their fifth indicator, of school quality/student success (SQ/SS).

The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will hold a hearing to discuss state innovation under the Every Student Succeeds Act.

The grinding, two-year process of drafting accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act has upended states’ K-12 political landscape and laid bare long-simmering factions among power brokers charged with putting the new federal education law into effect this school year.

For decades, district leaders have been clamoring for more say over how they spend their federal money. And when the Every Student Succeeds Act passed back in 2015, it looked like they had finally gotten their wish: a brand-new $1.6 billion block grant that could be used for computer science initiatives, suicide prevention, new band instruments, and almost anything else that could improve students’ well-being or provide them with a well-rounded education.

The debate over NCLB’s replacement, 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act, ramped up again Wednesday at the monthly meeting of the State Board of Education.

CSPAN Video Presentation on the floor of the House of Representatives by Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC)

Will parents be able to understand their child’s school’s performance under the Every Student Succeeds Act? And will schools with students from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds get a fair shake?

On Tuesday, the House education committee will hold a hearing on how the Every Student Succeeds Act is unfolding in states and districts. On this general issue, much of the focus (rightly) has been on how Republicans like Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the Senate education committee chairman, are reacting to what U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team are doing on ESSA oversight.

Ultimately, twelve states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin—received a notice from the U.S. Department of Education that they needed to create a plan to reduce opt-outs due to low participation rates.

This report highlights significant investments made by both Republican and Democratic policymakers in state-funded pre-k programs for the fourth year in a row. In the 2015-16 budget year, 32 states and the District of Columbia raised funding levels of pre-k programs.

The fate of the Trump-DeVos privatization agenda may hinge on the public’s ability to root out the euphemisms and codewords used to disguise the failure of school vouchers.

The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, with Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi as the lead co-sponsors, passed unanimously out of the committee. It now moves to the full House for consideration, and could become the first major education legislation sent to President Donald Trump during this Congress.

Having just one black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced low-income black boys’ probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent, the study found.

A number of states have released drafts of their ESSA plans. Here’s a compiled list of the most recent versions states have released so far. Arizona: First Draft (9/7/16)  Second Draft (11/9/16) Final Plan (1/15/17) Colorado: First Draft (2/10/17) Connecticut: Released plan (4/3/17) Delaware: First Draft (11/1/16) District…

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos €”who recently traveled to Florida to highlight dual-enrollment and career-readiness programs €”is hitting the road again Monday, this time to Kimberly Hampton Elementary School in Fort Bragg, N.C.

Earlier this week, the Brookings Institution released the fifth annual Education Choice and Competition Index, which ranks school choice in the largest school districts in the U.S. During her address, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos claimed that “parents are the primary point of accountability.”

North Carolina is currently drafting its state plan for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). While ESSA offers unprecedented opportunity to expand …