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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
Do the learning standards really mean the federal government is serving as a “national school board,” as Sen. Marco Rubio says? That’s hard to square with the reality that the standards were developed by governors and state education leaders. (ABC News)
The school-choice movement is built on the philosophy that competition forces schools to improve. (Washington Post)
A stack of research suggests that all the classroom technology in the world can’t compare to the power of a great teacher. And, since we haven’t yet figured out how to clone our best teachers, a few schools around the country are trying something like it: Stretching them across multiple classrooms. (NPR)
In 2013, Sidharth Kakkar and Alexandr Kurilin had the opportunity to watch children learning math in an inner-city Baltimore school. For a month, they attended to school every day and worked with students. At night, they programmed to make an application that could help the students learn. In September they launched their company, Front Row Education, with 3 teachers. Today there are over 80,000 teachers & 1.1 million students using Front Row across 19,000 US schools. (Forbes)
A growing number of statehouses are considering measures that would allow school districts, parents and students increasingly to use taxpayer funds to explore alternatives to traditional state-backed public education. (The Wall Street Journal)