Beth’s Briefings (5-4-15)

Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:

 

So you’re a parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend’s neighbor’s sister. It’s prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools—with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning—just aren’t cutting it. (Wired)

 

The announcement that President Barack Obama’s work on improving education and career opportunities for young men of color will likely continue beyond his time in the White House was welcomed Friday by the Council of the Great City Schools, which has partnered with the president on his signature My Brother’s Keeper initiative. (Education Week)

 

Attorneys for the state and California’s powerful teachers unions argued in a filing Friday that a landmark California teacher tenure case was flawed and should be overturned because no evidence was presented showing the disputed statutes are the cause of educational inequalities. (Southern California Public Radio)

 

After years of lobbying, millions of dollars from in-state and out-of-state advocacy groups and the support of the governor and other legislative leaders, school vouchers are still banned in Tennessee. (The Tennessean)

 

As online education enrollment growth slows, programs are exploring new formats to appeal to students. (US News & World Report)

 

Since its founding in 1988 by commodities trader Paul Tudor Jones II and Wall Street colleagues Glenn Dubin and Peter Borish, the Robin Hood Foundation has become a philanthropic powerhouse. It is now New York City’s largest poverty-fighting organization—in 2014 it gave $133 million to over 200 organizations that serve the city’s neediest residents, and its board continues to attract high-profile financiers, including David Einhorn, Lawrence Fink, and David Tepper, as well as such innovators in education as Marian Wright Edelman and Geoffrey Canada. (Gotham Magazine)

 

Darius Craig was disgusted Monday night watching other Baltimore teens on television as they burned cars, looted shops and hurled rocks at police. But the high school senior understood why his peers were so angry. (Washington Post)