Beth’s Briefings (6-29-15)

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

 

The Obama administration continues to dial back once-aggressive plans to rate colleges and draw off federal dollars from the weakest schools, saying instead they intend to present new information about performance to empower consumers. (The Wall Street Journal)

 

While speaking at the 2015 National Parent Teacher Association Convention and Expo in Charlotte, North Carolina, Duncan detailed a handful of rights he said all parents should be able to demand from their children’s schools. The rights, which span preschool through college, include free quality preschool, affordable quality college and high, challenging standards in a well-resourced school. (Huffington Post)

 

College accreditors are vigorously debating how they can more aggressively examine low-performing schools amid increasing scrutiny into whether colleges are providing enough value. (The Wall Street Journal)

 

Forty-three years ago, a federal law was passed requiring what today seems like a no-brainer: gender equality in schools. Over the past few years, that law—Title IX—has figured most prominently in discussions about sexual assault on college campuses. But the impetus behind Title IX was the lack of opportunity for female athletes. In 1972, the year the civil-rights law was enacted, only 30,000 women were participating in National Collegiate Athletic Association sports, compared to 170,000 men. The NCAA didn’t offer scholarships to women, nor did it hold championship games for female teams. (The Atlantic)

 

At Black Mountain College, students learned to draw by writing in reverse, and studied painting by sorting groceries on a shelf. Black Mountain wasn’t really an art school. (In twenty-four years of operation – between 1933 and 1957 – it never gained any academic accreditation.) Yet Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg were students, and teachers included Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Josef Albers. Nearly six decades after the school’s closing, Black Mountain has a reputation any MFA program would envy – a legacy examined in a major new exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. (Forbes)

 

Orders to remain silent are commonplace for grand juries, for those involved in sensitive negotiations and for anyone privy to trade secrets. (The New York Times)

 

A long-running partisan divide over taxes and education spending was repeatedly evident on Sunday as Pennsylvania lawmakers worked through the weekend in a rush to pass budget legislation in the days before the fiscal year wraps up. (Philly.com)