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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
In an unexpected move, Democrats have revised the K-12 education section of their party’s 2016 platform in important ways, backing the right of parents to opt their children out of high-stakes standardized tests, qualifying support for charter schools, and opposing using test scores for high-stakes purposes to evaluate teachers and students. (The Washington Post)
A survey of Americans age 18-30 reports that education is the most important issue for them when considering which political candidates they will support, according to a survey released Wednesday. (Education Week)
About half of the states now review the performance of their teacher-preparation programs on an annual or biennial basis, but they use a swath of different measures—some of higher quality than others, a new survey of state policy concludes. (Education Week)
Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-color family will hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3—but because of how it stacks up against a poor kid’s exposure to vocabulary. By the time she’s 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13 million words. (The Atlantic)
It may have started in Portland, where elevated levels of lead were found in the drinking water at two public elementary schools last month. High levels were later detected in more schools. (Huffington Post)
A recent Tuesday found Bernita Bradley in her car, crisscrossing the sparsely populated neighborhoods of Detroit’s East Side as she worked her way down a list. Each home she stopped at belonged to a family who hadn’t responded to news that their child secured a seat in school for the fall. (The Seventy-Four)
New York
A new coalition in the Hasidic community is pledging to improve instruction for their children, following complaints that dozens of New York City yeshivas fail to provide enough secular education. (The Wall Street Journal)