Beth’s Briefings (9-2-16)

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

 

Secretary of Education John King will host the last back-to-school bus tour of the Obama administration next week, with plans to make 12 stops across six states as he and Education Department officials travel from the nation’s capital south to their final destination in Louisiana. (U.S. News)

 

The Obama administration released draft rules Wednesday that would govern how school districts allocate billions of Title I dollars meant to educate poor children, one of Capitol Hill’s most hotly contested education issues since Congress passed a new federal education law late last year. (The Washington Post)

 

For nearly a half-century, the professional educators organization Phi Delta Kappa has released a poll this time of year to capture the public’s attitudes toward public education. This year, by far the most lopsided finding in the survey was about a controversial reform policy: school closures. (NPR)

 

New rules for Head Start, the federal pre-K education and health program for low-income children and their families, were unveiled Thursday, in a significant overhaul of the 52-year-old program hatched as part of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society reforms that now enrolls more than 1 million children a year. (EdSource)

 

This month, millions of students will head off to college hoping to earn the skills and degrees they need to secure well-paying jobs in today’s economy. This year’s entering students will be the best-equipped in history to select a school that meets those needs, thanks to the consumer-friendly College Scorecard website released by the Department of Education last fall that made public for the first time important outcome metrics like what percentage of an institution’s students are earning more than a high school graduate and the proportion of students that are able to begin paying down their loans. (The Hill)