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Here are the news and opinion articles educators, advocates and policy wonks are talking about today:
News and Analysis
The Common Core Standards, a story I have long considered just for education wonks and education writers, has been appropriated by politicians and political writers. Is that fair? Journalists who cover presidential campaigns have a much higher profile and appear on television much more than we do. Should they be stealing our hottest topics? (Washington Post)
Every student arrived with a smartphone. Ask a question, and instantly, thumbs began to effortlessly search for a digital answer. High school history had changed during my 21 year absence from teaching it. Now a professor of education at Baylor University, I returned to a local area public high school last fall on a research sabbatical, teaching tenth grade world history to more than 160 students. (Hechinger Report)
Earlier this year, Harvard announced that it had accepted 5.9 percent of the nearly 35,000 students who applied for admission to the class of 2018. The next day, Stanford announced an even more exacting 5.07 percent admission rate, the lowest in the university’s history. (New York Times)
New York
Upon his re-election in 2006, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein offered the free use of underutilized school facilities to a bumper crop of charter schools opening that year—including my first. Fueled by this policy, charter-school enrollment in the city grew from 11,000 to almost 70,000 by the end of Mr. Bloomberg’s second term in 2013, and my one school grew to 22. (Wall Street Journal)
New York City Department of Education officials said Sunday they had matched 45 high-poverty schools with 25 social service partners to create “community schools” in an effort to boost attendance, prevent dropouts and improve achievement. (Wall Street Journal)