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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
Educators Plan to Fight Back After California Ruling Gutting Tenure Emboldens Critics (Wall Street Journal)
There is nothing sacred about Common Core, the educational standards that are attracting renewed criticism as the school year begins. The standards, which are intended to ensure that students graduate from high school prepared to do college-level work, were not handed down from the heavens on stone tablets. They are a major improvement over previous standards in most states, but they remain a work in progress. (Bloomberg View)
New Jersey
Since arriving in Camden as a newly trained family physician more than 15 years ago, I have watched the city’s school district slide into ever deeper dysfunction. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
New York
Glenn Peters knew he would be in the minority when he started training to teach preschool as part of New York City’s rollout of universal pre-K, the largest such initiative in the country. But he didn’t realize just how rare men are in the profession until he attended a resume-building workshop for aspiring pre-K teachers. (NPR)
One afternoon this summer, Eva Moskowitz, who runs Success Academy Charter Schools, showed me her senior yearbook. “I was the editor,” she said. We sat in a half-furnished office at the construction site of her charter network’s first high school. A buzz saw shrieked in the background. She graduated in 1982 from Stuyvesant, the most selective of New York City’s public high schools. “I got completely engaged in how to take this sentimental book and make it a much bigger project.” She fought to publish photographs capturing the political protests of that time — against nuclear weapons, against American aid to the government in El Salvador. To go with the pictures, she wrote a manifesto, concluding: “We do not live in a vacuum.” (New York Times)