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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
Acting U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr., got a partisan-fireworks-free confirmation hearing from the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Thursday, including a series of collegial questions focused on how he will implement the brand-new Every Student Succeeds Act. (Education Week)
Thousands of parents pulled their children out of standardized tests, often based on the Common Core State Standards, pressuring state and federal policymakers to pay attention and, sometimes, to change their approaches. (Education Week)
An overflow crowd at a state appellate courtroom in Los Angeles listened attentively Thursday to the latest round in an ongoing argument about the intersection of students’ rights and teachers’ rights. (Los Angeles)
A small group of Chicago Teachers Union members and supporters rallied Thursday outside City Hall to protest expected layoffs and repeat a long-standing call for using surplus tax-increment financing funds to help Chicago Public Schools. (Chicago Tribune)
Marley Dias is like a lot of 11-year-olds: She loves getting lost in a book. But the books she was reading at school were starting to get on her nerves. She enjoyed Where The Red Fern Grows and the Shiloh series, but those classics, found in so many elementary school classrooms, “were all about white boys or dogs … or white boys and their dogs,” Marley says. (NPR)