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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
John B. King Jr was recently confirmed by the Senate as the new U.S. Secretary of Education for the remainder of President Obama’s term, succeeding Arne Duncan. With a slew of pressing issues from pre-K to college debt, I wanted to find out what King thinks he can get done in such a short window of time. Here’s our conversation… (NPR)
If there was ever a time when school districts’ chief academic officers and chief technology officers could work in their own silos, isolated from each other, those days appear to be over. In many K-12 systems, the jobs of these two administrators have become increasingly intertwined, as technology has evolved from an add-on or complement to instruction to a core piece of how teachers, students, and administrators go about their work. (Education Week)
Anxious parents may wonder how a major school system like Newark’s could overlook lead in the drinking water of 30 schools and 17,000 students. The answer: It was easy. They had to look only a few miles away, at the century-old classrooms of the schools here, across the Hackensack River. (The New York Times)
Right about now, anxious high-school seniors around the globe are obsessively checking their mailboxes, awaiting decision letters from the U.S.’s elite colleges. For all but a tiny handful of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who applied—pouring countless hours into agonizing over forms, editing personal essays, sitting through standardized tests, and nervously monitoring their GPA—those letters won’t bear good news. (The Atlantic)
California education officials have made significant changes to the way hundreds of thousands of special education students take the state’s standardized tests. But the modifications have some teachers and parents worried about whether they’ll help students. (KPCC)