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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
Acting Education Secretary John B. King Jr. told members of the Senate education committee Monday that the department is taking steps to refund money to all military borrowers who were charged more than 6 percent interest on their federal student loans since 2008. (The Washington Post)
One of the most intriguing moments in Sunday night’s Democratic debate came when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton, “Do you think unions protect bad teachers?” In the Democratic Party, few subjects are as incendiary as education. On one side of the issue are the reformers, such as Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who support charter schools, regular testing, and changing labor contracts to make it easier to fire underperforming teachers. On the other side are the defenders of public schools, such as Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, who are seeking to impose limits on the charter movement, modify testing requirements, and stand up for teachers. (The New Yorker)
Kane, a professor of education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, points out that there is no effective educational equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration, where medical research is rigorously vetted and translated into solutions. Maybe, he says, there should be. (NPR)
The Obama administration has worked hard to strengthen public-school teaching—a $400 billion-plus workforce, and perhaps the single strongest lever in schools for raising student achievement. But just after Thanksgiving, the president signed a major new education law that largely abandoned the cornerstone of his teacher agenda: pressing states and school districts to take more seriously the task of identifying who in the profession was doing a good job, and who wasn’t. (The Atlantic)
I traveled around North Carolina in 2000 to write a series of articles about the future of the state’s renowned public university system. As I talked to parents, they often remarked how they didn’t really need to save much money to pay the tuition bills for their children. At the time, tuition and fees were about $2,000 a year at most of the universities across the University of North Carolina system. (The Washington Post)