posted on
Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
With the Obama administration focused on reducing the number of suspensions, expulsions and arrests in public schools, a new analysis of federal data identifies districts in 13 Southern states where black students are suspended or expelled at rates overwhelmingly higher than white children. (The New York Times)
Recent battles in the edu-policy world have centered on standardized testing, teacher tenure, charter schools, vouchers and Common Core state standards. But debates over how to address poor student attendance — which is directly linked to low achievement and high dropout rates — have generated much less heat and light. (The Washington Post)
Jeb Bush threw his support behind a Tennessee plan to give two years of community college to students tuition free on Monday, the same plan that helped inspire President Obama’s similar proposal earlier this year. (The Hill)
Eight states—Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and Wisconsin—passed laws in 2015 that require students to pass some version of the test given to immigrants applying to become naturalized U.S. citizens in order to graduate from high school, according to a recent article in The New Yorker. (Education Week)
More than 5,000 Arizona students — about 3 percent of last year’s third-graders — need remedial reading lessons under the state’s Move on When Reading law. (azcentral.com)
The creation of high-achieving urban charter schools is one of the most impressive triumphs of American social policy. For all the success of the New Deal and the Great Society in ameliorating the hunger and deprivation of deep poverty, it has had but modest success breaking the power of social systems that allow affluent families to sustain their children in the same social class, while poor children cannot escape theirs. In a short period of time, urban charters have yielded impressive, even astonishing, success at closing the academic achievement gap between the poorest children and more privileged ones. (New York Magazine)