Weekend Reads: Texas teenagers jailed for truancy

At the moment we’re mainly reading about Friday afternoon’s barrage of Colorado education policy events — Education Commissioner Robert Hammond is retiring, the state board’s effort to hold districts harmless for opt outs was denied by the federal government, and the House approved a long-awaited testing-focused bill.

But if you’ve waded through all that and are still looking for more, we’ve got your weekend education reads:

  • More than a thousand teenagers in Texas have been jailed for failure to follow court orders around truancy charges, effectively ending their education because of a measure meant to protect it. (Buzzfeed)
  • Nicholas Kristof suggests that education reformers refocus their efforts around early childhood measures. (New York Times)
  • Schools’ approaches to technology often assume that students understand more about how tech shapes their lives than they actually do, and the result is large holes in their education. (The Atlantic)
  • In an eight-part series, Chalkbeat dives deep into how an influx of English learners into Indiana schools is re-shaping education efforts there. (Chalkbeat)
  • In an excerpt from his new book on games, reporter Greg Toppo profiles a popular app that teaches algebraic concepts through play. (Hechinger Report)
  • Anti-testing advocates are fighting against policies that require students who opt out of exams to sit quietly and do nothing. (New York Times)
  • The release of the second in the “Divergent” series of young adult movies inspires one writer to call for less “with us or against us” thinking in education policy debates. (US News & World Report)
  • One of the early supporters of value-added teacher evaluation models outlines what other states can learn from New York’s new revisions to its model. (Brookings)