Skip to main contentWeekend Reads: Meet ESSA, the new NCLB that (maybe) ends the accountability era
By | December 11, 2015, 4:00pm UTC - The Every Student Succeeds Act, the NCLB replacement that became law this week, keeps testing but loses accountability, basically. (Politics K-12)
- The new law represents a repudiation of outgoing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s approach. (FiveThirtyEight)
- But it’s not at all clear how much it will actually change life for individual students and teachers. (The Atlantic)
- How ESSA is like a “Game of Thrones” plot point about the randomness of destiny. (Andy Rotherham)
- The Common Core took another blow this week when New York’s governor recommended revising the standards there. (Chalkbeat)
- UFT President Michael Mulgrew lists three “school ‘reform’ myths,” starting with the idea that merit pay works. (Education Week)
- American students aren’t tested a lot, at least compared to their counterparts in lots of other countries. (Hechinger Report)
- Twins whose teachers have very different philosophies show their mother the value and danger of homework. (Motherlode)
- A growing number of Teach For America teachers are second-generation — they were taught by TFA teachers themselves. (The 74 Million)
- Schools with many poor students don’t just have inexperienced teachers — many have temporary teachers. (Washington Post)
- An English teacher is polling her colleagues about how they include fiction in the age of Common Core. (On the Shoulders of Giants)
- A science teacher shares her journey from teaching about rocks to getting her middle schoolers to code. (Chalkbeat)
- The success of coding curriculums depends on their implementation, as two Arizona districts illustrate. (Education Week)
- A Chicago school founded with a gaming focus is changing approaches to avoid closure. (Catalyst)
- Can people without kids have “skin in the game” of education policy? Here’s an argument for yes. (Grand Rounds)
- Get to know a Colorado school that has no graduation gap among students of different ethnicities. (Chalkbeat)