Over the past few weeks, the growing animosity between different education organizations and advocates regarding the merits of charter versus traditional district schools has dominated the news cycle. However, in recent years, a growing number of districts and charter schools have put aside their political differences and worked together in order to do what’s best for students. Read here to learn about these district-charter collaborations.
Yesterday, a 12 member task force convened by the NAACP issued a report on "Quality Education," which provided a set of five recommendations for improving the quality of public charters. Upon its release, the report elicited scrutiny from several education advocates, who questioned the authenticity of their public hearings.
Yesterday, the Minnesota House and Senate’s Education Policy Committees held a joint hearing on the state’s ESSA accountability plan. At the hearing, MDE provided an overview of the plan, which they have developed over the past year in community with a wide variety of stakeholders. Read here for some of the concerns that legislators and testifiers raised.
On July 4th, the vast majority of the 7,000 delegates from the National Education Association (NEA) voted to adopt a new charter school policy statement. The new statement is an overhaul of NEA’s former charter school policy statement that they had adopted in 2001. Read more about the statement and the response from NAPCS and NACSA here.
Over the past 20 years, the number of EL students in Minnesota has increased by 300 percent, making them the state’s fastest growing student group. However, despite the rapid growth, their academic progress, as compared to their non-EL peers, has plateaued. The Minnesota Multilingual Equity Network proposed seven recommendations to MDE for ESSA implementation.
Last Thursday, about 100 attendees gathered to hear and learn about New Hampshire’s first-of-its-kind Performance Assessment of Competency Education state accountability system from two of its architects—Deputy Commissioner Paul Leather, and the state’s PACE curriculum director, Ellen Hume-Howard.
This past week over 4,200 advocates, teachers, policymakers, administrators, consultants, and board members attended the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The conference boasted over 135 sessions, Betsy DeVos spoke, and Success Academy won the prestigious Broad Prize.
Last week, MDE’s ESSA Accountability Committee had their last meeting regarding their recommendations for state’s accountability plan. Over the course of ten months, the Accountability Committee met to discuss the different components of the plan - the state’s measures of school quality and student success (SQ/SS) measures, graduation rates, academic growth, the state’s goals for the academic indicators, and how the bottom five percent of schools will be identified for support.
Last night, Governor Dayton signed the policy and funding bills that laid out Minnesota’s next two-year, $46 billion dollar budget, which includes over $18 billion for K-12 Education. But, what's in it? Read here to find out about some of the key provisions.
The word "innovation" is in vogue. But what does it really mean? Read here about the four different dimensions of innovation and how they can be scaled up in K-12 education. This post first appeared on Rick Hess' blog, Straight Up, for Education Week.
