Last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared that states with NCLB waivers could wait until the 2015–16 school year to start tying test scores to teacher evaluations. It’s a very welcome bit of reasonableness, widely heralded, that grants overwhelmed states a reprieve and allows steadfast locales to stay the course. Effective implementation of the new Common Core standards is Job One—this is a time to support teachers as they stretch themselves and their students to meet the new, higher expectations. The Secretary’s decision will help.
On Thursday, a North Carolina trial court judge held unconstitutional a state voucher law that allowed public money to pay tuition at private and religious schools. The decision is frustrating for choice proponents—and not just because it leaves hundreds of families in last-minute limbo. Nevertheless, some light shines through. The ruling was based on the lack of regulation and accountability at these schools. Pass a provision requiring them to test kids and report the results, and the legal reasoning disappears. There’s also the imminent appeal.
New York City’s United Federation of Teachers supported a Saturday march against aggressive policing, pitting one city union against another and angering many teachers in the process. It also quite possibly injured their right to free speech. Teachers in NYC can choose not to be a member and avoid dues, but everyone still has to pay agency fees. This means that all teachers support union activities, including political speech with which they might disagree. Most states don’t require these payments. And the U.S. Supreme Court has recently opined on such fees (alas, the holding was narrow). Yet they still abound as absurd conditions of employment in some our nation’s schools.
RESEARCH ROUNDUP
Do higher math and science graduation requirements increase the number of dropouts? Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that “many students ended up dropping out when school was made harder for them.” The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that middle schools and high schools delay the start of class to 8:30 a.m. or later “to align school schedules to the biological sleep rhythms of adolescents.” The cost of living isn’t the same in different parts of the U.S., but the federal poverty threshold is. A General Accounting Office study finds that “there would be significant shifts in eligibility and program costs” if school meal programs accounted for local differences in the cost of living. Four-year-old children’s ability to draw pictures of other children is an indicator of intelligence later in life, according to a study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. So, when your mother put your pre-K drawing on the refrigerator, she was just rightfully recognizing your genius.
