DeVos’s Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States

(New York Times) Erica L. Green.   Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who made a career of promoting local control of education, has signaled a surprisingly hard-line approach to carrying out an expansive new federal education law, issuing critical feedback that has rattled state school chiefs and conservative education experts alike. President Barack Obama signed the […]

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Trump Team Hurries to Soothe States Worried About ESSA

(Edweek) by Alyson Klein. The Trump administration is under pressure to explain its extensive early feedback on state plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, and it appears to be responding. Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said in a statement Friday that the feedback letters “raised […]

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What’s Left: Correcting Common Core

(The Colgate Maroon-News) By J.J. Citron.   The goals of the Common Core system are worthwhile. The initiative strives to create a unified curriculum in an attempt to increase workforce readiness. However, in the process of standardization, states have been subjected to excessive pressures. Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced and updated the NCLB; […]

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A Dispatch From the Outgoing U.S. Education Secretary

(Edweek)  By John B. King Jr. — The passage just over a year ago of the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, provides us an opportunity to begin our work together. The top-down, one-size-fits-all approach of the No Child Left Behind law was a blunt tool, ill-suited to a task that called for nuance. […]

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2016: The education election nobody saw coming

(The Brookings Institution) By Michael Hanson — It has been seven weeks since Donald Trump’s come-from-behind presidential win, but his victory wasn’t the only surprising outcome of the election. In reflecting on the events of the campaign and the new direction in education conversations in the wake of the result, it strikes me that there’s a […]

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