Five Best Blogs: Harkin Back To 1994

The Waiver Wire Education Sector: To assume that higher education institutions notoriously impervious to change will abandon their inadequate remedial placement policies simply because the state adopted Common Core is naive. 

Not So Little Rights, But Big Wrong Eduwonk: On the big question of accountability it takes the federal policy back to an approach on accountability that didn’t work in the 1990s under the 1994 Improving America’s Schools  Act, and really before that.  

Of the Visit of the Secretary of Education Founding Principles:  I went to Secretary Duncan's town hall in Pico Rivera last night. Politician after politician rose and gave one meaningless speech after another.

The Feds' For-Profit Double Standard in Ed Rick Hess:  I'm frequently frustrated by our inability to talk sensibly about the role of for-profits in schooling. Most discussion amounts to reflexive demonization, occasionally interspersed with hired-gun salesmanship or protestations of good intentions.

Safety Dance Title I Derland: We all know that turning around a low-performing school is hard work. There’s never just one factor impacting a school’s performance and, let’s face it, many staff members and administrators are resistant to change. 

Why Education Needs an Occupy the Classroom Revolution Jose Vilson: We will hold accountable the people in charge of ensuring the right to a fair, equitable public education in the same fashion they have held us accountable. 

Laura Johnson’s Unhappy Journey Education Sector: A system that offers little guidance and no safety nets for ill-informed high school students making big educational decisions is almost certain to produce many more stories of seventeen year-olds wasting a semester of school at the worst possible time.