AM News: The Return Of Private School Choice

Tax Credit Strategie Fuels Private School Choice Push EdWeek: The political climate in many states has become ripe for private-school choice, and few choice models are proving as popular as tax-credit scholarships. 

L.A. Teachers Face New Evaluations WSJ: In the past three years, at least 30 states have begun to use student achievement to evaluate teachers, spurred in part by President Barack Obama's Race to the Top education initiative as well as by some Republican governors. California isn't one of them.

Reading, Pennsylvania: Poorest U.S. City Loses Pre-Kindergarten, 170 Teachers HuffPostEdu: School funding problems are particularly bad in Pennsylvania, where the state cut $860 million in education spending last year.

Duncan Calls on Parties to Work Together on Student Loans EducationNews: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made an appeal to lawmakers around the country to leave the politics out of the education debate if they hope to make any strides in fixing the problems afflicting American’s academic system. 

Reacting to Criticism, Cuomo Adds to His Education Commission SchoolBook:  Seeking to address complaints about the makeup of his new education reform commission, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has added five additional members to the panel in advance of its first meeting later this month.

Comments

[Sarah]

I wonder how many times now Congress has been encouraged to tackle the student loans issue. It's time Duncan stop formally calling upon Congress, and start insisting the issue be tackled. Aggression is the only way to reach these people anymore.

[Sarah]

And I wonder the circumstances behind Pennsylvania's drop of education funding and how much was really done to prevent it... or was it simply, as per political tradition, merely the easiest thing to cut, irritating the lowest proportion of voters?

[Bruce]

L.A. Unified is likely going down the wrong path on teacher appraisal, and it is unlikely that the strategy it appears determined to execute (direct use of student test scores as a percentage of a teacher's evaluation) is going to have the desired effect of improving the district, while it may well have unintended side effects (such as the continued flight of what remains of the district's middle class families). If this happens, which is not something I'm hoping for, it is likely to be attributable not so much to the judge's ruling, which appears to leave plenty of flexibility to the district and union for a cure, as to the current policy direction of the district. What you want to measure is the value the teacher adds to student learning, which cannot be directly deduced from that teacher's students' test scores even in the aggregate.