Race to Top Round 2: Announcing the Winners

The U.S. Department of Education confirmed the 10 winners of the second round of the Race to the Top competition late this morning as the news trickled out state by state from members of Congress, who were notified first.

Read More at Education Week

L.A.'s Leaders in Learning

A system used to rate schools in Los Angeles and some other districts across the country may be overlooking important data that could make the ratings more meaningful. The Academic Performance Index has been shown to mirror students' advantages and disadvantages outside of school, rather than any progress the school is fostering. "We're measuring who is in schools rather than how effective the schools are," a Duke University testing expert said. Some say student progress may be better measured by value-added methods that look at individual students' performance from year to year.

Read More at the L.A. Times

Teaching Our Way to a Stronger Economy

Today, the President took bold action, signing important legislation to provide urgent fiscal relief to school districts across the country to maintain our education system, and to enable 160,000 teachers to keep their jobs.

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President Obama Calls for an Increase in US College Graduates

In an address at the University of Texas, President Obama set a goal for the US education system to produce 8 million more graduates by 2020, which would position the US to once again have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world. 

Read More at The New York Times

Recession has Teach For America Becoming More Competitive

Teach For America positions have become a major resume booster, and as the economy continues to languish is increasingly a viable option for a solid paycheck for recent graduates.

But increased interest has made the program more competitive, with applicants facing a process almost as daunting and exclusive as Ivy League college admissions.

Read More at The New York Times

Managing by the Numbers: Empowerment and Accountability in New York City's Schools

The report offers one of the first broad analyses of the Bloomberg administration's reorganization of school management, explaining how principal empowerment and school accountability are intertwined, and how this management structure is shaping children's lives. The report identifies important gains as well as troubling problems.

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Central Office Transformation for District-Wide Teaching and Learning Improvement

One of the first and most comprehensive studies of its kind, this report identifies five major changes that can help transform the focus of school district central offices from administration and compliance to improving classroom instruction. The report is based on an in-depth study of central office reform efforts in Atlanta, New York City, and Oakland, California. The changes identified include the offices’ strong engagement with school principals on improving instruction in their schools, and the reorganizing and “reculturing” of every central office so it centers its work on the classroom. The report is part of a series by University of Washington researchers that investigates how leaders can contribute to improved student achievement, particularly in challenging schools and districts.

Read the Entire Study at the Wallace Foundation

Public Financing Supports Growth of Online Charter Schools

Laura Drews has converted a corner of her San Jose dining room into a public school. Every weekday, she guides her first-, fifth- and eighth-grade children through their class assignments, delivered through textbooks and desktop computers.

Read More at The New York Times

Panel Releases Proposal to Set U.S. Education Standards

The new standards, which experts said could well be adopted by a majority of states, would replace the nation’s checkerboard of locally written standards.

Read More at the New York Times

Building a Better Teacher

There are more than three million teachers in the United States, and Doug Lemov is trying to prove that he can teach them to be better.

Read More at the New York Times Magazine