2014 National Seminar

The big blue bus making its way around New York City attracted the attention of parents and policymakers. The vehicle, which pulled into neighborhoods to gather community feedback, was a part of the A+NYC initiative’s grassroots efforts to shape public school policy during the 2013 mayoral election.

States receiving waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act are getting more time to grapple with how to conduct teacher evaluations using student test scores, particularly the new Common Core State Standards-based assessments.

According to Education Week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the postponement at an event on Thursday in Washington, D.C., which earlier this summer announced its plan to delay its new teacher evaluations.

From President Barack Obama’s 2013 call to expand preschool in his State of the Union Address to a series of statewide pushes for better-funded early childhood education programs, all eyes are turning toward our nation’s youngest learners.

Journalists hoping to tap into the world of early childhood education reporting will have no shortage of angles and story ideas to tackle.

Tennessee’s Race to the Top application was pretty honest, the state’s Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman told an EWA audience at Vanderbilt University in May.

“It basically started out by saying things aren’t going very well, they could be going better, here are the things we’re going to do to get better,” he said during an EWA National Seminar session on where Tennessee stands with the competitive federal education reform initiative.

As states transition to assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards, they should also be rethinking policies tying those exams to high school diplomas, argues New America’s Anne Hyslop in a new report.

D’Leisha Dent graduated this spring from a 99-percent black high school – a story that might not be what you would have expected from an Alabama public school system that was federally ordered to desegregate in 1979.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, college cost and affordability have become increasingly hot topics. As tuition prices have continued to rise well above the pace of inflation — with no accompanying growth in family incomes — the issue of access for low- and middle-income students has received more attention, to the extent that, in January, President Obama held a White House summit to press college leaders to do more for the poorest students.

How does a school educate its special education students alongside kids who don’t have a disability? At Susan Gray School in Nashville, teachers and scholars are collaborating on what many say is a model example of inclusive learning.

The main purpose of college is to transfer knowledge to students, but that requires getting them to the classroom… and actually keeping them there until graduation. Nationwide, less than 60 percent of college students complete a bachelor’s degree within six years.

When Sandra Ruppert was growing up in Los Angeles every classroom at her school, Hancock Park Elementary, had a piano. And every teacher could play it.

“I made my first trip to the opera in third grade, learned ballroom dancing in the fourth grade and took violin in fifth grade,” Ruppert told those in attendance at “Kids Got the Beat,” one of the final panels of EWA’s 2014 National Seminar, held last month in Nashville. At her school, “there was artwork in the halls and seamlessly integrated into all kinds of classes.”

State governments increasingly are tying money for higher-education institutions to performance-based outcomes such as graduation rates, rather than just student enrollment. Twenty-five states now have some sort of performance-based model and four others are planning to follow. But there are still major questions about how schools respond to these models and what outcomes they have. Those issues were the focus of a panel discussion at EWA’s 67th National Seminar, held last month at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

At EWA’s 67th National Seminar at Vanderbilt University last month, we took a “deep dive” into the impact of noncognitive factors on student learning. This is the first of three guest posts from that session. Parts II and III will follow.

Today’s post features guest blogger Nancy Mitchell, communications director of the Education Commission of the States, who attended EWA’s National Seminar at Vanderbilt University in Nashville earlier this month. 

Stephen Abbott reacted with horror to one television reporter’s attempt to squeeze the Common Core State Standards into a sound bite: “It was a complete hot mess.”

Sit-ins were the preferred avenue of protest on college campuses during the 1960s and 1970s. Students protested in support of civil rights and opposition to war, and their actions sparked social, legal and cultural changes nationwide. As recently as last year, the Dream Defenders spent 31 days camped in the Florida capitol to protest criminal justice issues.

Sit-ins take time, though – time to organize, time for the sit-in to transpire and time to have an impact.

Today’s post features guest blogger Jennifer Donovan of Michigan Technological University, who attended EWA’s National Seminar at Vanderbilt University in Nashville earlier this month. 

As more people get their news from the Internet and social media — more and more of them accessing these information outlets by mobile devices — universities can’t rely solely on people coming to their home pages to get news about these institutions.

Avalon School in St. Paul, Minn. doesn’t have a defined leader, but it’s easy to see who is in charge.

Instead of having a traditional principal, the charter school is governed by a cooperative of the teaching staff that oversees decisions such as curriculum, budgets and training.

Teachers share administrative roles and work as a group to make decisions.

I’ve often made the case that there’s no reporting beat where the reporters are more collegial – or more committed to their work – than education. EWA’s 67th National Seminar, hosted by Vanderbilt University, helped to prove that point.