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Education officials in Florida are standing behind the new strategic plan approved earlier this month by the State Board of Education, which sets different goals for reading and math achievement based on race and ethnicity. The goals are required as part of Florida's No Child Left Behind waiver from the federal government, and the state must halve its achievement gap for all students by 2018.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy says five-year grants totaling more than $2.5 million have been awarded to 14 school districts and organizations across the state as part of the U.S. Department of Education's 21st Century Community Learning Center initiative. The grants must be used to provide literacy and educational development activities -- such as tutoring and mentoring, homework help, academic enrichment, community service opportunities, and music, arts, sports, health, and cultural activities -- to students at high-need schools.

Registration is open for CCSSO’s upcoming Annual Policy Forum in Savannah, Georgia, November 15-17, 2012.

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the awards for the five-year Comprehensive Centers program. The Comprehensive Centers program is composed of a two-tiered approach to providing technical assistance to states. Fifteen regional comprehensive centers (RCCs) provide support to directly to their constituent states while seven national content centers specialize in building state capacity and providing technical assistance to RCCs and states

The Council of Chief State School Officers has issued a framework to guide states in revising English-language-proficiency standards for English-language-learners. "What the framework writers have done is take the common core and the Next Generation Science Standards and identified the language demands in each of those content standards and described them," says Stanford University education professor Kenji Hakuta, who advised the framework developers.

Louisiana Superintendent John White is working on a common assessment and grading system for the state's publicly funded pre-kindergarten and early childhood education programs in accordance with a new law. White hopes to release a "conceptual framework" for public comment by the end of the month and plans to make recommendations to the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in December.

Schools districts in Illinois are working to implement the Common Core State Standards, with the State Board of Education providing professional development assistance to educators. Glenn Grieshaber, superintendent of River Grove School District 85.5, says the district will send some teachers out for training, and these teachers will share what they learned with other educators.

Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA) Director Marilee Fitzgerald says that because students of military parents must make physical and emotional adjustments to as many as eight schools between kindergarten and high school, recipients of the 2012 DODEA grants must strive to create programs that will benefit all military students. "That is what this grant program is about. It is about extending those opportunities to help our children continue their academic careers so they are not disrupted," she says.

Many school districts in Connecticut are using professional development time to revise their curriculum and prepare teachers for the implementation of the Common Core State Standards in 2014. According to the Connecticut Department of Education, 20 percent of the Common Core standards for English are not included in the state's existing standards, and 12 percent are only generally related. For math, 20 percent are new, but 68 percent match the state's math standards.

The California Department of Education has rolled out new School Quality Snapshots for each of the state's 10,000 public schools. These two-page documents provide information on the school's test scores, class sizes, fitness levels, and graduation rates, as well as a five-year overview of the school's performance on key indicators and state- and district-level data.