Current News

A broad coalition of national education, business, philanthropic and policy groups, including CCSSO, has come together to create a clear, unified and focused vision for what it means to be career ready. The coalition known as the Career Readiness Partner Council, issued a statement on October 18, “Building Blocks For Change: What it Means to be Career Ready,” making clear that career readiness is a process of connecting “education and employment to achieve a fulfilling, financially-secure and successful career.”

Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), an initiative dedicated to improving college readiness and completion, has announced grants totaling $5.4 million for 13 new models of personalized, blended learning at the secondary and postsecondary levels.

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday has filed paperwork with the Secretary of State's office to establish the Fund for Transforming Education in Kentucky. The foundation would be separate from the State Department of Education and would seek grants and funding outside of state, federal, and local sources to help school districts.

Idaho has been granted a waiver from the No Child Left Behind law by the U.S. Department of Education, which also approved the state's new accountability system that uses academic growth and other measures to assess student achievement. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna believes the new system will better gauge student achievement and better identify schools performing well and those that are struggling.

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.