Current News

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.

Although Gallup's Confidence in Institutions survey for 2012 shows a decrease in respondents placing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in public K-12 education to 29 percent, down 29 percentage points from 1973, MetaMetrics President and co-founder Malbert Smith III, director of professional development Jason Turner, and research engineer Steve Lattanzio say more should be done to highlight successes in the educational system.

PARCC and Smarter Balanced have both announced that they have sample assessment items and tasks available online, providing educators, parents, and students an initial look at the types of items that will appear on next-generation assessments.

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced its fourth round of Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants, a program that backs differentiated compensation systems. The program has expanded to include career ladders, where teachers not only get pay bumps but are given additional professional responsibilities; grantees now must secure more support from teachers' unions and others up front, rather than during a planning year; and more attention is paid to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The U.S. Department of Education announced on Oct. 1 that 22 states -- Alabama, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin -- will receive $24 million in grants to improve personnel training systems to help children with disabilities.

South Dakota Education Secretary Melody Schopp says that voters will get a say in education reform on Nov. 6 when they decide whether Referred Law 16 should be implemented. The law will enable local school districts to create their own programs to reward teachers, though schools can opt out of the merit-based program; but the program will provide annual state-funded merit bonuses to a district's full-time certified teachers.

South Carolina students demonstrated improvement on test scores and passage rates this year in most courses, according to data released from the South Carolina Department of Education. The largest improvements were recorded in biology, English, and U.S. history and the Constitution. State Superintendent of Education Mick Zais says, "The credit for student achievement gains belongs to hard working students, parents, and teachers. Measuring student achievement is an important tool to improving instructional practices."