Current News

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."

Rhode Island continues to develop and implement an intensive teacher evaluation system that uses student learning as a performance metric for teacher effectiveness. The evaluation system will be used for the first time this year, and over the summer, teachers worked with school principals to create personal student learning objectives to help them track student progress throughout the year. The state will use the students' progress on those objectives to determine teacher effectiveness.

Like seven states that have parent triggers on the books, Oklahoma State Senator David Holt has proposed legislation to allow parents to drive change in low performing schools. If 51 percent of parents sign a petition, changes could be made to staffing or turning a school into a charter, among other things.

In Maryland, the General Assembly paved the way for the state to create new teacher and principal evaluation systems as part of the federal Race to the Top grant program. Now, 129 Howard County teachers and 23 principals will participate in a pilot evaluation, even though the new evaluation system does not take effect until 2013. The evaluation systems must ensure that student growth is used as a measure in teacher evaluations, with about 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation based on student growth.