MOOCs: A Revolutionary PerspectiveJoin us for an online Town Hall with Gordon Rogers on Wednesday May 6th from 10:00am – 11:00am ESTA number of parallels exist between the new frontier of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their recognition as “academic currency” and the fate of the doomed Continental, the currency of the American colonies. Just as the revolutionary banknotes lacked credibility, the assessment instruments used by students to prove knowledge and mastery of MOOCs continue to face an uphill battle for authenticity. Until these issues are overcome, online education will be, in the eyes of many, “not worth a Continental”.But efforts are underway to achieve wider recognition and acceptance of alternative forms of credentialing. They are taking place in universities, community colleges and coding “boot-camps.” They generally fall into a framework known as “Competency Based Education” (CBE), representing the first significant step in the unbundling of American higher education. …

by Issie LapowskiSO YOU’RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend’s neighbor’s sister. It’s prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools—with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning—just aren’t cutting it.At the same time, you’re thinking: this school is kind of weird.Read the rest of the story at Wired.

Last week’s events in Baltimore did not start the race discussions and teachable moments for the students and faculty at Washington Latin PCS in Washington, D.C., they continued them. The community, lead by Head of School Martha Cutts, has been facing the issue of race head on using its “classical education for the modern world” as its foundation.

by Kyla Calvert Mason

by Leila Meyer

Discover who is truly responsible for bad data use in education and how better data systems and clear reporting can improve decision-making for educators.

by Josh ZumbrunMuch has been written about millennials–the nickname for the generation of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s–and the rough time they’ve had in the economy. But now that the generation is getting older, and  the oldest millennials are in their mid-30s by some definitions, an increasing number are parents themselves.A new report from Konrad Mugglestone, a policy analyst at Young Invincibles, a Washington-based group that represents the interests of young Americans, has dived into the data on millennial parents (defined in this report as those ages 18 to 34).Read the rest of the story on the Wall Street Journal site.

Rebecca Winthrop from the Brookings Institution notes that the differences between the developed and developing worlds in education remain stark.

N ationally, eighth graders’ average scores on the NAEP U.S. history, geography, and civics assessments showed no significant change in 2014, compared to 2010—the last assessment year. However, several student groups have made gains. In 2014, eighteen percent of eighth-graders performed at or above the Proficient level in U.S. history, 27 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in geography, and 23 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in civics. Students performing at or above the Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter. See the results at The Nation’s Report Card.

by Katrina Schwartz S andwiched between preschool and first grade, kindergarteners often start school at very different stages of development depending on their exposure to preschool, home environments and biology. For states adopting Common Core, the standards apply to kindergarten, laying out what students should be able to do by the end of the grade.* Kindergartners are expected to know basic phonics and word recognition as well as read beginner texts, skills some childhood development experts argue are developmentally inappropriate.“There’s a wide age range for learning to read,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige on KQED’s Forum program. Carlsson-Paige is professor emerita of education at Lesley University and co-author of the study “Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose,” which criticizes the Common Core standards for kindergarten.Read the rest of the story at KQED News.

by Elissa Nadworny

by Harvey Rice O ne college professor found his students so hopeless that he flunked them all and quit the course. In an email to his management class at Texas A&M Galveston, professor Irwin Horwitz came down hard.”I am frankly and completely disgusted. You all lack the honor and maturity to live up to the standards that Texas A&M holds, and the competence and/or desire to do the quality work necessary to pass the course just on a grade level,” he wrote, according to Inside Higher Ed. “I will no longer be teaching the course, and [you] all are being awarded a failing grade.”RELATED: Meanest things said about Houston college teachersIn the message, Horwitz said students had cheated, told him to “chill out,” called him a “[expletive] moron” and spread false rumors about him online. He told KPRC news he even felt unsafe in the classroom at times, and had never …

T he Foundation for Excellence in Education, also known as ExcelinEd, released its annual Digital Learning Report Card today. Digital Learning Now, an initiative of ExcelinEd, bases the report card on “Ten Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning” that identify specific policies and issues states need to pursue regarding digital learning. Included in these elements are student eligibility, student access, personalized learning, advancement, quality content and instruction, choice, assessment, funding and delivery. The Digital Learning Report Card examines what states are doing to advance digital learning by gauging 42 actionable metrics related to these elements.This 2014 report assigns a letter grade to each state based on those metrics. The states of Florida and Utah each received an “A” grade. Fifty percent of the states improved their grades overall, and nine states improved from their previous “F” grades. The report cites overall progress nationwide, but also acknowledges that states have been busy …

by M. Alex Johnson I n what’s believed to be the biggest shutdown in the history of higher education in the United States, Corinthian Colleges said Sunday it’s closing its remaining 28 for-profit schools effective immediately, kicking about 16,000 students out of school.Corinthian, based in Santa Ana, California, said in a statement and an email to students that it would lean on government agencies and other institutions to place the students, who were enrolled at Heald College locations in California, Hawaii and Oregon and at Everest and WyoTech locations in California, Arizona and New York.Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

by Mike Anderson