Hot Topics – controversial

Terrorism, climate change and our education system are the topmost national security issues facing the USA.

Education has become an experience, for a great number of students, that embodies a doctor’s visit and less like a visit to your local Science Center. Students are basically poked and prodded for data to satisfy funding allocation procedures by the very adults charged with forging a new and exciting path of study.

From POLITICO
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush offered a sweeping school choice-centric education plan Monday with proposals that would allow parents to spend government dollars on the pre-K program of their choice and give college students a $50,000 line of credit to pay tuition.
Bush unveiled his plan on Martin Luther King Jr. Day as he fights to stay relevant in a GOP race dominated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, invoking education as a civil rights issue.

From U.S. Uncut – Detroit’s students are trying to learn while breathing in black mold and sitting in classrooms filled with buckets catching toilet water leaking through the ceiling. And that’s not even the worst part. Republican Governor Rick Snyder is not only using the financial emergency management laws to poison children in Flint; he’s doing the same thing in Detroit via the public school system, which the state has controlled for the last seven years.

an op-ed on the Common Core State Standards, The Real “Common Core” of Teaching, that garnered a lot of attention on LinkedIn. Here is the reaction of educator Ken Turner: 

School districts are under pressure from the federal government, foundations, and states to include value-added assessment as a part of a teacher’s evaluation to meet the widely supported policy goal of identifying the most effective and the least effective teachers in a school system. On its face, the argument for value-added models (VAM) seems to make sense. How well a student does after a year with a teacher should serve as an indicator of how effective that teacher was. But by what measures? How valid are those measures? If the student measure is a score on a standardized test, what evidence do we have to indicate the standardized test accurately measures teacher effectiveness? Which students are being compared?

By Greg Botelho
(CNN) The United States’ two biggest school districts get the same threat.
One — in Los Angeles — decides to call off school, with the superintendent saying students won’t go back until he’s absolutely sure everything is safe.
The other — in New York — decides just the opposite, dismissing the threat as an apparent “hoax.”

The Great Recession may be officially over, but state spending on K-12 education hasn’t recovered.

With his signature Thursday, President Barack Obama is setting the nation’s public schools on a sweeping new course of accountability that will change the way teachers are evaluated and how the poorest performing schools are pushed to improve.