Education Policy and Government

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush again defended his support of the Common Core education standards, which are deeply unpopular within the Republican Party.Read the rest of the story at CBS News.

Photo Credit: Medill DCby Nick AndersonEducation Secretary Arne Duncan delivered this week a dual message on accountability in higher education. He said the Obama administration aims to crack down on schools that fail to deliver what they promise to students, but he lamented that politics and bureaucracy in the system of oversight often stymies efforts to get tough on dismal school performance.Read the rest of the story at The Washington Post.

Both houses of Congress have now passed versions of the bill that would update the largest federal education law, known as No Child Left Behind, for the first time since 2001. They are big, meaty and complicated, and now they have to be reconciled into one messy Dagwood sandwich of a bill to go to the president. Read the rest of the story on NPREd.

Photo credit: Tim Evansonby Jennifer C. Kerr, Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — More than a decade after No Child Left Behind established a stronger federal role in public education, the Senate on Thursday approved a rewrite of the much-criticized education law that would return much of that power to the states.Read the rest of the story at U.S. News and World Report.

by Jennifer Steinhauer and Motoko RichWASHINGTON — Congress on Wednesday moved to substantially scale back the federal government’s role in education, particularly the use of high-stakes standardized testing to punish schools, in the first significant proposed revisions since the No Child Left Behind law was passed 14 years ago.Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.

by Lauren CameraAfter weeks of letting it languish in the legislative queue, the U.S. Senate this week is slated to begin debating a proposed bipartisan overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—the first such Senate debate since 2001, when Congress last updated the law in its current iteration, the No Child Left Behind Act.Read the rest of the story at Education Week.

Could Hillary Clinton bring together a party splintered over education policy?by Allie BidwellOutside of local elections, education policy has never been an issue that makes voters flock to the polls. It’s just not as sexy as raising or lowering taxes, nor as anxiety-inducing as foreign relations and national security.Read the rest of the story at U.S. News.

by Maureen SullivanCarly Fiorina, the former CEO and chairman of Hewlett-Packard, today announced her run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. She has never held public office and calls her run a “return to citizen government.” She pokes fun at her undergraduate degree from Stanford in medieval history and philosophy but says it comes in handy when she wants to poke holes in President Obama’s comparison of ISIS terrorism with the Crusades.Read the rest of the story on Forbes.

by Allie Bidwell