When schools closed and classes went online, expectations fell. Some students had trouble accessing classes or younger siblings to tend or jobs essential for paying the family’s rent. Teachers were told to give “grace” and flexibility in a time of crisis. easier grading and lower expectations the norm, wrote Eric Wolf Welch, a Virginia teacher, in an email to Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews. It’s “dangerous,” he believes. A long-time social studies teacher at a Fairfax

Fordham’s Reading and Writing Instruction in America’s Schools looks at how teaching has changed in the Common Core era. Middle and high school teachers report students are better at citing evidence from the text, a Core priority, the report finds. However, teachers are “more likely to assign texts based on students’ current reading levels—as opposed to their grade levels—contrary to the intent of the standards.” In addition teachers are assigning fewer classic works of liter

Once upon a time, 45 states adopted Common Core standards and exams — either the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) or Smarter Balanced — writes Tracy Dell’Angela in Education Post. There was “some shared understanding of what grade-level proficiency really looks like from Nevada to New Jersey.” That consensus has shattered. Illinois plans to replace PARCC with a state-designed exam, reports Stephen Sawchuk in Ed Week. The PARCC consortia

“Making graduation too easy” doesn’t just undermine “the motivations of students (and teachers),” writes Robert Slavin, who directs the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins and chairs the Success for All Foundation. “It also undermines the motivation of the entire system” to improve. If educators can keep doing what they’ve always done, knowing that numbers will be fiddled with at the end to make everything come out all right, then the whole system can

Orange is the new red for California schools, writes New America’s Conor Williams in The 74. Twice as many schools fell in the bottom (red) tier of the state’s Trivial Pursuit-inspired accountability dashboard this year. It could have been “a signal that California needs to do a whole lot more to improve how its schools serve students,” he writes. Instead, the state tweaked the dashboard to move reds to orange and boost the number of greens and blues. The move “appears to sub

In Raising Kings: A Year of Love and Struggle at Ron Brown College Prep, a three-part series by NPR and Education Week, Cory Turner reports on the first year of Washington, D.C. high school designed to nurture and educate young men of color. In the second half of the 2016-17 school year, the school’s college-prep ambitions clashed with its social-emotional learning mission, writes Turner. Forty percent of students are at risk of failing ninth grade. Shaka Greene can’t teach a

Ohio raised its graduation requirements, promising graduates would be ready for college and careers. Now the state Board of Education is considering lowering requirements amid fears that one third of 11th graders aren’t on track for a diploma. The recommendations would destroy the value of a diploma, argue Chad L. Aldis and Aaron Churchill, who work for Fordham in Ohio, in the Plain Dealer. Currently, students in the class of 2018 and beyond have three paths to a diploma. The

“Six years after Common Core’s debut,” its critics “have produced enough books to collapse a sturdy bookshelf,” writes Fordham’s Robert Pondiscio. However, most “traffic in fear mongering and paranoid conspiracy theories about corporate greed.” For example, teacher/activist Kris Nielsen, author of Children of the Core (great title!), believes the “Common Core network” is trying to “dismantle public education.” Common Core and the Truth, by Amy Skalicky, billed as a “parent’s