Bill Gates had an idea. He was passionate about it, absolutely sure he had a winner. His idea? America's high schools were too big.

When a multibillionaire gets an idea, just about everybody leans in to listen. And when that idea has to do with matters of important public policy and the billionaire is willing to back it up with hard cash, public officials tend to reach for the money with one hand and their marching orders with the other. Gates backed his small-schools initiative with enormous amounts of cash. So, without a great deal of thought, one school district after another signed on to the notion that large public high schools should be broken up and new, smaller schools should be created.

PISA has come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of how to measure student achievement across national school systems with different curricula. Instead of measuring how well students learn what they are taught in each system, it measures a set of economically useful skills that no one teaches.

Both PISA and NCLB, I argue, are cases of how we are shrinking the aims of education. One approach focuses on mastery of skills that are relevant but not taught and the other on mastery of content that is taught but not relevant. Neither seems a sensible basis for understanding the quality of schooling or for making educational policy.

This report, based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of school districts in Common Core-adopting states, examines school districts' efforts to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).  The report addresses district leaders' views on the rigor of the CCSS and their impact on learning and instruction, progress on and challenges in implementing the standards, outreach efforts to inform various stakeholders about the CCSS, district collaboration with other entities on various implementation activities, and the types and helpfulness of CCSS-related assistance from the state education agency. 

A month after asking the state to delay using Common Core-aligned state test results to grade schools, the Portland School Board appears ready to back that effort up with a refusal to set yearly achievement targets in three subjects linked to the new test.   The board is set to vote next week upon the district's proposed yearly goals for student achievement - which conspicuously don't include targets for third grade reading, fifth-grade math and eighth-grade math.

School superintendents standing by Common Core State Standards  by Lyndsey Layton  in the Washington Post blog 

A majority of school officials responsible for implementing the Common Core State Standards say the new national academic benchmarks are more rigorous than their previous state standards and will improve the skills of students, according to a new national survey released Wednesday.

But most of those same school leaders said it is a major challenge to find the funding they need to implement the standards properly and said there is not enough time to cement changes related to the Common Core before new tests are used to evaluate students, teachers and schools.

Fraud, financial mismanagement, lousy results: 

In a real "bargaining process," those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.   But that's not what's happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities - either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.

 

Fake It Till You Make It  by Amy Cuddy on YouTube (an original TED Talk)

Your body language shapes who you are.  Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how "power posing" -- standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don't feel confident -- can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.