The presidential pre-school watch can officially begin.
The eyes of advocates, educators and many others are now upon President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for education secretary as he initiates an early childhood agenda.
Chicago Schools Chief Arne Duncan made it clear that preschool expansion is among his priorities at a Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
Duncan said he wants to build on the successes of Head Start and Early Head Start and that he believes investment in early childhood is needed because “too many children show up at kindergarten already behind.”
Before Duncan faced the Senate, the New America Foundation posed some excellent policy questions that will be useful for journalists to watch closely in the coming months.
The Senate hearing was hardly a grilling; Duncan received a warm reception and lots of applause throughout the hearing — where his own pre-schooler read and drew.
Hechinger blogs
How will NYC students fare on the new exams?
It’s the learning, stupidLast month, the state of New York administered English Language Arts and mathematics assessments to students in grades 3-8. For the first time, the assessments were aligned with the Common Core State Standards, a set of standards for what students should know at each grade level in these subjects that 45 states across the country [...]
Completion strategies may be too costlyThe community college Completion Agenda aims to double the number of students who complete a one-year certificate or an associate degree or who transfer to complete a credential, writes Terry O’Banion in Community College Times. College leaders have focused on orientation, advising, placement, financial aid — everything but teaching and learning. Key leaders involved in the Completion [...]
New test assesses non-academic readinessCommunity colleges and other broad-access institutions are under pressure to graduate more students while cutting costs, write Community College Research Center researchers Davis Jenkins and Olga Rodríguez in Access and Success with Less: Improving Productivity in Broad-Access Postsecondary Institutions. But completion-boosting strategies may not be cost effective and the most commonly used cost-cutting strategies, such as hiring adjuncts [...]
Community colleges see 3.6% enrollment dipStudent success depends on motivation as well as academic preparation. A new ETS test called SuccessNavigator claims to measure students’ readiness to show up for class, ask question and persevere, reports Inside Higher Ed. Steven Robbins, director of research innovation at ETS, said the test can be used in tandem with conventional placement exams to find students [...]
CCs try to double the number of grads by 2020College enrollments are continuing to fall by an average of 2.3 percent, except at four-year, private, nonprofit institutions, reports the National Student Clearinghouse. Community colleges lost 3.6 percent of students from spring 2012 to 2013. Full-time enrollment declined by 5.2 percent and part-time enrollment by 2.6 percent. The number of traditional-age students went down by only 1.7 [...]
Community college leaders are trying to double the number of graduates by 2020 to meet President Obama’s targets. It’s not easy, writes Stacy Collett in Community College Journal. For administrators at Harper College in Illinois, 10,604 is the magic number—it’s the college’s share of the 5 million additional community college graduates President Obama challenged the [...]
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Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak. “It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. [...]
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ORLANDO―Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida (UCF) had spread out over the room in small groups. One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed [...]
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INGLEWOOD, Calif.—In the back of a tenth-grade geometry classroom on a recent morning at Washington Preparatory High School, nine miles southeast of Los Angeles, Landon Yurica and Alycia Jones bent over the papers in front of them. At 23 and 24, respectively, the two could almost blend in as students as they tried the assignment [...]
California struggles to assess teacher training programs
NORTHRIDGE, Calif.— It took less than a minute for Mario Martinez to finish the first six questions of the algebra exam that his professor, Ivan Cheng, had just handed to him. The high school-level test was supposed to be a good example of an exam, so that the graduate students in Cheng’s math methods course [...]
NORTHRIDGE, Calif.—On a recent afternoon at California State University, Northridge, Nancy Prosenjak was attempting to quiet the graduate students spread out across conference tables in the back of her classroom. She was still missing nearly a third of the class, but she was eager to debrief with her students about their first day of student [...]
