What’s in a name? Plenty. Or, why your child’s kindergarten class has three kids named Ava and two named Olivia. (Boston Globe)

A bid toward success. Sarah Hanson, 19, has auctioned off 10 percent of her future earnings in order to pay off her student debt and create her own startup. The winning bid on her future success? An unbelievable $125,000. (VentureBeat, h/t Huffington Post)

Success with the Common Core. Critics of the Common Core State Standards have ramped up efforts against the new educational framework, particularly in Colorado, Idaho, and Indiana, for a variety of reasons. A recent Education Sector piece reminds us that we’ve been here before. It outlines the biggest obstacles to the Common Core’s success and how to avoid them. (Education Week)

Ed reforContinue Reading »

On Monday, five states announced that they would add at least 300 hours of learning time to some schools in the fall of 2013. These states—Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee— are working with the Ford Foundation and National Center on Time & Learning  to roll out this initiative in two stages. In 2013-2014, 35 schools that enroll about 17,500 students will increasContinue Reading »

This guest blog post was written by Christopher Caruso, Senior Vice President for ExpandED Schools, TASC.  Contact him at ccaruso@tascorp.org

Christopher Caruso, Senior Vice President for ExpandED Schools, TASC.

The federal government and many school districts are placing major bets on more learning time as an enabler of student progress. More than 90% Continue Reading »

Why hide data? For the first time, Jay Matthews includes a sampling of private schools in his annual High School Challenge Index. But he questions why many schools are reluctant to participate. As Education Sector’s Anne Hyslop has said before, outcomes data is particularly important for determining college readiness. (Class Struggle/Washington Post)

Prehistoric school days. National TeaContinue Reading »

This is a guest post, written by Lucy Friedman, president of TASC (The After-School Corporation).

No one has done more than the Obama administration to stimulate schools and communities to expand the frozen-in-time schedules of the traditional public school day and year. But in “Off the Clock: What More Time Can (and Can’t) Do for School Turnarounds,” Education Sector’s Elena SContinue Reading »

What's important to know about ELT? Click image to enlarge.

Today Education Sector releases Off the Clock: What More Time Can (and Can’t) Do for School Turnarounds. You may recall, in 2007 ES analyst Elena Silva wrote On The Clock: Rethinking the Way Schools Use Time, where she argued that improving the quality of instructional time in school is at leaContinue Reading »

Amaze and Mystify Your Friends. Did you know there are now fewer school districts, but more schools, than there were a decade ago? Or that the share of total revenues for public elementary and secondary education from state sources varies from a low of 31 percent (Nevada and Illinois) to a high of 86 percent (Vermont)? These and other facts are included in A Public Education Primer: Basic (andContinue Reading »

Los Angeles redux. The performance data of 18,000 New York City public school teachers is now in the public’s hands, and SchoolBook has been updating here, where they also plan to publish all of the rankings. Side note: helpful (unrelated), color-coded graphic showing which states link student performance data to teacher evaluation scores. (New York Times/NewsDay)

Extending the schContinue Reading »

Flickr photo by ToniVC

Now that the waiver details have been revealed by the Department of Education and states are beginning to plan their applications, I think it’s worth spending the next few entries of our series poring through the fine print that may have been overlooked in the Department’s announcement.

One of these tucked-away surprises is an emphaContinue Reading »