President Obama said that “I want to work with both parties in Congress to replace No Child Left Behind with a smarter law that addresses the overuse of standardized tests,” during his Weekly Address on Saturday. Transcript as Follows: “Hi,
Will the Republican-controlled Congress renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s (ESEA) and permanently lock states into federal control of education?
One of the major problems that the adoption of Common Core’s standards has led to is excessive testing—at all grade levels from kindergarten on—sometimes more than one test per grade level.
As Republicans of all stripes and the main-stream media are predicting that Jeb Bush’s support for the Common Core standards will be among his greatest obstacles to a potential 2016 GOP nomination, Bush himself went off-script during remarks at the Detroit Economic Club Wednesday, emotionally defending the highly unpopular education initiative and his own education reform record.
As the debate heats up across the nation over the renewal of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), House Speaker John Boehner – writer of the original NCLB law – says he supports annual statewide testing, which also has the support of House Education Committee Chairman Rep. John Kline (R-MN).
Education Commissioner Michael Williams is bracing for the possibility that Texas may lose its No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver. State and federal education officials are not seeing eye-to-eye on educator evaluations but is that a bad or good thing?
To honor National School Choice Week, Louisiana U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R) announced Monday that he has introduced the Local Control of Education Act, a measure that would ban the federal government from mandating the adoption of specific standards—such as the Common Core standards—as well as curriculum and assessments.
The Mississippi State House has approved a bill that would remove the name “Common Core” from the state’s academic standards, but not replace the actual standards themselves.
After enticing states into a binding promise to develop their student databases, President Obama now says he will call for legislation that will protect students from commercial data mining.
When the new Congress begins to consider the federal government’s role in America’s classrooms, civil rights groups will be doing their best to advocate for the strength of that role to ensure mandates that purport to promote “equity” for “diverse” groups. However, in October of last year, these same groups referred to the standardized testing requirements of the same federal government as “overly punitive” of racial minorities.
On Friday, Politico offered an image of left-wingers fearful that Republicans at the helm in both the House and the Senate will take advantage of the backlash over the Common Core standards and “strip the federal role out of education.” True conservatives, however, lament that the Republicans in charge are not poised to accomplish that.
