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Standards

Friday Reading List: Common Core Readiness, School Turnarounds, and Parent Trigger

By Alyson Klein — August 15, 2014 1 min read
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Summer is winding down, back-to-school shopping season is in full swing. Appreciate the precious last two weeks of summer and check out these good reads:


  • Does having a district-level No Child Left Behind waiver get Los Angeles out of abiding by the state’s parent trigger law this school year? John Deasy, the superintendent thinks so.
  • And speaking of waivers, Oklahoma filed its request for an extension of its waiver this week, even though its higher education institutions still haven’t certified that its standards will prepare students for college. (Oklahoma ditched the Common Core State Standards earlier this year.) The state’s waiver extension request lays out a process for developing new standards, but the Sooner State doesn’t have the actual approval in hand. Will the request fly with the Department, which so far has only dropped the hammer down on states who have struggled with teacher evaluation, not the more politically fraught issue of standards? District superintendents, including Tulsa’s Keith Ballard, are worried about what waiver revocation could mean.
  • Are teachers actually ready to teach to the Common Core standards? About half of them don’t think so, and teachers of English Language Learners feel especially unprepared, according to a survey by the Education Week research center.
  • In case you missed it, Chalkbeat Colorado has a great series on school turnarounds in Pueblo, Colorado, which was the site of one of the biggest contractor disasters in the School Improvement Grant program.
  • Does Michelle Rhee’s departure from StudentsFirst leave Team “Reform” without a Diane Ravitch-like mascot? Over at This Week in Education, Alexander Russo explores the question.
  • And finally ... A congratulations is in order to Anne Hyslop, the No Child Left Behind Waivers Uber Analyst, who is leaving the New America Foundation and heading to Bellwether Education Partners as a senior policy analyst. She’ll be cranking out research and analysis on school accountability and improvement, NCLB, and the intersection of state and federal policy when it comes to PreK through 12. (And she’ll still be talking to reporters. Thank goodness.)