MORE ON COMMON CORE READING
NPR has wrapped up its four-part series on Common Core reading with a great look at a classroom of Washington, D.C. fifth graders picking their way through American history readers. The complexity of their standards-aligned texts—which require the students to answer questions using evidence from the reading—should challenge them to read more closely and develop an appetite for greater difficulty. Fordham’s incomparable tandem of Robert Pondiscio and Kevin Mahnken tackled this aspect of the literacy wars back in September.
BUT WHO WILL INVENT SELF-WRITING PERSONAL ESSAY SOFTWARE?
As high school seniors are beginning to make college plans, tech companies are stepping up to provide more tools to do so. Among them, LinkedIn’s new University Finder helps students identify schools with high grad-employment rates with certain companies, and Parchment.com purports to show students their chances of getting into their top schools. Check out the other online tools and pass them along to college-seeking seniors.
FORDHAM BOOK CLUB
Newsweek’s Abigail Jones talks to John Demos about the strange story of the Heathen School, chronicled in the historian’s 2014 book of the same name. Opened in Connecticut 1817, the Foreign Mission School (as it was officially known) sought to educate and convert American Indians as well as immigrants from China, Hawaii, and India. Local prejudice doomed the project from the start, and Andrew Jackson’s obsession with Indian removal scattered its best minds westward, but Demos has used it as a prism through which to examine the young nation’s dueling impulses to nurture and oppress minority groups.
DIPLOMAS WILL BE PRINTED ON THE BACKS OF COCKTAIL NAPKINS
The Honors Academy Charter School District, which operates seven schools in Central Texas and the Greater Dallas area, has no legal authority to operate as a public school district. The group had its contract revoked after failing to meet state academic standards and was ordered to cease all operations. Stunningly, the school district continues to advertise as an accredited institution and has yet to tell parents that their charter has been revoked, the Texas Tribune reports.
