BIGGER IS BETTER
A new study highlights the importance of even earlier early education, finding that having a higher birth weight leads to higher cognitive development. “Weight, of course, may partly be an indicator of broader fetal health, but it seems to be a meaningful one: The chunkier the baby, the better it does on average, all the way up to almost 10 pounds.” But birth weight is not the be-all and end-all: Researcher David Figlio was 5 pounds, 15 ounces at birth.
DUELING BANJOS ON THE HELP COMMITTEE
Which senator played the washboard with a spoon in a banjo band? It's a question the Politics K–12 duo asks in a quiz of (useful) facts about the likely heads of the next Senate HELP Committee. The primer matters to wonks because, “[n]o matter which party comes out ahead on Election Day, the Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will have a new leader.”
COMMON CORE AND GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS
Three states are plowing ahead on tying graduation requirements and Common Core-aligned assessments, “a natural part of the transition from the adoption phase of Common Core to actually implementing the standards in a meaningful way.”
THE COMPLACENCY GAP
Sick of hearing about the achievement gap? Fordham's own Chester E. Finn, Jr. wants you to consider the complacency gap. When it comes to education reform, “[w]e also have an enormous fraction of the population that doesn’t think there’s a problem. Call it the ‘complacency gap,’ if you will, or the ‘discontent gap.’ Most of the great American middle class thinks their kids’ school is just fine the way it is. And their kid is basically getting a good education because it’s pretty much like the education they got a while back. The school looks the same and the teacher’s nice. And so things are fine. And those troubled schools that are pulling down the scores are on the other side of town,” notes Finn at Stanford University’s State of the Union 2014.
THE CHANGING FACE OF CAREER TRAINING
Programming boot camps are popping up across the country and offering weeklong courses to aspiring coders and software developers, often at the price of $1,000 or more per class. With such a high demand for these skills in the workforce, boot camps may replace conventional vocational schools and help secure jobs for students who opt out of the traditional higher education path.
