SCHEDULING AROUND THE "SUMMER SLIP"
It is now generally recognized that the long layoff of summer vacation is a hindrance to knowledge retention (especially for low-income students), sticking kids with months in which to forget what they’d learned the previous school year. So it's gratifying to learn, as Education Week’s Madeline Will reports, that the number of year-round schools in the United States has reached 3,700. With several state-level grant programs helping to prod the switch to a staggered yearly calendar, the practice will hopefully continue to grow.
PELICAN (STATE) BRIEF
On Wednesday, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled constitutional Act 1, a controversial 2012 bill limiting teacher tenure and empowering superintendents at the expense of local school boards. The ruling was praised by Governor Bobby Jindal and other state officials. "Act 1 gives principals and superintendents freedom from politics to do the right thing for children," said State Education Superintendent John White.
OPTING OUT OF ACCOUNTABILITY
Bellwether Education’s brilliant Anne Hyslop (an occasional Fordhamite) has leapt into the week’s most fervid ed-reform debate: To test, or not to test? In her latest post, she cautions so-called “districts of innovation” (those mobilizing project-based and competency-based learning in the classroom) from opting out of statewide testing in favor of district flexibility.
MUST-READ
The news came this week that John Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, was resigning. The Hechinger Report has an extremely useful postmortem on his tenure, mingled with some great thoughts on the difficulty of bringing reform to large urban school districts.
