NEW PRESIDENT FOR STUDENTSFIRST
Jim Blew of the Walton Foundation will take over the helm of the advocacy group StudentsFirst after the resignation of founder Michelle Rhee, who announced she was stepping down two months ago.
NEVER TOO YOUNG
Early childhood teachers in North Carolina are adopting hands-on formative assessments to evaluate student development. The innovative, "holistic" assessments are designed to track the learning progress of students too young to take paper-and-pencil tests, and have been allotted roughly $10 million in grants from the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge.
PICK UP THE PACE
Education Week's Catherine Gewertz reports that school districts are falling behind in their efforts to implement Common Core. Still, many district officials have greeted the standards with open arms. “When the Common Core was adopted in Illinois in 2010, there was almost a sense of relief among the instructional leaders in our district," Gewertz quotes one curriculum director as saying. "[T]hey were more in line with what we already believed.”
EDUCATION SNAPSHOT
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific profile of Paymon Rouhanifard, the superintendent of the state-operated school system in Camden, New Jersey. Rouhanifard, a 33-year-old Teach for America veteran, is the twelfth district superintendent in the last twenty years. For a great wide-angle examination of the troubled city and its efforts to reform, read the incomparable Andy Smarick's piece from this January.
