- Will an end to the annual testing mandates be the defining feature of a reauthorized No Child Left Behind Act? Education Week’s Alyson Klein reports a draft bill circulating among Senate GOP aides would leave testing schedules up to the states—no more mandatory reading and math tests in grades 3–8. Someone should remind the GOP that annual testing made clear that every student in every grade matters. Oh, wait. We did that.
- They won’t have John King to kick around anymore. New York’s education chief is stepping down to become a senior adviser to Arne Duncan. More than “inspirational,” the adjective “embattled” had become a more common frozen epithet attached to King, who presided over the rollout of Common Core and pushed for strong teacher evaluations. In doing so, he ran afoul of the state’s teachers unions and anti-reform activists, who accused him of not listening even while jeering and shouting down the dignified King at series of public forums last year. He will be missed.
- ProPublica ran a piece blowing the whistle on “sweeps contracts,” wherein non-profit charter schools funnel nearly all their public dollars into the coffers of for-profit management companies. Potentially alarming, but This Week in Education blogger Alexander Russo rightly noted the ProPublica piece offered no clue on just how widespread the practice is. “A NACSA staffer tells me that there's no national data but that these situations aren't rare,” Russo writes.
