Weekend Reads: Meet ESSA, the new NCLB that (maybe) ends the accountability era

  • The Every Student Succeeds Act, the No Child Left Behind replacement that became law this week, keeps testing but loses accountability, basically. (Politics K-12)
  • The new law represents a repudiation of outgoing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s approach. (FiveThirtyEight)
  • But it’s not at all clear how much it will actually change life for individual students and teachers. (The Atlantic)
  • How ESSA is like a “Game of Thrones” plot point about the randomness of destiny. (Andy Rotherham)
  • The Common Core took another blow this week when New York’s governor recommended revising the standards there. (Chalkbeat)
  • New York City’s teachers union president lists three “school ‘reform’ myths,” starting with the idea that merit pay works. (Education Week)
  • American students aren’t tested a lot, at least compared to their counterparts in lots of other countries. (Hechinger Report)
  • Twins whose teachers have very different philosophies show their mother the value and danger of homework. (Motherlode)
  • A growing number of Teach For America teachers are second-generation — they were taught by TFA teachers themselves. (The 74 Million)
  • Schools with many poor students don’t just have inexperienced teachers — many have temporary teachers. (Washington Post)
  • An English teacher is polling her colleagues about how they include fiction in the age of Common Core. (On the Shoulders of Giants)
  • A science teacher shares her journey from teaching about rocks to getting her middle schoolers to code. (Chalkbeat)
  • The success of coding curriculums depends on their implementation, as two Arizona districts illustrate. (Education Week)
  • A Chicago school founded with a gaming focus is changing approaches to avoid closure. (Catalyst)
  • Can people without kids have “skin in the game” of education policy? Here’s an argument for yes. (Grand Rounds)
  • Get to know a Colorado school that has no graduation gap among students of different ethnicities. (Chalkbeat)