June News RoundUP

News:

• Teachers Union Initiative Focuses on Funding Tech Education, Education Week: The AFT announced it will fund career and tech ed programs in five cities as part of its Promising Pathways initiatives.
• Collaborative Effort Taking Shape in Data Privacy, Education Dive: Common Sense Media is teaming up with 20 districts across the country to create a privacy and safety rubric.
• The Truth About America’s Grad Rates, NPR: The news organization has been working on an investigation into the historically high 81% graduation rate that was released earlier this spring.
• Nation’s Report Card to Gather Data on Grit, Mindset, Education Week: NAEP is working to include a diverse set of measures of these factors in the background information collected with the tests beginning in 2017.
• Happy Birthday to the Common Core, EdWeek: The standards turned 5 years old this month. This article gives a quick summary of what has transpired in the last five years—from adoption to implementation.
• CPS CEO Steps Down, Education Dive: As the saga continues in Chicago, Barbara Byrd-Bennett has left her post.
• College Board & Khan Launch New Website for New SAT, Inside Higher Ed: The two organizations announced free online test prep resources for the new version of the SAT, which will unveil next spring. The two are also working alongside the Boys and Girls Clubs of America to give access to free resources to students who might need support or access to Internet or computers.
• Teachers Don’t Want More Data, Want Better Data, Education Week: The Gates Foundation has issued a new report, which finds that 67% of teachers who are using digital tools to extract data aren’t satisfied with the effectiveness of the data they receive from those tools.

Blogs:

• Using Games for Assessment, Edutopia: This post discusses the ways that games can assess students both within a game and outside of a game.
• Does Not Compute: Millennials Aren’t Tech Savvy: Change the Equation, a STEM advocacy organization in DC, released a new report this week that shows that just because millennials might have devices glued to their hands, they may not be using tech effectively.
• Creating Close Reading Lessons Across the Disciplines, ASCD: This post talks about strategies to create opportunities for “close reading” for students, and the guiding principles to make this work.
• Busting a Broken Debate: How Schools Should Embrace Poverty Relief, Forbes: Julia Freeland and Michael Horn released a research paper this week that sheds light on how the battles in education reform have created some false dichotomies. They examine school-based solutions and solutions that fall outside school doors, and propose a bit of a combination to truly close the achievement gap.
• Can We Really Prepare Kids for College & Career? The Hechinger Report: The article takes a look at California’s linked learning initiatives, which aim to connect careers to schooling in authentic ways.
• Help Wanted: 11 M College Grads, Gates Notes: Bill Gates wrote a blog post encouraging students not to forge a similar path to his; that is, he wants people to understand that by 2025 2/3 of all jobs in the US will require education beyond high school.
• Exploding Myths about Learning Through Gaming, NPR: This interview with reporter and author of a new book on games Greg Toppo sheds light on why he sees so much promise in digital play.
• Can Games and Digital Tools Help Students Take Fewer Tests? edSurge: Tony Wan examines Motion Math and how it is aiming to measure students’ use of math apps to correlate to their performance on mini-assessments taken afterward. The company has built the infrastructure to automatically measure which activities correlate to improve mastery of CCSS, without a costly study.