U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has spent much of this week talking about his priorities for the No Child Left Behind reauthorization, and he made two things clear in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor: The best ideas probably aren’t going to come from Washington, and the name’s gotta go. In a speech to education and civil rights groups leaders, USA Today reports that Duncan asked them to put aside “tired ideas” and build a new law that focuses on getting “great teachers and principals into underperforming schools” and finding better data to measure student growth, drive instruction and evaluate teachers.
In other stories featured in School Board News Today this week:
- The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governor’s Association have released a draft of common core standards for math and language arts. And while the initiative is groundbreaking, the draft standards have a lot of common ground with some others developed by education groups over the years.
- In the neverending coverage of the H1N1 flu, the federal government says older children will only need one shot of the newly developed vaccine, while younger children still need two. The school nurse shortage, meanwhile, is hurting schools’ efforts to control the virus.
- A school counselor shortage, meanwhile, has sent thousands of high school students to the internet for information on college admissions.
- And an Associated Press investigation found that the drinking water in thousands of schools across the country may have unsafe levels of toxins.
Read these stories and more in School Board News Today’s weekly wrap-up. And check out the round-up of education headlines each day at School Board News.
