The Biden administration proposed this week what would be the most significant expansion of education programs in at least a generation with a $1.8 trillion package focused on families and children. The proposal calls for universal pre-K for 3- and 4- year-olds, two years of...
In an interview with Education Week’s Andrew Ujifusa, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., chairman of the House education committee, reiterated his firm support for administering annual state assessments amid the pandemic. “If we don’t know how far behind these students are, we won’t know how much...
In this in-depth profile, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Chester E Finn, Jr. captures the life and service of three-term, retiring Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Detailing his time as the Chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, or HELP, Committee, Finn states...
Five years after it was signed into law, the Every Student Succeeds Act is being challenged by the unanticipated disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports Andrew Ujifusa for Education Week. At greatest risk, he says, are the assessment and accountability systems required of individual states;...
As conversations around the 2020-21 assessment period and the direction of accountability systems more generally become an increasingly fraught topic by district and state school leaders, EWA posted an overview of the topic geared toward education reporters. Specifically, the piece highlights ongoing back-and-forths between a...
Long term financial considerations are quickly becoming a top concern for district and school leaders as federal stimulus discussions falter and local budget projections increasingly show massive shortfalls in communities across the nation. In reviewing lessons learned from the 2008 Great Recession and the resulting...
Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of America’s leading companies, recently issued a set of education recommendations for members of the business community, who the council says “can be part of the solution [to the opportunity gap] by investing further in programs that...
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli, in examining the developing conversation around additional K-12 stimulus funding for schools, argues that any federal investment should be distributed in a way that directly provides services to kids “most at risk of falling even further behind.” To...
According to Education Week, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will soon be releasing a proposed rule to resolve the “dispute over how much coronavirus aid private school students should receive.” In a letter to a group representing state education leaders, DeVos announced the soon-to-be...
In a piece published by the Brookings Instition, Sarah Reber and Nora Gordon argue for as much flexibility as possible for states to allocate COVID-19 relief funding for K-12 schools. The authors assert that sending “most federal aid to states and school districts through a...
