Obama administration reaches out to education activists before march
Two days before thousands of teachers, parents and education activists are staging a march in Washington to protest the Obama administration’s education reform policies, U.S. officials have invited some leaders of the event to the White House for a discussion.
According to leaders of the Save Our Schools March, four of them were just invited to the White House on Friday, and the Education Department is trying to work out a meeting with a major march participant and Secretary Arne Duncan.
The march is taking place Saturday, and a two-day conference of activists began today at American University. Leaders of the march have said they planned the event because it was important to let the administration know that teachers, principals, parents and others are fed up with reform policies that are turning public schools into testing factories and unfairly evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
Read full article >>Report: How voucher landscape is widening
A new review of voucher research over the past decade reveals that vouchers over all “do not have a strong effect on students' academic achievement” and that proponents have shifted their rhetoric away from academic impact and instead highlight parent choice and other issues.
The analysis, called “Keeping Informed about School Vouchers: A Review of Major Developments and Research,” was done by the Center on Education Policy, an independent nonprofit that takes no position on voucher programs. It highlights changes in the voucher landscape since 2000, when the center released an earlier reviewof research on the subject.
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