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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

UPDATE: National school boards group blasts U.S. Education Department + A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education

A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education:


National school boards group blasts U.S. Education Department

(Jacquelyn Martin-Associated Press)
(Jacquelyn Martin-Associated Press)
The National Schools Board AssociationTuesday blasted the Obama administration’s education policies, saying that the Education Departmentunder Secretary Arne Duncan has pushed “unnecessary and counter-productive federal intrusion” onto local school districts.
Here is a news release issued Tuesday by the association, which is holding a conference in Washington D.C.
Alexandria, Va. (Jan. 29, 2013) – More than 700 school board members and state school boards association leaders will be meeting with their members of Congress and urging them to co-sponsor legislation, developed by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), to protect local school district governance from unnecessary and counter-productive federal intrusion from the U.S. Department of Education.
School board leaders are in Washington D.C. to take part in NSBA’s 40th annual Federal 


A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education


common-core2The debate on the Common Core State Standards has in recent months centered around the issue of how much fiction high school students should read. Here’s a tough critique on the standards and how they relate to early childhood education. It was written by Edward Miller, a writer and teacher who lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. He is the co-author of “Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School,” and you can reach him ted@ed-at-large.com. Nancy Carlsson-Paige is professor emerita of early childhood education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of “Taking Back Childhood” and you can reach her at ncarlsso@lesley.edu.
By Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige
Recent critiques of the Common Core Standards by Marion Brady and John T. Spencerhave noted that the process for creating the new K-12 standards involved too little researc

Why we love artists but not arts education

Last week, arts educator and author Lisa Phillips wrote about the top 10 skills young people can learn from arts education. Here is a new piece about the seeming contradiction between America’s love of artists and its penchant to undervalue … Continue reading →