As Congress undertakes its most serious effort to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, backlash against standardized testing has prompted vigorous debate about whether the federal government should continue requiring annual exams. The Washington Post

In the education world, you see this phrase all the time: “free and reduced-price lunch.” What’s the percentage at a given school? It’s not necessarily out of concern about who’s getting fed. Instead, its most often used to talk about concentrations of poverty and how that effects learning. NPR

Whether it is youth here or youth abroad, student unrest seems to be growing in our most uneducated communities. Data shows an increased correlation between a lack of education and crime, poverty and social welfare programs. Education News

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The National Center for Education Statistics on Thursday released its latest data on how much money states are investing in public school students.  NCES, an arm of the Department of Education, analyzed each state’s revenues and expenditures per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools during the 2011-2012 school year. The District of Columbia and New York took the top spots, spending over $19,000 per student. Click the link to see how your state faired.

Educators and students could benefit or suffer intensely from the battles now being fought over education technology. Debates over funding and standards threaten to slow progress, a leading education advocate told attendees at the FETC 2015 conference Friday. The Journal

Metro Nashville Public Schools is replacing five head principals at 12 of its lowest-performing schools, district officials announced Wednesday. The move represents “the first major step in the next phase of the turnaround process for these schools.” Chalkbeat TN

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The Senate continued its most serious effort to date to rewrite the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law with a hearing Tuesday that focused on improving the nation’s teachers. Lawmakers from both parties indicated that they would not seek to continue the Obama administration’s push to link teacher evaluations and teacher pay to student test scores. The Washington Post

Over the next six months, national experts will hop-scotch to a dozen cities to collaborate with school leaders in workshops on tough questions about how to make classrooms effective. These workshops are the next step in the Future Ready effort to encourage more schools to infuse technology into the classroom. The Hechinger Report

President Obama will drop his proposal to effectively end the popular college savings accounts known as 529s, but will keep an expanded tuition tax credit at the center of his college access plan, White House officials said Tuesday. The New York Times

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Twelve years after the passage of No Child Left Behind, and eight years after it was supposed to be revised and updated, Sen. Lamar Alexander, the new chairman of the Senate committee on education, says now is the time for its long-neglected makeover. TIME Magazine

A recent Alliance webinar addressed policy and practice changes supporting struggling learners during Common Core implementation, where experts agreed that educator professional development is critical to implementing the standards and related curricular changes, especially when working with “students on the other side of the opportunity gap”. Education Daily

Mississippi legislators passed with wide support a bill Thursday that proponents say will give the state more control over public education standards but admit it would have no effect on the schools currently teaching the Common Core State Standards. The Hechinger Report

Teachers in California are tackling one of the greatest challenges facing educators: building support among bewildered parents for the Common Core EdSource

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The ‘Deeper Learning Digest’ is a bi-weekly roundup of articles, blog posts, and other content around deeper learning. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed to stay up-to-date on all deeper learning news. Please be sure to follow @deeperlearning on Twitter for more on deeper learning.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spelled out his priorities for a new federal education law January 12, laying out his vision for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Duncan called for scrapping the ‘broken’ law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and emphasized the critical role of ESEA in protecting the rights of all students to a quality education that will set them up for success.

Robert Rothman, senior fellow at the Alliance for Excellent Education, writes that two less heralded events in education during the same time as Alexander’s and Duncan’s proposals might offer more of a progressive insight to driving education forward. As one offers a guide to states to support local districts in developing and advancing student-centered, personalized learning models, the other – an initiative from the Department of Education and the Alliance, allow more than 500 leaders to share ideas and access resources to help them design new education systems. While ESEA remains vital to the future of education, according to Rothman, other enterprises should not be overlooked.

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To remedy the lack of diversity that continues among U.S. teachers – who remain overwhelmingly white and female – U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan set a 2015 goal to add thousands more black male teachers in U.S. schools.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Thursday tapped former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to serve as chairman of his education foundation, turning over the organization to the former diplomat and academic. The Associated Press

An annual report based on two large-scale surveys of education decision-makers reveals that school technology budgets are growing stronger, school leaders are seeking Common Core-aligned instructional materials, and there is a growing demand for tools that improve teaching and personalized learning. eSchoolNews

President  Barack Obama ’s push to start taxing college-saving accounts, including the popular “529” accounts, would affect millions of Americans who are stashing money for their children’s education, stirring debate about how to structure federal student aid and how to define the middle class. The Wall Street Journal

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Today, the Alliance for Excellent Education introduces “Federal Flash,” a brand-new weekly video series that will keep you in the loop on important developments in education policy in Washington, DC. In less than five minutes, the Alliance will review the latest federal activity while previewing what to expect in the week ahead.

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 This guest blog post was written by Kate Hicks, a teacher at Alain LeRoy Locke College Preparatory Academy in Los Angeles, CA and is part of the Alliance’s Digital Learning Day Blog Series. Digital Learning Day 2015 takes place March 13.

Watts is a changing community: its population is shifting and the historically African American neighborhood is welcoming families from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and even China. Students from all over the world, eager to learn and grow, congregate just north of the 105 freeway in South Los Angeles to attend Locke High School. While the community may be known for some of the largest public housing projects west of the Mississippi, it is also known for the iconic Watts Towers, community-based Watts Café, and a legacy of civic activism and civil protest.

Technology is scarce on our campus and often it is hard to balance which necessities need to be met first: ninety-nine percent of our students receive free lunch and many also are clothed and sponsored by staff members for extra curriculars. Most sophomores at our school read and complete math work below grade level and have six academic classes to help catch up, but no electives for art or technology.

With the transition to the Common Core, we had a chance to let students express themselves and share their learning with the larger community. It was my chance, as an English teacher, to fill in the gaps. Also, in a world with tremendous difficulties students face each day,[1] we needed practice finding audiences for our writing. We needed to celebrate our stories and bear witness to our suffering.

What was a teacher to do?

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A Republican-controlled Senate committee began work Wednesday on revising the landmark No Child Left Behind education law, focusing first on federally mandated testing of America’s schoolchildren. The committee’s chairman, Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., has released a draft bill offering a lot more leeway to states in designing their own assessment systems. The Associated Press

During the hearing, many educators spoke of their experience to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, voicing their opinions on testing and the NCLB bill.  The Huffington Post

A new video series produced by the Alliance for Excellent Education is seeking to highlight gains made under the Common Core academic standards adopted by Kentucky in 2010. Kentucky is one of five states the Washington, D.C.-based national policy and advocacy organization has chosen to spotlight as what it considers a Common Core success story. WUKY

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Parents, teachers and policymakers who listened to Tuesday night’s State of the Union address heard an earful from President Barack Obama about his intentions to retool education’s bookends by making community college free, expanding child care and increasing cybersecurity for students. Highlighting the need for high-speed broadband for everyone, Obama called on Congress “to finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks, combat identity theft, and protect our children’s information.”

Senate education committee leader Sen. Lamar Alexander says he wants to work out a bipartisan deal this spring to rewrite the landmark education law No Child Left Behind. as he angles to revamp rules about how often students are tested, how much power the education secretary should have, and when to intervene in schools deemed failing and more. Politico

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