Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), policy organizations and funders have raced to create resources, tools, and fact sheets to help state and local school leaders understand what the new law requires and the innovation opportunities it offers. Leading up to ESSA’s passage, and even in the immediate months afterward, there was an air of celebration as national, state, and local organizations and the media heralded the devolution of power back to the states.

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Results released from a new innovative assessment that tests students’ knowledge and skills in technology and engineering reveal gaps in performance by gender, race/ethnicity, and opportunity.

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Although deeper learning is more crucial than ever, it is still too rare in the nation’s classrooms, reports the Seattle Times. Deeper learning only occurs in one in five classrooms, according to a recent study of high schools, the article notes, and yet, the changing economy requires students to have deeper learning skills. The Times explores the study, conducted by Jal Mehta, an organizer of Education Week’s Learning Deeply blog, on why deeper learning is so rare.  According to Mehta, few teachers have experienced deeper learning themselves, making it difficult to apply it in their own classroom. Mehta says that a focus on standardized tests can take away incentive for project-based learning that is key to deeper learning. The study also found that deeper learning varies greatly within schools, not just between schools. Learn more: http://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/a-deep-dive-into-deeper-learning.

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Spring is a time when many teachers and students celebrate the end of the school year. It is a time to reflect on their powerful learning experiences and take pride in their progress. But for too many students, by the end of the school year they have lost out on many of these learning experiences because they have missed a significant numbers of school days.

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Glaring academic achievement gaps in communities across the nation are revealed in a new data set put forth by the Stanford Graduate School of Education. The data set was created from more than 200 million test scores of third to eighth grade students, from 2009-13, and includes scores from every public school district in the country, along with socioeconomic information, school district characteristics, and racial and economic segregation. The analysis is the first to explore racial achievement gaps across the country at such a fine geographic scale, allowing comparison to be drawn between and within states.

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While children in the early years of education increasingly experience curricula and learning tools based in the science of learning (SOL), children in middle and high school—particularly those from historically underserved populations—endure traditional “common sense” approaches that go against what researchers know about the developing brain. The growing research on adolescence in the SOL reveals that investment in secondary schools is essential to ensure students graduate prepared for college and a career. Here are three reasons why:

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On Education Week’s Learning Deeply blog, Stephen Hamilton, dean of High Tech High Graduate School of Education, discusses college, career, and civic readiness, and “the case of the missing ‘C.’” Hamilton explains that when discussing these three C’s, the focus is typically on college readiness, and often the “career” portion is neglected. “This surely reflects the reality that most educators know more about college than careers,” he writes, “but it neglects those students, still the majority, who do not graduate from a four-year college, and it ignores those who were ready enough for college to graduate but then find themselves unemployed or underemployed.”

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