Afternoon Announcements: California Facing a Truancy Crisis

Scarcely a month ago, on August 27, the Los Angeles County Unified School District placed the first iPads in students’ hands at the outset of a $1 billion plan to give one to every single student in the nation’s second largest public school district. The project is now being resoundingly panned, as reports surfaced quickly of high school students going around the security software on the iPads to surf for non-approved content. The Hechinger Report

States with No Child Left Behind waivers will get another month to decide whether they want an extra year to implement a key part of their teacher evaluation systems. Politics K-12

Congress was unable to reach agreement on temporary spending plan to keep the government open—and the U.S. Department of Education and other government agencies are on partial shutdown. Most schools and school districts aren’t going to be immediately affected by a short-term shutdown. A longer-term shutdown, however, could cause more headaches. Politics K-12

One out of every four California elementary school students — nearly 1 million total — are truant each year, an “attendance crisis” that is jeopardizing their academic futures and depriving schools of needed dollars, the state attorney general said in a report to be released Monday. Los Angeles Times