Afternoon Announcements: Common Core experts testify in Ohio on behalf of the standards

Opponents of the Common Core in Ohio spent a week criticizing that set of standards while supporting a bill to repeal it. Now, an Ohio House committee is hearing from the other side, including some national experts who helped create those benchmarks. State Impact

In the latest blog in our Core of the Matter series. Dr. Kent McGuire, president and chief executive officer of the Southern Education Foundation and a member of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Board of Directors, considers those who stand to win (but are often forgotten in the Common Core debate) – the students.

Lawmakers and other supporters of the Common Core academic standards said at a New Orleans forum Tuesday night that Louisiana’s poorly-ranked schools need the more rigorous standards, and have “nowhere to go but up” in public schools. The Times-Picayune

A day after Los Angeles Unified abruptly suspended the contract for its controversial iPad project, there were growing calls for a more thorough investigation into whether the bidding process for the $1-billion program was improperly handled. The LA Times

Though some legislators and civil rights groups have blamed a test-only policy for the fact that very few black and Hispanic students are admitted to the eight prestigious public high schools in New York City, a group of alumni from the so-called ‘specialized’ schools have issued a statement of support for keeping the test as the sole criterion for entry. The New York Times

For far too many children in the U.S. – a majority of whom are low-income – there is such a significant academic regression during the summer months that studies have shown it is responsible for most of the achievement gap between poor and middle-class students. The Hechinger Report

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced today that the city has reached a tentative contract agreement with the union that represents school safety agents, which would bring the maximum pay for school safety agents in line with that of special officers with similar. ChalkBeat NY

California’s Assembly approved a first-in-the-nation online privacy measure Monday, authored by which prohibits uses of student personal information for profit. The Journal

Metropolitan School District of Warren Township in suburban Indianapolis, IN is going fully 1-to-1 with Chromebooks, pairing the device program with a digital curriculum that puts an emphasis on proving alternative learning and course delivery options. The Journal

Educators are taking the computer out of teaching computer science via the program, Computer Science Unplugged. The new concept gives children as young as five a hands on approach to algorithms, binary numbers, and the basic ideas that undergird computer science. The Hechinger Report

Tennessee lawmakers, concerned that some children do not have a signature and struggle to read their teachers’ handwriting, overwhelmingly passed a bill making cursive a mandatory subject in grades two through four. The Huffington Post

San Francisco-based Clever has released “Instant Login,” a free single sign-on platform that unites a school or district’s applications under one username and password per student or teacher. edSurge