Federal K-12 policy had been a bit slow over the past few weeks, but in this last week before many take off for the holiday, there have been some important developments. Senator Lamar Alexander, the chair of the Senate Education Committee, announced he will not be seeking reelection. Also, the Trump administration’s commission on school safety released its final report.

As this year comes to a close, Federal Flash reviews ten things, both good and bad, that happened in federal K-12 policy in 2018.

Gaining technical skills and know-how is critical to land that dream job, but employers are saying that they need candidates who have also mastered basic workplace skills. When should that training start? Some states are saying high school.

Today’s digest focuses on career and technical education programs that are preparing students for success beyond high school. It also highlights videos that showcase the “gold standard” of project-based learning projects.

Every student deserves to be known. Today’s digest features a school that is taking action to make sure that every student is taken care of and has a positive relationship with the adults in the building. It also explores the power of putting students and student interests at the center of learning, plus a tool that makes it a bit easier to keep track of student-led projects.

While federal law has required states to identify and intervene in struggling schools for years, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) promised a reset, allowing states to reimagine their school rating and identification systems and giving districts and schools more control over improvement strategies. There is reason to be optimistic. But the authority in ESSA does not guarantee better results; rather, it gives education leaders more flexibility and creativity to solve one of the nation’s most intractable problems—improving (deplorably low) outcomes for underserved students. We do not know yet how many states will seize this opportunity to demand bold action from districts, but a handful of states already are leading the way.

As a professor of human development in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park, Dr. Kathryn Wentzel researches the nature of teacher-student relationships and how these relationships predict young adolescents’ goal pursuit, prosocial behavior, and academic performance.

The results of this week’s midterm elections mean changes for federal education policy. But just how big will these changes be?

Today’s Federal Flash covers shifts in the House and Senate, as well as what a change in leadership could mean for an array of concerning polices coming from the Department of Education.

What is it about stories that make them such a powerful tool of communication? How can educators weave storytelling into instruction to help students make deeper and more meaningful connections to academic content?

Today’s Digest explores how storytelling can be used to promote deeper learning in the classroom. It also paints a picture of competency-based learning across the country, and offers some advice for kick-starting personalized learning in your school or district.

Last month, as I attended the EdSurge Fusion 2018 conference, I immersed myself in the idea of education transformation. Sitting in that hotel ballroom, I was surrounded by the most cutting-edge educators—those district leaders, principals, and teachers who are leading the way to provide students with genuine twenty-first-century learning experiences.

Recently, Mike Petrilli wrote about the Alliance for Excellent Education’s analysis of state ESSA plans in which we found that twelve states do not ensure subgroups are universally included in school ratings. While acknowledging that this could be an issue, Mike, with an assist from Aaron Churchill, used Ohio data to make the case that we were (mostly) crying wolf: Including subgroups in school ratings doesn’t matter because subgroup performance is almost always reflected in schoolwide averages, at least when using value-added measures. Specifically, Mike and Aaron showed how school-level growth data for “all students” in Ohio tends to be strongly correlated with school-level growth data for “Black” and “low-income” students. Very few schools would have received both an “A” or “B” grade for “all students” growth and a “D” or ”F” for the specific subgroup’s growth. Mike concluded that we “should stop fretting about this particular aspect of state accountability systems” and move on.