TER Weekly Clips - March 3, 2016

TER Initiatives:

Give charter schools a chance
March 1, 2016
San Antonio Express-News

In a recent commentary ("Unlevel playing field giving charter schools financial edge," Other Views, Feb. 3), Northside Independent School District Superintendent Brian Woods suggested that charter schools with waitlists should not be allowed to build new schools because other charter schools with no waitlists still have unused capacity.

Texas Education News:

Number of Texas students taking Advanced Placement more than doubles in the past decade
March 1, 2016
Texas Education Agency

Commissioner of Education Mike Morath announced today that the number of Texas graduates taking at least one Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) exam during high school has more than doubled over the past decade, according to College Board's AP Cohort Data Report for the Class of 2015. In addition, the percentage of Texas students taking at least one AP exam in high school continues to outpace the national average.

National Education News:

Make education politics great again! Eliminate 'off-cycle' school board elections
February 26, 2016
Brookings

What if I told you I'd found a surefire way to decrease community involvement in our local schools while at the same time increasing the costs of providing education for taxpayers? Probably not a political winner, eh? And yet, for well over 100 years we've adopted such an approach to governing America's public schools.

The New Normal in K-12 Education
February 22, 2016
Third Way

In the final days of 2015, Congress ushered in a new era of federal education law, updating No Child Left Behind to reflect both the big lessons we've learned over the past 15 years in education policy and the major changes that have taken place on the ground in our nation's schools since the 1990s. Yet if you listen to the rhetoric of many on the front lines of our education wars, you could be forgiven for thinking that Reality Bites has just premiered, Crystal Pepsi is all the rage, and the Spice Girls are the hottest ticket in town. Though a slow-moving Congress has realized that we live in a new education world, too many who spend their days fighting in the trenches have not.

Dogs and cats, working together
February 28, 2016
New York Daily News

The city least likely to produce a fruitful collaboration between a traditional public school and a top charter school surely must be New York. After all, the mayor is famously anti-charter; his schools chief hands out public hugs to the teachers' union president.

The Concentration of Poverty in American Schools
February 29, 2016
The Atlantic

In almost all major American cities, most African American and Hispanic students attend public schools where a majority of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income, a new analysis of federal data shows.