Ninety percent of students at Hobgood Elementary in Murfreesboro, Tenn., come from low-income households. Most of the school's teachers don't. And that's a challenge, says principal Tammy Garrett.

"If you only know middle-class families, you may not understand at times why they don't have their homework or why they're tired," Garrett says.

When she became principal four years ago, Garrett decided to get her teachers out of their classrooms — and comfort zones — for an afternoon. Once a year, just before school starts, they board a pair of yellow buses and head for the neighborhoods and apartment complexes where Hobgood students live.  click here for full story: Via NPR

In New York state this past spring, some 20 percent of students refused to take the 2015 state-mandated Common Core standardized tests in math and English language arts, highlighting the growth of a high-stakes testing “opt out” movement around the country. That amounts to more than 200,000 students from grades 3 through 8, with some districts reporting more opt-outs than students sitting for the test. click here for full article: Via The Washington Post

By KATE TAYLORAUG. 20, 2015

School districts will not be penalized for having large numbers of students refuse to sit for the New York State standardized tests this year, education officials said on Thursday, ending months of uncertainty over how they would respond to a growing antitesting movement. Via The New York Times

Gene V. Glass is a renowned statistician and researcher who has worked for decades in educational psychology and the social sciences. He created the term “meta-analysis” — a statistical process for combining the findings from individual studies in a search for patterns and other data — and described its use in a 1976 speech when he was president of the American Educational Research Association. He has won numerous awards during his career. He is now a Regents’ Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, a senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an elected member of the National Academy of Education. click for full article: Via The Washington Post

Residents of Baldwin, Michigan, pooled together their money to provide scholarships for everyone, and it changed the town profoundly.

Alana Semuels

BALDWIN, Mich.—College was never much of an option for most students in this tiny town of 1,200 located in the woods of the Manistee National Forest. Only 12 of the 32 kids who graduated high school in 2005 enrolled in college. Only two of those have gotten their bachelor’s degree.

That was just a decade ago. Now, nearly everybody who graduated from the high school here in June is off to a four-year college, a community college, or a technical school. Kindergarten students talk about going to college. High schoolers take trips to campuses around the state and, at a raucous assembly each spring, reveal to the school which colleges they’re going to attend.  for full article: Via The Atlantic

By KESHIA CLUKEY 3:25 p.m. | Aug. 12, 2015

ALBANY— Individual schools could lose funding if large numbers of students opt out of state standardized tests in April, state education commissioner MaryEllen Elia said on Wednesday.

Of the 1.1 million students eligible to take state exams in math and English language arts exams this year, nearly 20 percent, or 200,000 students, opted out.

The state Education Department is in conversations with the U.S. Department of Education working on a plan regarding possible sanctions for districts with high opt-out rates, Elia said.  for full article click: Via Politico New York