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Star Ledger--NJEA president: These PARCC reforms prioritize learning, not testing | Opinion
When PARCC was first administered here in 2015, eighth grade students took 12 hours and 50 minutes of standardized tests across math, language arts and science.
That was nearly an hour longer than the New Jersey bar exam taken by law school graduates. Children as young as third grade spent just under 10 hours sitting at computers taking PARCC exams, and high school students were expected to sit for over 11 hours of testing in each of their first three years. All told, PARCC and related tests required nearly 100 hours of testing over each student's school career.
Marie Blistan| Star-Ledger Guest Columnist| Updated Sep 11, 10:37 AM; Posted Sep 11, 9:30 AM
NPR--If 'Free College' Sounds Too Good To Be True, That's Because It Often Is
To millions of parents and students, they're magical words: free college.
But is the idea pure fantasy?
More than a dozen states now offer grants, often called scholarships, promising to help qualifying students pay for some or all of their college education. In fact, that word, "promise," shows up again and again in these programs' official names: Nevada Promise, Oklahoma's Promise, Oregon Promise, Tennessee Promise ... you get the idea.
Cory Turner| September 12, 20186:36 AM ET
Education Week--It's Time to End Football in High School
Traumatic brain injuries are a serious concern, even for players who don't suffer concussions
More than one million high school students participate in tackle football programs at their schools, during which they each sustain hundreds of violent blows to the head over the course of a season. According to our analysis, the cumulative effect of rattling this many brains this many times is that each year roughly 264,000 high school students suffer traumatic brain injury and cognitive impairment that diminishes their ability to think, learn, and succeed in school.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/09/11/its-time-to-end-football-in-high.html
Randall Curren & Jason Blokhuis| September 10, 2018
