Philadelphia Inquirer--More New Jersey students taking and passing AP exams
TRENTION — More New Jersey students are passing Advanced Placement exams than the national average, according to new data.
Twenty-eight percent of New Jersey’s students in 2017 successfully passed an Advanced Placement exam, moving the state from ninth to seventh in the nation, College Board data shows. The national average is 22.8 percent.
“Our students are on the path to leading the nation in AP exam achievement,” said Lamont O. Repollet, acting commissioner of the state Department of Education. “This means more schools are helping make college more affordable to more students.”
Students who score a 3 or higher on the AP exams are considered passing. The exams are graded on a five-point scale. The tests, administered by the College Board, allow students to earn college credit while in high school.
CLAIRE LOWE Staff Writer| Feb 26, 2018
Washington Post--DeVos moves to delay Obama-era rule on minority special-education students
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is seeking public comment on a plan to delay the implementation of an Obama-era rule that is intended to prevent schools from unnecessarily pushing minority students into special education.
The Education Department published a note in the Federal Register on Tuesday that says it wants to delay for two years the rule that was intended to be implemented starting in the 2018-2019 school year.
The department did not respond to a query about why it was doing this, but the notice says that it is doing it to make sure that the rule’s “effectiveness” can be ensured. The Hill newspaper had reported recently that states, districts, superintendents and others had raised concerns about the rule. Administrators have expressed concern about the cost of implementation, while advocates for students with disabilities have said it is an important step to protect minority children.
This is one of a number of Obama-era regulations and rules that DeVos has rolled back or delayed, and it is possible that DeVos could decide to eliminate it altogether.
Valerie Strauss| February 26
Education Week--States Confront New Mandate on School-Spending Transparency
A tricky financial-transparency requirement in the Every Student Succeeds Act has cranked up tensions among state politicians, school district administrators, and civil rights activists over public understanding of how districts divvy up their money among schools.
ESSA requires districts to break out school-level spending by December 2019—a first-time federal requirement. It's a level of detail unknown even to most district superintendents.
Various interest groups are split over whether such items as transportation, technology, special education, and pre-K—some of the biggest drivers of the rise in school spending—should be categorized as regular school costs, or as extraordinary costs or overhead.
Civil rights activists, meanwhile, expect that the reporting of school-level-spending amounts will reveal to the public where districts' most-experienced and highest-paid teachers work, if those data are presented in a coherent and comparable way.
Daarel Burnette II| February 27, 2018