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Star Ledger--Here's how N.J. ranks in the U.S. on quality of life for kids
New Jersey this year ranks eighth in the nation for the quality of life it affords its children, buoyed by its competitive academic achievements and wide access to health care but disadvantaged by the number of families that remain mired in poverty.
New Jersey slipped from seventh place last year in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual Kids Count report released on Tuesday. The drop is likely due to the Garden State coming in 26th for economic well-being, falling from 20th place in last year's report.
Here are highlights from the report:
EDUCATION: N.J. is ahead of the pack
New Jersey owes its top-10 ranking to its achievements in education, ranking second best in the country, and outperforming the national average in all four categories, according to the report.
By Susan K. Livio | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com| Updated June 13, 2017
Posted June 13, 2017
Star Ledger--Unacceptable! Poor N.J. schools close because of heat wave | Opinion
Thermometers are rising and more than 20,000 students in public schools in Plainfield, Trenton, and other districts throughout the state are being sent home early over the next two days.
With the pressure of finals in the air, many students and school employees also have to contend with rising classrooms temperatures.
Few examples so elegantly show the wide disparities in school conditions in New Jersey.
Star-Ledger Guest Columnists Jerell Blakeley and Eric Jones| Updated on June 12, 2017 at 11:48 AM Posted on June 12, 2017 at 11:43 AM
NPR-- DeVos Says More Money Won't Help Schools; Research Says Otherwise
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made it clear, appearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday, that she sees no connection between school funding and school performance. As evidence, she criticized the Obama Administration's $7 billion grant program to improve struggling schools, an effort that yielded no significant impacts in test scores or graduation rates.
"The notion that spending more money is going to bring about different results is ill-placed and ill-advised," DeVos said in an exchange with Louisiana Republican John Kennedy.
This is a decades-old debate in education.
Kayla Lattimore| June 9, 20176:00 AM ET
Education Week--Should Schools Test the 'Career' Half of 'College and Career'?
The time is ripe to build better vocational assessments for schools, experts say
As states move to adopt college- and career-ready accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act, many educators and researchers argue that assessments will not be able to adequately measure the "career" part of that equation.
"Over the years, we've built tests that measure better and better whether a student will be able to get at least a C in their first year of college—but they explain almost nothing about whether a student will succeed in an occupation," said Anthony Carnevale, the director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.
Career assessments typically focus on the occupations that provide high enough wages to support a family and require some postsecondary training, though usually not a bachelor's degree. But Carnevale and other researchers have found that the material on career-readiness tests, like the U.S. military's Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, and the civilian WorkKeys run by ACT Inc., still overlap significantly with the academic content of college-readiness tests like the ACT or SAT, which focus on early-college content, rather than content geared toward the workplace.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/05/24/should-schools-test-the-career-half-of.html
Sarah D. Sparks| May 24, 2017
