Imagine this: Jenny Smith is a second-year teacher at a Happytown Elementary. Her students have been acing every standardized test they take. Smith is so proud of her students. But Smith isn’t the only one who is proud of the people who have learned from her; the college that Smith earned her degree from is also benefiting from the improved scores on her students’ tests.

On the opposite end of the spectrum: Jake Snow is another new teacher at Frownyville Middle School. His students’ test scores have been falling every year that he has been teaching. And now, the university where Snow graduated from is being scrutinized to see if they are adequately training their students.

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Race to the Top program. Which states have already applied for funding? Which states are not going to apply? Is it too political? Is it expecting too much of teachers? What exactly is it? The Race to the Top program is a $4 billion grant program created by the Department of Education and signed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. 

It was created to encourage states to assess and improve students’ education and performance. It is also intended to enable schools to hire and keep high-quality teachers. States must apply for the funding, and if they qualify, they could receive up to $700 million to improve their schools.

States are evaluated on several criteria. The biggest factor is if they have “a comprehensive and coherent reform agenda.” The quality of the teachers and having common standards are also factors used during the evaluation process.

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President Obama’s health care program may not be popular among certain Americans, but his desire to eliminate summer vacation will render him an easy target among all American school children.

Earlier this year we reported that President Obama proposed longer school days, and recent buzz indicates he’s still at it. The President wants American children to be better prepared to compete with children worldwide who spend on average 30 percent more time in school than American kids. Along with his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, President Obama believes that the current American academic calendar year is antiquated and was created when the country was primarily an agrarian culture; but since very few families toil in the fields all day, the Obama Administration is on a quest to develop the minds of American children by extending their time in school in order to keep them on par with the minds of millions of children around the globe. Read the rest of this entry »

I had to fill out the FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, when I was a high school senior. It had 153 questions and took me several hours to complete. Many of my friends did not even bother filling it out just because it was too complex. It was a nightmare!

President Obama must also see the FAFSA as a monstrosity. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are recreating the form to make it more “user-friendly.” By doing so, they hope to make it easier for more students to apply for and receive financial aid, therefore enabling more students to attend college. Duncan said the goal is to increase college enrollment levels among lower income students. Read the rest of this entry »

(Science class via Curious Mind Store)

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday he wants to launch a “new era” of science education in the United States, one that encourages students to ask tough, challenging questions and brings more specially trained science and math teachers into the classroom.

Duncan told the National Science Teachers Association during a visit to New Orleans that President Barack Obama sees a need for inventors and engineers along with poets and scholars and “will not allow scientific research to be held hostage to a political agenda.”

“Whether it’s global warming, evolution or stem cell research, science will be honored. It will be respected and supported by this administration,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

For this generation of students to remain competitive with their international peers as adults, they need to start spending more time in school. This week President Obama proposed that American school children extend their time in class, either by lengthening the school day, or spending less time on summer vacation.

“We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day,” Obama said. He continued to say “That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea. That is no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Arne Duncan, Obama's Education Secretary

In the recently-passed stimulus package, nearly $5 billion in discretionary funds was allocated toward education, helping Obama fulfill campaign promises to improve public schools and maybe even fulfill promises made by Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative, now seven years old. However, in the current economic crisis, Arne Duncan, Obama’s Education Secretary who will oversee how the money is spent, has admitted that some of the money will be used to prevent teacher layoffs rather than improving the education system. Much of the money could be used to cover operational expenses like payroll if the stimulus package does not improve the nation’s overall economic condition, which could dampen the potential benefits of receiving such a windfall. Still, Duncan told reporters that he sees this as “an absolute historic opportunity.” The intention is to use the money for “rewarding innovation,” as Obama puts it. Schools and universities who feel that they have an idea for an innovative way to improve education can apply for part of the federal funding in order to put their idea into practice.

These discretionary funds are part of a larger $100 billion allowance intended for education in the stimulus package. The other funds are to be used for updating aging schools, keeping class sizes to a reasonable number, funding early education programs and the like.

The economic stimulus package that President Obama fought so hard to sell last night in his first public address passed the Senate today. They approved $838 billion, the largest government stimulus since World War II.

From that package, $83 billion is being earmarked for education, significantly less than the $150 billion approved by the House last week. Newly seated Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says it is “not nearly as much as we need,” and without funding, more than 600,000 education positions stand to be cut due to continuing strain on state budgets.

Under this stimulus spending for Title I and Pell Grants will increase and will make emergency funds available to public schools and state universities.

See more on this story from the New York Times.

Yesterday, Arne Duncan assumed his official position as part of President Obama’s cabinet as Congress approved him for Secretary of Education. “Mr. Duncan, there is no question that schools across America can benefit from the same kind of fresh thinking that you have brought to the Chicago public schools,” said Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, as he instroduced Duncan to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

During the confirmation hearing Duncan announced “We must do better.”

We’ve yet to see an official plan for his tenure, but he has made it clear that priorities include merit-based pay for teachers and more robust pre-k programs. He also shared three goals with the Committee: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official. Barack Obama has nominated Arne Duncan, the current chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, to serve as the Secretary of Education for his upcoming administration.

As the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Duncan has taken some aggressive and controversial stands.  Here’s a rundown of Duncan’s qualifications and what he’s done in the Chicago Public Schools.

He was a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard University in 1987 with a degree in sociology. He was also the co-captain of Harvard’s basketball team. Duncan was Director of Chicago’s Ariel Education Initiative, an organization that seeks to create educational opportunities for inner-city kids through mentoring and tutoring, between 1992 and 1998, and then ran Chicago’s magnet school system from 1998-2001, when he then became the CEO of the Chicago Public schools. During his time as CEO he accomplished the following:

• Duncan has strongly advocated charter schools and has closed down under-performing schools.
• Duncan aggressively sought to improve attendance and dropout rates in the Chicago Public Schools.
• Duncan supported a proposal to open a school for Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender students.

Duncan has quite a full schedule lined up for him over the next few years, with No Child Left Behind badly in need of reform, out of control tuition costs at public colleges and universities, and budget cuts at public schools across the country.