The Daily Report Card: NCLB Waivers May Not Mean End To SES

A City Education: Inspiring Students With a Spelling Bee Spring is finally in the air, and that means an array of welcoming sights: sunny skies, breezy weather, flowering trees, and bees. In the case of P.S. 50 in East Harlem, New York, that means spelling bees. Last Thursday, the school auditorium was fully decked out in bee-themed letters and colors along with signs cheering on each of the 28 participants in the City Year Spelling Bee. (Good)

Think NCLB Waivers Mean an End to SES? Think Again Earlier this month, not long Florida received its waiver, the state legislature passed a law requiring schools to set aside 15 percent of their Title I funds in 2012-13 for tutoring. And districts are not happy. They complained forcefully to federal officials at a meeting of the Council of the Great City Schools earlier this month that the state was backtracking on its promise in its waiver application. (blogs.edweek.org)

The Cinema of Educational Despair: A bad narrative reinforced The least productive current narrative about public education goes something like this: Our schools, especially high schools, are failing. There is a predominance of ineffective teachers. Short of closing bad schools, firing bad teachers, and sending kids to charter schools, there is little we can do to change this. Most good teachers, buried alive in the testing mania, are impotent on a systemic level. For the general public this narrative, partially reinforced by films like Waiting for Superman , provides a misguided message. For teachers struggling in underfunded schools, it encourages anger and self-pity rather than productive action. (Washingtonpost.com)

Colleges Shedding Non-Core Operations In an era of stagnant or declining state support for higher education nationwide, universities are cutting their budgets and shedding non-core operations. (Wall Street Journal)