Calif. Districts Team Up to Push School Improvements
Group seeks NCLB waiver
Frustrated by their own state's pace and direction of school improvement, eight California districts have banded together to move ahead on rolling out the Common Core State Standards and designing new teacher evaluations based in part on student performance.
The districts, which include the Los Angeles and San Francisco school systems and enroll more than 1 million students altogether, are also mounting a major breakaway from California in seeking their own waiver from mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
The U.S. Department of Education has already issued similar reprieves to 34 states and the District of Columbia, but last month rejected California's waiver bid, which ignored one of the department's key criteria: teacher evaluations that include student outcomes. If approved by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—a possibility that the Education Department has signaled could be strong—the district-level waiver could dramatically alter the relationship between the districts and the state education department when it...
This article is available to subscribers only.
To keep reading this article and more, subscribe now or start a 2-week FREE trial.
Subscribe to Education Week
You Save 20% or More!
Access selected articles, e-newsletters and more!
Viewed
Emailed
Recommended
Commented
Sponsored Whitepapers
• Best Practices in Information Management, Reporting and Analytics for Education
• Smart infrastructure report to get your district ready for future IT needs.
• Integrating Social and Emotional RTI to Improve Student Performance
• Taming the wild west: How America’s third largest school district manages PCs, Macs, and iPads
• Overcoming the Odds: Getting Every Student to College YES Prep Shares Its Success Story
- Superintendent
- Portola Valley School District, Portola Valley, CA
- Principal
- Roaring Fork School District, Carbondale, CO
- Chief Academic Officer
- Maryland State Department of Education, MD
- Superintendent
- Round Rock ISD, Round Rock, TX
- Superintendent
- Ann Arbor Public Schools, Ann Arbor, MI