State policymakers and advocates from Minnesota, California, and New York joined district administrators and researchers from these and other states to provide convening participants with updates from the cutting edge of DLL reforms.

“Talking about postsecondary education as a universal need is a big deal,” says Mary Alice McCarthy, a senior policy analyst at the New America Foundation, who has long explored the nexus between college and workforce development. “This is a very important reframing of the discussion.”

On the second Higher Ed Happy Hour, Kevin, Libby, and Andrew sample some Irish whisky, dive into the merits of President Obama's higher education tax credit agenda, veer into the great student loan repayment debate, and finish with a discussion of why everyone hates Bill Belichik and whether DeflateGate should really be known as Ballghazi.

"We knew the year-round Pell Grant program had a reputation of being way more expensive than everyone had thought," Miller says, "but what we really found was that the year-round Pell Grant was a victim of larger circumstances beyond its control."

We need data to guide our instructional choices and our policymaking, even if those data are imperfect. Data from those NCLB-mandated assessments illuminated enormous racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps in American schools. Eliminating them now would be akin to refusing to take regular blood tests after seeing a few rounds of worrying cholesterol counts.

A new paper explains why the year-round Pell Grant was a good policy with a negative reputation that was unfairly earned.

In the inaugural episode, Kevin, Andrew and Libby talk about President Obama's free community college plan, the recent college football national championship game, whether federal college ratings are a good or terrible idea, and the upcoming season premiere of The Americans.

Universal pre-K illustrates a critical progressive value: programs that support underserved, low-income children and parents make it easier for them to live dignified lives. Whenever you hear about pre-K’s promise—stuff like “every $1 we invest in quality pre-K returns $7 in benefits and savings”—that usually includes the savings to society that come from children who grow up less likely to drop out of school, go to prison, have children out of wedlock, or go on public assistance.

“Public schools do not move quickly when it comes to how they serve anyone, let alone how they serve special populations,” said Conor Williams. “There are a lot more English learners in American schools and American schools don’t know what to do about it, so they are stumbling around.”

So why are reformers like Duncan and Packnett taking heat for their support and leadership of the protest movement? Surely they are better than folks who would rather act as though police violence against African-Americans is somehow irrelevant to improving American education

Over the last six years competitive grants have played a large role in triggering changes in the early education space, which has been a growing priority for the Obama administration. While the competitions themselves tend to receive attention from policymakers and the media, the actual implementation process, which is critical to the success of the program, is too often overlooked.

Conor Williams isn’t shy about sharing his stories or his opinions. He’s shared with the whole Internet, for example, that he was mugged during his second year of teaching, and that he thinks white progressives have overlooked how systemic racism is in America. When Conor writes about education, he writes fun, compelling prose.

New report argues for automatic Income-Based Repayment coupled with employer withholding for federal student loans

"The first African-American president of the United States is not likely to... weaken the federal government’s ability to force states to take educational equity seriously," Conor P. Williams said. "For most of American history (and today), the decentralization of public education has been repeatedly used to protect de jure and de facto segregation, inequitable allocation of educational resources, and a dizzying variety of civil rights abuses."

This isn’t to say that all school reformers have been silent. Individual reformers, including Groff, Conor P. Williams of the New America Foundation, and Students for Education Reform cofounder Catharine Bellinger have also spoken out.

The protests have never been about one incident. They've never been about one particular tragic death. These are protests against unceasing, unaccountable violence over many years. These are protests responding to a systemic failure that has roots as deep and as old as American chattel slavery.

Leveraging new mapping tools can energize efforts to understand and activate 21st century learning networks. "Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities," a new report from New America' Education Policy Program, highlights examples and explores potential impact for the future. The report argues that while significant national attention has been directed at each of these components of the education system separately, few education policy leaders are considering this entire network of learning opportunities as a whole. Nor are they recognizing how much place and location continue to matter. But the increasing segregation of low-income families makes these issues inextricable at the community level.

This issue brief, first published as a blog series at EdCentral.org, sought to demystify the funding structure for Title III dollars and provide policymakers with some context for the program’s complicated history.

Each American’s ideological mileage on immigration varies according to which end of the “e pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”) equation pulls strongest on their heartstrings. Either we’re a country primarily constituted by our breadth of diversity (‘plures’), or an ‘unum’ nation that constitutes a common cultural, racial, ethnic, and linguistic whole.

New report highlights trends and raises important considerations for schools in supporting and assessing a more comprehensive set of student “skills for success”—and explores how assessments of these skills could be used to inform school improvement and accountability strategies.