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In the news Tuesday, NPR ran the first of three pieces on their All Things Considered program looking at the great benefits that educational entrepreneurs like Don Feinstein and his Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL) have brought to the Chicago school system, revitalizing failing schools with new and innovative ideas while working within the existing public school system. NewSchools Venture Fund, an America Forward coalition member working to advise, invest in, and network educational entrepreneurs, helped NPR connect with AUSL and get their story. Check out the show and keep an eye out – there’ll be two more episodes coming along in the next few weeks, as well as a closer look at NewSchools Venture Fund tomorrow as part of our Focus on Impact series!

Several coalition organizations submitted videos to the RNC as part of their Online Platform Submission process. You can view videos from Computers for Youth, "I Have a Dream" Foundation, and Jumpstart on YouTube. We are excited to see the voice of coalition members in the Republican dialogue on issues and priorities!

Computers for Youth

"I Have a Dream" Foundation

Jumpstart

America Forward is at the forefront of an important movement aimed at building bipartisan public policies that will help solve pressing social issues. To help America Forward continue to generate momentum in Washington, we can point to member organizations such as BUILD. Lawmakers can use BUILD and other innovative organizations to design effective programs that improve the lives of individuals and our entire nation. When I visited a high school in California where students could enroll in BUILD’s program, I saw just how influential organizations like BUILD can be with our students and our country.

According to Ann Hubert, a writer for Slate magazine, Mother’s Day can serve as an occasion to reflect on the disparities in family experiences and resources.

Acknowledging the reality of the Congressional schedule, and the unlikelihood that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law will be reauthorized before the session ends, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings yesterday proposed major regulatory changes in enforcement of the law. One change will require states to use a single federal formula to calculate and report high school graduation rates. Secretary Spellings also wants to require schools to notify parents of their right to transfer students out of failing schools two weeks before the start of each school year, and to explain more fully to parents the opportunities for federally financed tutoring that are available to students attending troubled schools. The federally financed after-school tutoring program was a hotly debated topic when Congress sought to rewrite the law last year. The Secretary will issue final regulations in November, and they will take effect one month later, just weeks before a new president takes office. Read more about the changes to NCLB.

Bell Multicultural Senior High School in Washington, DC is highlighted in today’s Washington Post as the first public high school in the District to require all of its students to take college level AP courses and exams. In “Embracing the Challenge of AP English for All Students,” Bell educators, parents, and students dispute the warning that the growth of AP courses, particularly for low-scoring students, is a recipe for disaster. Rather, required AP courses are “exactly what we need to prepare for college or good jobs.”

This past week, The New York Times reported that many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

This article ran in the Palo Alto Daily News on Tuesday, March 11, 2008.

All presidential candidates believe that the real problem in our educational system, at both the national and the local level, is a lack of funding.

More targeted spending measures also have a mixed record. Modernizing classrooms and increasing access to technology are often cited as one of the reasons for increasing the budget for our schools. After several students from Edison-McNair Academy in East Palo Alto vandalized multiple classrooms and caused thousands of dollars worth of damage, it is not clear that merely increasing the presence of technology in schools will help these students invest in their education.