By Chad Aldeman Congratulations, Democrats, we made it through the nominating process without hearing much about what our nominee, Hillary Clinton, will do on education. Aside from a passing mention of tuition — and debt-free college for the middle class — Clinton’s historic acceptance speech last night continued the two-week convention trend of little to...

By Hailly T.N. Korman The DNC kicked off last night with two parallel stories of immigration that are meaningful, especially for those closely watching education issues. Karla Ortiz — a 10-year-old American citizen — spoke along with her mother, Francisca Ortiz, who is undocumented. Another speaker, Astrid Silva — identified on the schedule simply as “DREAMer”...

By Kaitlin Pennington Yesterday, my Bellwether Education Partners colleague Andy Rotherham wrote on this blog that “as long as the Democrats don’t burn the place down, it’s going to be hard for them to have a worse convention than the GOP just did.” Well, it came close. The Democratic National Convention delegates didn’t seem to get...

A new RNC dispatch from Peter Cunningham, executive director of Education Post: If Republican conservatives stand for one thing above all else when it comes to public education, it is local control. Just as some conservatives see tax cuts as the only answer to an ailing economy, some also see local control as the antidote to...

By Max Marchitello The Veep-stakes are over! The pick is in. Mike Pence, the sitting governor of Indiana, will run as Donald Trump’s vice president. Although he has only been governor for a few years, Pence also served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Putting those records together, Bellwether Education Partners’ Max Marchitello takes stock of what...

Democrats added a misleading reference to standardized tests to the party platform over the weekend, requiring they meet a reliability standard that doesn’t actually exist. “[W]e believe that standardized tests must meet American Statistical Association standards for reliability and validity,” the amendment reads, saying this would “strike a better balance on testing, so that it...

By Peter Cunningham The Democratic Party has always stood for one thing: we fight for the little guy. In the field of education, the little guy is the student. He can’t vote. He doesn’t have much say about his school. He mostly has to do what he’s told. And he is trusting us to do...

Via Edsource | By John Fensterwald A joke around Sacramento is that it takes a Ph.D. in Proposition 98 to understand how California schools are funded and governed. The truth is that agood short course is probably all that’s needed for the basics of California’s complex education policies. And now there is one – Ed100.org. Created by...