EdTech Thrives/Stumbles

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While educators’ interest in edtech continues to grow—tablet purchases (most of them iPads) were up nearly 50 percent in 2013— the setbacks nearly matched the momentum. Ambitious tablet deployment efforts have stumbled in Los Angeles (where students hacked their iPads) and Guilford County (North Carolina) where officials have halted the use of malfunctioning Asus tablets using learning software developed by Rupert Murdoch’s education division. One of the founders of the online and generally free course movement (known as MOOCs) revealed that few students who signed up for the courses actually took and passed them. Much-admired edtech startup Tutorspree.com shuttered its virtual doors. Most schools are wired, but few have schoolwide wifi or enough bandwidth to allow everyone to be connected at the same time. Good news may be on the horizon, however: Google devices and software are beginning to make the education tablet market more competitive, and the President has begun pushing to give more schools high-capacity wireless.

Parents Opting Out of Standardized Testing

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Protesting against test proliferation, excessive test prep, and controversial uses of test results to rate teachers and schools, a small but vocal group of parents have begun withdrawing their children from some or all standardized tests. The “opt-out” movement hopes to force schools to rethink their testing programs. In a handful of cases—Texas, Chicago, Tulsa, and New York State—their efforts have generated a testing rollback. Critics note that regular assessments are necessary parts of making U.S. schools better, and that poor, minority, and special needs students have benefitted in particular from external accountability provided by testing. Some states like Tennessee and Washington D.C. that put strong emphasis on test scores saw improved results in the latest round of national testing. However, testing opponents say that test prep has taken over their children’s classrooms and that test results are wrongly being used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers and schools.

Sequestration/Shutdown/Head Start

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Sequestration—the across the board trimming of federal spending required when politicians couldn’t agree on annual spending levels—became a fact of life in 2013. Education and social safety net programs focused on the poor were particularly affected, especially given the rise in child poverty and continuing joblessness among many parents. The government shutdown that followed was particularly hard on programs like Head Start that rely primarily on federal funding to stay open. Businessman and philanthropist John Arnold donated $10 million to help prevent some Head Start centers from shutting down and was thanked for his efforts by an angry blog post from Ravitch (who later apologized). The shutdown was also a vivid civics lesson over how NOT to run the government.