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...
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