US Chamber of Commerce

Waivers for 8 More States From ‘No Child Left Behind’ | New York Times

The Obama administration freed eight states from core provisions of the No Child Left Behind education law on Tuesday, bringing to 19 the number of states granted waivers this year, and officials said that even more states would soon qualify for them. State officials have clamored in particular for relief from the federal law’s requirement that every student be proficient in math and English by 2014. The Department of Education waived that condition in exchange for an agreement by states to meet new standards — in a longer time frame — that Arne Duncan, the education secretary, says are tougher.
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Seattle School Board can't hide from U.S. Chamber's slap | The Seattle Times

The thickest pair of rose-colored glasses can't hide the Seattle School Board's tendency to devolve into dysfunction. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's report tells Seattle what most of us already know. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls the Seattle School Board dysfunctional. That characterization is only slightly dated. It is true that the board is not as bizarre as it was a couple of election cycles ago, when ideologues on the board took up large chunks of time debating issues unconnected to the classroom.
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Study: How Local Businesses Should Influence Education Reform | The Heartland Institute

Local businesses can and should influence education reform, concludes a new study of how 13 business partnerships have recently done so in communities throughout the United States. Businesses can work with local school boards to make schools more accountable, effective, and focused on student needs, says “School Board Case Studies,” published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “More of the most impactful [education] decisions are being made at the local level,” said former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a senior adviser to the Chamber. “But businesses are usually involved more at the state and not the local level.”
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Report: School Boards Play Important Role, Face Challenges| U.S. News & World Report

While well-known officials such as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan may get a lot of national press, smaller, sometimes overlooked groups also have a huge impact on American education. Local school boards critically shape the quality of district-wide public education, according to the "School Board Case Studies" report released yesterday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its two nonprofit affiliates, the Institute for a Competitive Workforce and the National Chamber Foundation. "Local school boards hire district leadership, oversee school budgets, negotiate collective bargaining agreements or memoranda of understanding with teachers unions, and set policies on a wide range of issues," the report states.
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How To Fix Pell Grants | TIME

A decade ago I was involved in an effort to rethink federal college aid programs in partnership with the Brookings Institution. We brought together a diverse set of thinkers to brainstorm about how to better target federal dollars to help the neediest students. Sounds pretty mundane, right? But it was a circus. People were so miffed by any suggestion of changing the Federal Pell Grant Program that one advocate even circulated a cowardly anonymous poem insulting the wife of a participant. (Who says education policy is boring?) There was hardly any useful data about who was using various federal aid programs because different federal agencies — including the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education — wouldn’t talk to each other. In short, I quickly learned that when it comes to higher education reform, war is Pell.
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Colleges Get Career-Minded | Wall Street Journal

At Wake Forest University, students can hedge their bets, majoring in history and balancing out Napoleon or the Prussians with a minor in Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. The five-year-old program, the school's most popular minor, requires students to learn the practical aspects of starting a business. It is a sign of change in liberal-arts colleges, which are grappling with the responsibility of preparing students for a tight and rapidly shifting job market while still providing the staples of academic inquiry.  Some schools are beginning to make career development a mission-critical aspect of the college experience, with everything from ramped-up career services to academic programs emphasizing real-world applications and efforts to engage faculty in practical mentoring.
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Former U.S. ed secretary on legacy of No Child Left Behind | The Atlanta-Journal Constitution

DM: Cheating scandal call testing into question?

Spellings: I think obviously the vast majority of educators and education leaders take assessment seriously and the integrity seriously and don’t cheat. When it does happen it ought to be addressed and attended to vigorously. Obviously, we saw that exact same thing play out in Atlanta and what encourages me when I think about the Atlanta case study, the business community, as you know, was very engaged, got a little sideswiped by the scandal, a little aggrieved by their engagement that was rewarded with this sort of behavior. I think to their credit they’ve stayed engaged and active and continue to be and are moving forward to the benefit of kids. Often we take our eye off the ball with students and achievement and get ensnared – in that case – in criminal activity, when we really need to stay focused on the mission. So I think it’s a good news story that bad things can happen and the business community can stay engaged and do good things.
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