EduClips: Carranza Vows to End NYC’s Homeless Students Crisis, NAEP Scores Remain Flat (but With Gains in FL & CA), and More Must-Reads From America’s 15 Biggest School Districts

EduClips is a roundup of the day’s top education headlines from America’s largest school districts, where more than 4 million students across eight states attend class every day. Read previous EduClips installments here. Get the day’s top school and policy news delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for the TopSheet Education Newsletter.

Top Story

NAEP — Test scores released Tuesday for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) continued a decade-long trend of stasis, with small improvements measured only for performance in eighth-grade reading. Although states with disparate academic approaches have made some strides over the past few years — notably Florida and California — national averages have varied only slightly, despite billions of dollars invested to improve performance at the national, state, and local levels.

Over the past half-century, NAEP has been administered every other year by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to test fourth- and eighth-graders in reading and mathematics. Fourth-grade scores in 2017 were flat in math and down somewhat in reading, though the decline was not considered statistically significant. Eighth-graders made incremental improvements in both subjects, though only in reading were they characterized as statistically significant. (Read at The74Million.org)

National News

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE — DeVos: Some Educators Say Schools Are ‘Less Safe’ Because of Obama Discipline Guidance (Read at Politics K-12)

KY TEACHERS — Kentucky Governor Says He’ll Veto Budget Bill That Ignores Charter Funding While Teachers Are Again Poised to Ramp Up Protests (Read at The74Million.org)

District and State News

NEW YORK — City’s new schools chancellor vows to help fix student homeless crisis (Read at the New York Daily News)

FLORIDA — Nation’s report card: ‘Something very good is happening in Florida’ (Read at the Orlando Sentinel)

TEXAS — Testing Season Starts Without Decision on Waiver for Hurricane Harvey (Read at Houston Public Media)

CALIFORNIA — Under state control, Inglewood school district’s financial picture worsened (Read at the Los Angeles Times)

ILLINOIS — Opinion: Why would Pritzker want to limit choices for poor kids? (Read at the Chicago Tribune)

NEW YORK — Thousands sign parents’ petition demanding action from de Blasio on racist school incidents (Read at the New York Daily News)

CALIFORNIA — Charter school group drops two lawsuits against L.A. Unified (Read at the Los Angeles Times)

ILLINOIS — New bill makes it easier for out-of-state teachers to teach in Illinois (Read at KWQC)

Think Pieces

A NATION AT RISK — 35 Years Later, Blockbuster Reagan-Era Education Report Has Remarkable Durability and Resilience (Read at The74Million.org)

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE — Who Misbehaves? Claims That School Discipline Is Unfairly Meted Out Ignore Actual Classroom Behavior (Read at City Journal)

CITIZENSHIP TEST — Could Requiring Students to Take the Citizenship Test Do More Harm Than Good? (Read at Education Week)

SCHOOL REFORM — Three Mistakes We Need to Fix If We Want Education Reform to Succeed (Read at Forbes)

CIVICS EDUCATION — Better civics education in schools? Yes, please (Read at the Seattle Times)

HEAD START — How rural families came to rely on Head Start for basic child care and so much more (Read at The Hechinger Report)

Quote of the Day

“This has been education’s lost decade.” —Michael Petrilli, president of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, on the trend of flat progress on the nation’s NAEP scores. (Read at The74Million.org)

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