May 15: Education News We're Reading This Week

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May 15, 2015Here are the best articles from education news this week.

“Don’t overlook…the nation’s largest college readiness program,” writes Jay Matthews in The Washington Post. California-based Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), led by Mary Catherine Swanson, has been tutoring and preparing low-income students for college since 1980.

The New York Times jumps into the conversation on education data in this new piece. “Data has become a dirty word in some education circles,” writes Motoko Rich, “seen as a proxy for an obsessive focus on tracking standardized test scores.” Some school districts, however, are simply and effectively embracing an observational analysis of student metrics.

Counting low-income students in a given school has long relied on Free and Reduced-Price Lunch data. However a new program called “community eligibility,” writes NPR, would mean that entire districts would receive free lunch if only 40 percent of students qualify for a “means-tested program” and the data would be instantly skewed.

Education Week reports on My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, President Obama’s newly formed nonprofit aimed at breaking down barriers for students of color.

A consortium of four liberal arts colleges have teamed up with edX, a Cooke Foundation partner and massive open online course (MOOC) provider. Colgate, Davidson, Hamilton and Wellesley seek to enhance their respective teaching models through the partnership, writes Inside Higher Ed.

This week The Wall Street Journal published an article on efforts in Silicon Valley to link low-income students with elite colleges. Top venture capitalists are giving to QuestBridge, an education nonprofit, in part to fill a pool of future employees.

Cooke Foundation Executive Director Harold Levy and Catharine Bond Hill, president of the first inaugural Cooke Prize recipient Vassar College, contributed towards this piece on economic diversity in USA Today.

Harold Levy also penned this piece on using data to measure the education of low-income students for the American Association of School Administrators.

The Huffington Post just published this op-ed by Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholar Olga Homonchuk. She discusses her journey from Ukraine to Cornell by way of community college, and her impending graduate studies at the University of Oxford.

The Loudoun Times-Mirror reported on this year’s Cooke Foundation Good Neighbor Grants, with over $230,000 being used to support local education organizations.

In last week’s Friday Roundup we shared some of the local stories celebrating new Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholars. Even more have rolled in since then, listed below.