Calls for shared curriculum related to the Common Core State Standards initiative have triggered renewed debates about who decides what students learn, and even about varied meanings of the word “curriculum." These debates further complicate the job of translating the broad learning goals of the standards into classroom teaching.

The most recent calls for common curriculum came from the American Federation of Teachers and the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank named after the late AFT leader. But the calls for “shared” or “common” curricula have sparked heated conversations about whether this would lead to a loss of public input in shaping what children learn. To learn more, read the full article by Catherine Gewertz at Education Week.

After leading the world in college graduates for decades, the United States has slipped to ninth. With that in mind, Vice President Joe Biden has announced a new initiative designed to help reverse the trend.

Biden's office has released a "college completion tool kit" that challenges colleges and universities to boost graduates by offering close to $200 million in competitive grants to innovative institutions. The initiative also encourages governors in every state to set completion goals. To learn more, read the full article by Wade Malcolm at Delaware Online.

The State Board of Education has set guidelines to thoroughly vet textbooks and approved guidelines for the prevention of sexual misconduct and abuse in Virginia public schools. The board unanimously passed both measures.

The Virginia Department of Education revised its process for approving school textbooks after two elementary history textbooks published by Five Ponds Press were discovered to have significant errors last year. To learn more about the textbook guidelines, read the full article by Jeremy Slayton at The News & Advance online.

"Despite the complete lack of evidence that they work, pay-for-performance schemes seem to be as popular as ever," writes Justin Baeder in the On Performance blog at the Education Week website. "Why does anyone think such plans will improve student learning?"

One related analysis, writes Baeder, comes from the 2007 article "What to Do? The Effects of Discrepancies, Incentives, and Time on Dynamic Goal Prioritization" in the Journal of Applied Psychology. In this article, Aaron Schmidt and Richard DeShon describe how they used a computer-based experiment to explore how performance goals and incentives influence the allocation of resources.

To learn more, read Baeder's full article.

In one of the largest and oldest refugee settlements in the world, education is a luxury denied most of the 90,739 children who live there. Set up at the outset of Somalia’s civil war in 1991 to accommodate 90,000 refugees, three camps near the northeastern Kenyan town of Dadaab -- Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley -- are now home to more than three times that number, and persistent conflict in Somalia, from where 95% of the refugees originate, means the population grows daily. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the primary school attendance rate is 43% while in secondary schools the rate is just 12%. Read more at IRIN News online.