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Regularly updated information provided by Center on Education Policy (CEP). This state-by-state list details which states have applied (or plain to apply) for waivers to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as announced by Education Secretary Arne Duncan in August 2011.

The New York State Education Department is part of the University of the State of New York (USNY). Its "mission is to raise the knowledge, skill, and opportunity of all the people in New York."

A regional organization of 15 Western states created to facilitate resource sharing among these states' higher education institutions. Offers student exchange programs, regional initiatives, and research and policy work.

By Jane Stancill in the Education section of the North Carolina NewsObserver.com, December 31 2010. "North Carolina has become the nation's incubator of early college high schools, with one-third of the total in the United States," 71 schools with 15,000 students. In 2011, NC State University will launch a new early college high school. This article provides background on the ECHS.

The following excerpt says so much to me..."goal state is initially only partially described" (every time!); the need to "scaffold the work of leaders" while "making a more improvisational style of collaboration possible". These phrases express truth and performance goals for me. "Her research on leadership in creative collaboration online explores how people can collaborate across distance on projects where the goal state is initially only partially described. Amy and her students are creating tools both to support existing creative collaborative practice by scaffolding the work of leaders, and also to try to transform that practice by making a more improvisational style of collaboration possible."

excerpt on teaching critical thinking "What are the right kinds of questions to ask? In figuring out what questions to ask, it's really helpful to look at Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's begins with a knowledge-based question such as, "Who was the first president of the United States?" To answer that question simply requires knowledge. That's just a first step. Next you want them to be able to evaluate. So I push teachers to look at the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy that involve the analysis and evaluation type of questions. That's when you're pushing kids' thinking. For instance, if you ask, "To what extent was George Washington successful as the first president of the United States?" that's a much higher-level question. It requires a student to evaluate, to create a set of criteria for what makes someone a great president, to possess knowledge about George Washington, and to evaluate his performance against that set of criteria. I suggest that teachers really think about questions that hit four specific criteria. Questions should be open-ended, with no right or wrong answer, which prompts exploration in different directions require synthesis of information, an understanding of how pieces fit together be "alive in their disciplines," which means perpetually arguable, with themes that will recur throughout a student's lifetime and always be relevant be age-appropriate

NCNSP works with school districts and educators to develop more than 100 innovative high schools in every region of the state. NCNSP partners with colleges and universities, state and local government, and supporters in business and philanthropy. The organization provides a full range of services and supports to enhance the knowledge and skills of educators in new schools.

(Department of Public Instruction, State Board of Education) Information about schools, testing, data and statistics and programs.

The Career and Technical Education section of the site was also mentioned. http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/cte/. All programs and departments can be accessed from the pull down menus on the home page.

Southern Regional Board works with 16 member states to improve public pre-K-12 and higher education. The organization works directly with state leaders, schools and educators to improve teaching, learning and student achievement.

The Common Core State Standards Initiaitive is a state-led efford coordinated by the National Governors Association for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers

As posted on eLobbyist.com. This House bill requires the state to review and make recommendations on "Early College High Schools" for the state of Mississippi.

Title: Reaching the Goal:  The Applicability and Importance of the Common Core State Standards to College and Career Readiness.Source: EPIC Educational Policy Improvement CenterAuthors: David Conley et al A new analysis from Educational Policy improvement Center (EPIC) indicates that mastering the Common Core Standards have the baseline knowledge and skills necessary for college work.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is the administrative unit for primary and secondary public education. Agency responsibilities include: managing the textbook adoption process; overseeing development of the statewide curriculum; administering the statewide assessment program; administering a data collection system on public school students, staff, and finances; rating school districts under the statewide accountability system; operating research and information programs; monitoring for compliance with federal guidelines; and serving as a fiscal agent for the distribution of state and federal funds.

" Education for the Future is a not-for-profit initiative located on the California State University, Chico campus that focuses on working with schools, districts, State Departments of Education and other educational service centers and agencies on systemic change and comprehensive data analyses that lead to increased student learning. "

by Derek Bruff, November 6, 2011. The best justification of the Innovation Lab premise that I have seen. "Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."" Often our students engage in what Ken Bain, vice provost and a historian at Montclair State University, calls strategic or surface learning, instead of the deep learning experiences we want them to have. Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient-they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning. Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community. My students might not see the beauty and power of mathematics, but they can look forward to participating in a community effort to learn about math. Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

MCNC's school Greer appealed against the South Carolina's Department of Education and won the right to be amongst 14 out of 179 high schools statewide to met the No Child Left Behind standards.

Largest public school system in Texas; seventh-largest in United States.

The Community College Research Center (CCRC) is part of the Insitute on Education and the Economy, Teacher's College, Columbia University. From their site: "CCRC"s mission is to conduct research on major issues affecting community colleges in the United States and to contribute to the development of practice and policy that expands access to higher education and promotes success for all students."

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

Good comparison by Amy Greene at the Evergreen State College on Diigo vs. Zotero