The Record--On key votes, school boards bypass conflicts of interest. Is this in the public interest?

WAYNE — Four of the Wayne Board of Education’s nine members have accepted donations from the local teachers’ union. They still voted to ratify the teachers’ union contract and approve raises, thanks to a practice that allows school boards to legally bypass conflicts of interest.

Wayne isn’t the only district to utilize the practice. By law, New Jersey school boards and charter schools may invoke a Doctrine of Necessity when a quorum of board trustees have conflicts preventing them from voting on a matter, such as a superintendent’s evaluation or ratifying a contract. A board must publicly adopt a resolution stating the nature of the conflicts, and then members can cast their votes.

Meghan Grant, NorthJersey Published 5:06 p.m. ET June 11, 2018 | Updated 1:50 p.m. ET June 13, 2018

The Atlantic--The Controversy Over Just How Much History AP World History Should Cover

The College Board recently announced that it will no longer test students on the thousands of years that predated European colonialism.

Like any Advanced Placement course, AP World History is intense, requiring students to absorb lots of sophisticated, detail-laden information in a relatively short amount of time: usually, a single year of high school. Yet AP World, as it is colloquially called, is a special breed of intense. The timespan the course’s curriculum covers is as expansive as its geographic focus: The material includes history starting around 8,000 B.C.E. and ends in the present—more than 10,000 revolutions around the sun later. This content, which the curriculum divides into six periods, is typically covered over the course of two sequential college classes.

Now, the College Board, the nonprofit testing company that runs (and earns

Alia Wong| Jun 13, 2018

Education Week--How (and Why) Ed-Tech Companies Are Tracking Students' Feelings

A push to use new technology to understand the 'whole child' is sparking privacy fears

All school year, Kaylee Carrell has been watching online math videos using a free software platform called Algebra Nation.

What the Florida 8th grader didn’t know: The software was also watching her.