With the school year underway, FutureEd has been exploring what's happening inside the classroom: from STEM curriculum to critical thinking skills.

Our senior fellow Morgan Polikoff discussed his research into using Hot Wheels to bring the Next Generation Science Standards into the fourth grade. It's part of a bigger effort to bring together curriculum and standards.Our Georgetown colleague Bill Gormley shared his expertise on critical thinking skills and exploded myths about when and how schools can build these skills into classroom instruction.

 

We also connected with Georgetown's Edunomics Lab, which brought school district leaders from across the country to campus to talk about using weighted-student formulas to fund their schools. The U.S. Education Department is developing a pilot program that will allow up to 50 school districts to use their federal dollars in ways that follow the student.

 

We contributed commentary pieces to Education Week and The Charlotte Observer based on our recent report on chronic student absenteeism under ESSA.

 

With the announcement of the new direction for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we used our Connect the Dots feature to highlight  Gates education strategist Bob Hughes, the new director of the foundation's K-12 program. We also continue to watch who's coming and going in the education world--information we update two to three times a week in The Churn.

 

And we have had some news folks join our Future Ed network. Thomas S. Dee, a professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, has signed onto our research advisory board. And we have three new senior fellows: Amanda Fernandez, founder and CEO of Latinos for Education; Michael Goldstein, founder of Match Education; and Nadya Chinoy Dabby, who was the Education Department's innovation chief during the Obama administration.