Second and third graders, violins in hand, silently walk into the auditorium and take their seats. Katy Brodhead, the music teacher at KIPP THRIVE Academy, walks around the stage checking to make sure students have followed directions to put their bows away in the seat pocket behind them. Each time a class comes out to play, two students introduce the original compositions they’ve written and let parents know which class they are in.

After months of preparation and worry, numbers released by the New Jersey Education Association claim only 460 students opted out of last month’s Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) examination. That is not the case in other parts of the state, where opt outs topped 50,000.

Our 2015 enrollment deadline in Newark is February 6th. Please apply today at www.kippnj.org/enroll.

If you’re a teacher, you probably already write assessments each class and put an objective on the board. Are you ready to take assessment to the next level? Criteria for success, from The Skillful Teacher by Jon Saphier, is a tool used in most, if not all, of our classrooms. It helps us take assessments and objectives and make them actionable and real to students.

After years of playing in an old parking lot, students at Rise Academy will finally have a field to call their own. With the help of the NFL Foundation, the NY/NJ Super Bowl Host Committee and the NY/NJ Snowflake Youth Foundation, they received a $225,000 grant to begin construction on a new Rise field adjacent to the school.

Anne Kadowaki is currently wrapping up her Fisher Fellowship, where she designs her ideal school and makes it a reality. Anne’s school will be the first TEAM school to open in our expansion to Camden. I sat down with Anne to talk about her vision for Revolution Primary, a KIPP School. I did Teach For America in 2006, and that’s what brought me to Newark.

Every day, five billion records of cell phone location transmissions are recorded and stored from cell signals, both domestically in the US and internationally. These records are housed in a National Security Agency (NSA) digital storehouse called FASCIA, aimed at mapping these records storing them for analysis.

If you have used Google Hangouts, Skype, Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or a whole host of other online sites, your information could have easily been intercepted by PRISM and the analysts working major cases for the NSA. PRISM has access to millions of user’s data sent to insufficiently encrypted servers at major internet providers everywhere.