Education News

My colleague Ezra Klein, the founder of the Wonkbook blog, just wrote a post about the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of the tea party. It carried this headline: "The IRS was wrong to target the tea party. They should've gone after all 501(c)4s."

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For an initiative billed as being publicly driven, the Common Core States Initiative has benefited enormously from the generosity of the private philanthropy of Bill and Melinda Gates. How much? About $150 million worth.

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Raise Your Hand Texas has become a seasoned lobbying force on education issues, and its No. 1 legislative priority is fighting private-school vouchers.    

You may not know what a DBQ is. For most of my life, neither did I. But in the high schools of this region and the rest of the country it has become an important and in some ways fearsome term.

It haunts the dreams of 400,000 teenagers who will take the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. history Wednesday. It is part of a massive reform of the AP exam system that controls the schedules of most of the nation’s high schools every May.

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Thousands of breast cancer survivors and their supporters gathered Saturday on the Mall for the annual Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure, but attendance at the charity’s signature fundraising event was down for a second consecutive year.

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Here is a list of commencement speakers at selected colleges and universities in the District, Maryland and Virginia.

The District college/university date speaker American May 11 Anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer Catholic May 18 Poet and critic Dana Gioia Gallaudet May 17 Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood George Washington May 19 Actress/activist Kerry Washington Georgetown May 18 Lisa J. Shannon, founder of Run for Congo Women Howard May 11 Former president Bill Clinton Trinity Washington May 18 Community health leader Maria Gomez University of the District of Columbia May 11 UDC Interim President James E. Lyons Maryland Bowie State May 17 First lady Michelle Obama Johns Hopkins May 23 Neurosurgeon Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa St. John’s May 12 James Schamus, chief executive of Focus Features St. Mary’s May 11 Gov. Martin O’Malley U.S. Naval Academy May 24 President Obama University of Maryland at College Park May 19 Retired baseball star Cal Ripken Jr. University of Maryland Baltimore County May 23 Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor Virginia George Mason May 18 U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner Marymount May 19 NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd Mary Washington May 11 Walgreens executive Steve Pemberton University of Virginia May 19 Former U.S. senator James Webb Virginia Tech May 17 Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger Washington and Lee May 22 Religion professor Harlan R. Beckley William and Mary May 12 FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III Read full article >>    

After years of pay freezes and unpaid furloughs, physical education teacher Steven Lightman received a roughly $8,000 annual salary bump this school year.

But it wasn’t because Lightman’s school system decided to give the veteran teacher a raise. He made it happen himself by switching Washington area school districts.

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Concussions are drawing more attention, but some advocates are debating how to reduce preventable deaths from sudden cardiac arrest and heat stroke.    

Students are bombarding their dream schools with baked goods, craft projects and dossiers of testimonials in an effort to get an edge — and get off the waiting list.    

The Times’s Ariel Kaminer on how far high school seniors (and their parents) will go to get themselves off a college waiting list and into the school of their dreams.    

Anjelica Gonzalez says lessons from her mother, a Las Vegas blackjack dealer, helped her succeed as a scientist.    

In an introductory course, a professor found that requiring students to ask everyday questions was an effective way to teach economics concepts.    

At a forum on Saturday, several candidates said they would scrap signature policies of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, including his A-through-F grading system for schools.    

David A. Patterson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has firsthand knowledge of the substance abuse and other problems facing American Indian communities.    

Pomp, circumstance and the perennial debate over free speech on campuses.    

The following 90-second video was secretly recorded by a student at Duncanville High School in Texas as another student, Jeff Bliss, told off his world history teacher about the way she was teaching after she had kicked him out of the class.

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Mike Yastrzemski, the grandson of Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski, is a senior on Vanderbilt’s baseball team and is expected to play professionally.    

A discussion on school reform in New York took a surprising turn this week when Paul Vallas, a pioneer of the current era of school reform, said, "We're losing the communications game because we don't have a good message to communicate."

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It just so happens that in the same week that a co-author of a Heritage Foundation immigration study resigned for suggesting that Hispanics have lower IQs than whites, the Pew Research Hispanic Center released a new analysis showing that Hispanic high school graduates have passed whites in the rate of college enrollment.

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A task force on Friday unanimously recommended tearing down Sandy Hook Elementary School and building a new one on the site where a gunman killed 26 children and adults on Dec. 14.