Education News

The chairman of the D.C. Council’s Education Committee is using private donations to hire an outside law firm to help him craft a package of school-related legislation that would aim to lift student achievement and address points of friction between the city’s traditional and charter schools.

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Heads up, high schools: Your graduates may not be as ready for college as you think they are.

New survey results from the ACT assessment organization, made public Wednesday, show a disconnect on the crucial question of college readiness. Eighty-nine percent of high school teachers surveyed said students who finished their classes were well or very well prepared for college work in those subjects.

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The practice, which colleges and universities consider an economic benefit, comes as a shock to students.    

Nearly six months after the presidential election, the Education Department is still riddled with "acting" officials, and Secretary Arne Duncan is losing some of his key aides.

Deputy Secretary Tony Miller is departing within the next month, according to Acting Press Secretary Daren Briscoe, and Assistant Secretary Carmel Martin, who ran the office of planning, evaluation and policy development, is gone as of this week.

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After New York City proposed closing or merging several colleges in the CUNY system in 1975, Dr. Lynch supported student protests and found savings in the budget.    

How have people in Boston, around the U.S. and across the world shown support for those affected?    

A 13-year-old eighth grader in upstate New York woke up on Sunday and decided that it would be funny if she designed a standardized test that made fun of standardized tests. (See below) After all, Sophia Stevens was getting ready to take one of the state's new Common Core-aligned standardized tests on Tuesday, so the subject was on her mind.

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The free online engineering course could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.    

Who holds most of the leadership positions in your school, boys or girls? In your community? Why do you think that is? In general, do you think girls (and women) are discouraged from seeking top roles by outside forces like cultural attitudes, or do you think girls somehow hold themselves back?    

Can you calculate the number of teachers in Michigan in 2012 if you know the number — and percentage of the total — who were facing job loss because of new accountability standards?    

You can't have a conversation about education reform these days without, at some point, hearing the words "personalization" and "engagement." What do they really mean? Here to explain is George Wood, superintendent and secondary school principal at the Federal Hocking Local School District in Stewart, Ohio. He is also the executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy and chair of the board for the Coalition of Essential Schools. This appeared on the forum's blog.

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See what you know about the news of the day.    

Seven Florida teachers have brought a federal lawsuit to protest job evaluation policies that tether individual performance ratings to the test scores of students who are not even in their classes.    

This word has appeared in 252 New York Times articles in the past year.    

College acceptance letters are increasingly telling applicants to show up at midyear, an economic benefit for the colleges but a shock to the students.    

Teachers in Florida filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday, claiming the state’s new teacher evaluation system is unfair because it partly rates their job performance on test scores of students they don’t know and subjects they don’t teach.

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Why do you think the Boston police commissioner declined to call the blasts a terrorist attack during his late-afternoon news conference?    

(Update: BU identifies student killed at marathon)

Boston University officials have identified one of the three people killed in Monday's bombings at the Boston Marathon as a graduate student from China attending the school. Another BU grad student was injured and remained at a Boston hospital.

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