Education News

How have teacher assessment systems changed in the past few years?

Can you choose the average amount pledged by fans of a certain television show after the top 370 donors to its movie product had been removed from the list?

It would be easy to think that the Atlanta cheating scandal by adults on standardized tests is the worst we have seen, given last week's startling indictment against former Atlanta schools superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 others under a law used against mobsters.

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François Taddei uses a playground stand-by - staring in fascination at a busy ant colony - to relate to schoolchildren in a Paris suburb.

See what you know about the news of the day.

This word has appeared in 19 New York Times articles in the past year.

Prosecutors planned to investigate possible sexual abuse at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts after it released a report that detailed allegations against two faculty members who taught there for decades.

Not everyone is impressed with Steve Coll, who will become the new dean at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, but journalists now work in a future he thought a lot about.

As spring break begins Monday for public schools across the District, students are fanning out across the globe on trips designed to impart lessons that can’t be learned from a book.

More than a dozen students from Washington Metropolitan High, a D.C. alternative school, and the selective School Without Walls are journeying to West Africa. They will practice French in Dakar, see the shocking pink waters of Senegal’s salty Lake Retba and witness a slice of rural life in the Casamance region.

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At the heart of college denial letters lies a paradox.

The admissions deans who sign them almost always express sorrow or regret over their decision to turn down an applicant. And yet colleges seeking to attain or maintain prestige reap an undeniable benefit from the act of denial on a massive scale.

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Jenna Kress sat down at her computer one recent evening to check the status of her application to the University of Georgia. The 17-year-old senior at Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County let out a scream when video fireworks lighted up her screen.

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In early January, a group of District high school dropouts opened a plastic tub full of spare parts and a computer. Six weeks later — with some help from professional engineers — they had turned the materials into Fresh T.E.C.H.S., a boxy robot complete with a conveyor belt of orange tubing and a metal arm that expands to 60 inches.

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The Virginia School Boards Association announced that Gina Patterson will be the organization’s executive director beginning Jan. 1.

Patterson, now the deputy executive director, will succeed Barbara Coyle, who is retiring at the end of this year.

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Here's a list of 50-plus ways that schools manipulate standardized test scores to make the results look better than they actually are. They were compiled by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest, a nonprofit dedicated to ending the misuse of standardized test scores, and were taken from actual cases documented in government and reports. You can learn more here about the misuse of tests.

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I understand the frustration of Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III over low school performance. I see why he wants to take power away from a sometimes ineffective school board. All over the country, conscientious leaders like Baker are looking for ways to improve learning, particularly for poor kids.

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Michael Zamansky, a teacher at Stuyvesant in Manhattan, is credited with the idea behind the Academy for Software Engineering, but it hasn’t turned out exactly as he had hoped.

Could it be that Rick Perry, an Aggie, is riled up over the University of Texas System because of a college rivalry?

New teacher evaluation systems were intended to provide useful feedback and weed out weak performers, but the reluctance to set a high bar has led to scores that seem impossibly rosy.

Student test scores are among the lowest in the Washington region. Many classrooms are overcrowded. School buses often arrive late or not at all. Superintendents and teachers often leave after spending just a couple of years in the district.

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Here are some excerpts from the 96-page indictment returned in Fulton County, Ga., against former Atlanta Schools superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 others in a massive cheating scandal.

The indictment portrays Hall as the head of a corrupt organization that used standardized test scores to financially reward and punish employees, and it alleges that those involved agreed to lie and cheat and destroy documents to cheat so that student test scores would look higher than they really were.

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