Education News from Washington Post

Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was in Washington D.C. on Thursday at the National Press Club to launch a campaign grounded in a new book, "Closing the Opportunity Gap," that he co-edited with Stanford University Professor Prudence Carter. The Washington Post coverage is in today's paper. Here are the comments that Welner, a professor of education policy and program evaluation in the School of Education, made at the press club about the issue, the campaign, and the book, "Closing the Opportunity Gap:"

(Update: Response from David Catania's office)

My colleague Emma Brown reported in this story that David Catania, the chairman of the D.C. Council's Education Committee, is using private donations to hire an outside law firm to help him design school-related legislation aimed at improving the city's public schools. Here's a piece about why this is such a bad idea. It was written by Sam Chaltain, a DC-based education writer, a senior fellow at the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and a former member of Mayor Vincent Gray's transition team for education policy. He can be reached at schaltain@gmail.com.

KIPP DC’s controversial proposal to build a high school on public land in Southwest Washington stalled this week when officials with Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s administration announced that they will not consider leasing the site this year.

Prince George’s County Interim School Superintendent Alvin L. Crawley’s announcement that he would leave the school system on June 3, almost a month before his contract ends, is likely to create more uncertainty in a district plagued by rapid leadership turnover.

Here's an argument about why it matters when state education departments refuse to release sample questions on state standardized accountability tests. This was written by Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He writes the Sociological Eye on Education blog — where this post first appeared — for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.

A new study from Stanford University that reviews research on the Advanced Placement program of college-level high school courses concludes that the common wisdom about AP -- including about how much benefit students get from it -- is not accurate.

Mark Wahlberg, the wildly successful actor and musician and producer and actor, appeared at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria to encourage kids to stay in school and get their degree. He dropped out in ninth grade, and now, at 41, he is working through an online credit recovery program to get that diploma.

Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to close 15 District schools will improve education across the city and does not discriminate against poor and minority students, D.C. officials said in response to a lawsuit filed by activists seeking to halt the closures.

The Meridian Public Charter School is a well-regarded institution serving students in preschool through eighth grade on 13th Street between V and W streets in Northwest Washington. Nearly all of its 531 students are black or Hispanic. Eighty-seven percent are from low-income families. The student body’s reading and math proficiency rates are about 15 percentage points above the city average.

Former Washington Post managing editor Philip Bennett will become director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University starting in July.

Bennett, who for the past two years has been managing editor of the PBS television program “Frontline,” was an editor at The Post from 1997 to 2009. He served as the newsroom’s second-ranking leader in the last four years of that period.

Strong gusts near a rural Williamsburg airport might have played a role in the plane crash that killed a two-star Air Force general and his wife last week, airport officials and family members said.

Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Brown IV, 54, and his wife, Sue Brown, 52, had traveled from their home in the District on Friday to visit Brown’s father, Joseph D. Brown III, a doctor with a private practice in Williamsburg. It was a trip the couple had made many times in the family’s single-engine Cessna 210, but airport officials said winds gusting to 35 mph might have caused the plane to stall and spin out of control just before an attempted landing.

For more than a generation, educators and policymakers have been agonizing about America’s achievement gap, the persistent chasm in academic performance between poor and privileged children.

A new book and a national campaign launched Thursday says the country must pay equal attention to the “opportunity gap” — which exists when poor and minority students and English-language learners lack the same access as affluent students to skilled teachers, quality curriculum and well-equipped schools.

Can computers really grade essay tests? The National Council of Teachers of English say "no," even if there is new software that says "yes."

New software described in this New York Times story allows teachers to leave essay grading to the computer. It was developed by EdX, the nonprofit organization that was founded jointly by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and that will give the software to other schools for free. The story says that the software "uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers."

If No Child Left Behind was supposed to be about anything, it was improving student achievement. Here's an important piece about how it wasn't really student achievement that affected NCLB outcomes but, rather, tiny differences in arcane rules. This was written by Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This originally appeared on the Shanker Blog blog.

On the same day that I published a brief history of problems that Pearson, the education giant, has been having with standardized testing (going back years and across a number of states), I learned of yet a new Pearson problem from David Steensma, a doctor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Here's the e-mail he sent me on Wednesday:

Selective colleges get plenty of applications from the top-scoring children of affluent parents, including many in this region. What the colleges need, their admissions officers say, are more high-achieving, low-income applicants. Places such as Georgetown and Duke don’t like being called country clubs for the rich. They want more academically talented poor kids. Why aren’t they applying?

Mark Wahlberg, one of the world’s most successful high school dropouts, stopped by T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria on Wednesday morning to encourage students to stay in school.

The multimillionaire Hollywood producer, actor, former rapper and model dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. But now, the 41-year-old father of four is pursuing his diploma through an online credit-recovery program.

Maryland officials say they are confident the state will meet federal deadlines to develop new teacher evaluation systems requiring the use of standardized test scores.

It’s a sharp turnaround for the Maryland State Department of Education. In December, the U.S. Department of Education told Maryland officials the state was at risk of losing about $40 million in Race to the Top Funds for falling behind on developing new teacher evaluation systems. About a month later, the federal agency released a report showing Maryland was behind in implementing Race to the Top requirements.

Federal budget cuts and surging demand for student aid may limit awards this year from a popular D.C. scholarship fund that aims to provide up to $10,000 annually for residents to attend public colleges outside the city, officials said Wednesday.

The cafeteria at Savoy Elementary in Anacostia was rocking. Cheerleaders cheered, students in school T-shirts chanted and the principal gave a go-get-’em speech.

But this was no pep rally of yore, building excitement for a football team. This was all about getting psyched for a standardized test — the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, or D.C. CAS, a bubble exam that students across the city are taking this week.