Education News from Washington Post

Mary Ann Hall was once among the most rich, popular and powerful women in Civil War Washington. Before she died in 1886 at age 71, she had garnered a nationwide reputation for integrity, charm, and utmost discretion.

The District sends more money per student to its traditional schools than to its charter schools, charter officials and advocates told the D.C. Council on Friday, renewing what has become an annual plea for equitable funding.

Interviews with teachers by Reader's Digest yielded a list of more than 30 things that teachers think but would not tell their students' parents. Here are a dozen of them, and you can find the rest here.

Every major parents group in Florida, including the PTA, has long been vocally opposed to the "parent trigger" legislation now before the state legislature. Recently, a new group called Sunshine Parents was formed, this one in support of parent trigger -- laws allowing parents at a failing school the right to change the school's structure. What seemed unusual about the group wasn't that some parents in Florida support parent trigger; surely some do. Rather, nobody was standing up and taking credit for creating the group, which sent out a pro-parent trigger e-mail, with a link to a video, to legislators and other Floridians. There was an e-mail address for the group on the letter, but nobody responded to the e-mails I sent to that address.

There's nothing in this school reform era, it seems, that can't be aligned with school content standards -- even Girl Scout badges. It turns out, according to the Girl Scout Web site, that the "content" of every single Girl Scout national proficiency badge and journey has been correlated by grade level to a whole series of standards for every state plus the District of Columbia.

The Prince George’s County Board of Education voted Thursday night to strip member Carletta Fellows (District 7) of her county-issued credit card after an internal auditor found more than $700 in unauthorized charges for utility bills.

Some Prince George’s County residents who fought to restore the county’s elected school board after state lawmakers replaced it in 2002 with an appointed board said they plan to start a petition drive against the county’s new school governance structure.

George Mason University’s new president staked out a position Friday somewhat unusual for the leader of a school deemed an up-and-comer: He’s explicitly not trying to make it the best in the world.

“What we’re going to try to become is the best university for the world,” GMU President Angel Cabrera said. “That’s our goal.”

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.