Education News from Washington Post

Last month, it was the uproar over Lululemon’ssee-through yoga pant. This week, its a fashion fight over leggings and long (or not-long-enough) shirts.

A Rockville High School student’s dress code violation Wednesday has reignited debate over a current fashion trend among young women: Are tights pants?

This seems hard to believe in 2013, but students at Wilcox County High School in Georgia have long held segregated proms -- one for blacks and one for whites. This year a group of black and white teens who have been friends for years are fighting for a fully integrated prom. But it hasn't been easy.

It's early April and that means plenty of high school seniors around the country who are lucky enough to have multiple college acceptances are deciding which one to choose. The conversation can become obsessive, most prominently when it is about the most elite schools. Here's something of a rant about the college admissions process, by Liz Willen of The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet that is an independently funded unit of Teachers College, Columbia University.

The curlicue letters of cursive handwriting, once considered a mainstay of American elementary education, have been slowly disappearing from classrooms for years. Now, with most states adopting new national standards that don’t require such instruction, cursive could soon be eliminated from most public schools.

Here is a list of more than 300 Maryland private schools that are receiving textbooks, computers and other materials that are being paid for by Maryland state public funds. I wrote a post, which you can read here, about the Maryland NonPublic Student Textbook Program, which, since 2001, has provided several million dollars in public funds for textbooks, computers and other resources that are purchased by the state Education Department and then given on loan to qualified private schools.

Today teachers, students, parents, researchers and other activists are starting the second annual "Occupy the DOE" event on the grounds of the U.S. Education Department to protest corporate-based school reform.

A lawsuit challenging the District’s plan to close 15 city schools, filed by activists in local court last week, will now be heard in federal court.

The transfer comes at the request of lawyers for the D.C. government, who asked Tuesday that the case be removed from D.C. Superior Court to U.S. District Court, according to court records. Such a move is allowable in cases alleging violation of federal law.

To listen to some school reformers, you'd think there are no urban traditional public schools that are successful. Here's a different story, adapted and excerpted from "Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System And A Strategy For America's Schools" (Oxford University Press), by David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a former newspaper editor and policy consultant, as well as the author of numerous articles in various publications and several books, including "Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education." His new book, "Improbable Scholars," tells the story of the public schools in Union City, N.J., where teachers do an amazing job of teaching high-poverty students without employing "miracle" reforms.

One of education’s most serious flaws is the failure to require that students produce a research paper or project before they graduate from high school.

I vent on this often. I once thought we just needed a change of attitude, but I am learning it is more complicated.

A compromise bill to alter the leadership of the Prince George’s County school system won a key approval Wednesday in Annapolis, but the measure falls far short of the sweeping changes County Executive Rushern L. Baker III proposed in his bid to take over the schools.

The Prince George’s state Senate delegation voted 7 to 1 on a bill that would restructure the county school system, allowing the county executive to select the new schools superintendent and choose the chairman and vice chair of a retooled Board of Education.

RICHMOND — The University of Virginia’s top leaders discussed the school’s finances for more than three hours Wednesday afternoon, returning again and again to one question: Should they continue to increase tuition each year?

(Update: Maryland Education Department provides list of private schools in program)

There's an interesting item in the 2014 supplemental budget that Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has submitted: a request for $500,000 in "additional funds for non-public school textbooks."

Students at Marie Reed Elementary School in Adams Morgan will soon be able to play soccer on a new artificial turf field, installed courtesy of the United Arab Emirates and the Manchester City Football Club.

A teacher in New Jersey who blogs under the name "Jersey Jazzman" does some great work unraveling the mysteries behind school reform. Here is a piece that follows the money and shows just how interconnected the school reform community is. This is illuminating; it appeared on his Jersey Jazzman blog.

Nine groups seeking to open new charter schools in the District will present their ideas at a D.C. Public Charter School Board hearing Monday.

The hearing is a chance for charter board members to ask questions before voting to approve or deny each of the nine applications on May 20.

Remember back in the olden days when kindergarteners used to be allowed to learn from playing? Now, in the age of the Common Core State Standards, 4 and 5 year olds are being required to do things such as write "Informative/Explanatory Reports" and identify topic sentences.

There has been a flood of news about charter schools recently, and in the following post, Jeff Bryant, a marketing and communications consultant for nonprofits, tries to make sense of it. Bryant is a marketing and creative strategist with nearly 30 years of experience the past 20 on his own as a freelance writer, consultant, and search engine marketing provider. He has also written extensively about public education policy. This post appeared on the Education Opportunity Network, a new online publication edited by Bryant.

Bill Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in no uncertain terms takes aim in this post at federal school policies that led to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Ayers, a radical activist during the 1960s and '70s, had the national spotlight thrown on him during the 2008 presidential campaign when right-wing commentators tried, incorrectly, to say he had a close relationship with then candidate Barack Obama. In any case, Ayers is a well-known Chicago educator who worked with mayor Richard Daley on school reform and who taught and did research for years at the university. He has written numerous articles and books on elementary education.

Stanford University will team with a nonprofit founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to develop an open-source Web platform for free online college courses.

The Stanford alliance with the nonprofit venture edX, announced early Wednesday, signaled a new twist in what has become a race to open up the highest levels of higher education to the world.