Education News from Washington Post

Stacie Brockman is the Prince George’s County mother of lively twin 9-year-old boys. Her sons were born two months premature. She has done everything possible to deal with the disabilities that often impede the progress of such children.

Watch this video and think about the nightmare it is for many kids with disabilities to take standardized tests.

Read full article >>    

The Supreme Court will soon hand down its verdict in a case that challenges racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas. In this post, Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the nonprofit public policy research organization The Century Foundation, and a proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions, looks at the issue. This appeared on the foundation's blog.

To the long list of perks of being a senior, add this one: Organizing a rock concert can count as your final project.

Ten 12th-graders from Yorktown High School in Arlington and Oxon Hill High School in Prince George’s County spent their last three weeks of high school getting a crash course in arts management at Artisphere in Rosslyn. The culmination of their work is a battle of teen bands tonight at the arts center.

To boost the flagging graduation rate at T.C. Williams High School, Alexandria leaders decided to open a satellite campus with a more flexible online curriculum tailored to students with complex lives.

Calvert County school officials on Friday denied a request to clear the school record of a 5-year-old boy who was suspended for bringing a cowboy-style cap gun onto a school bus last month.

The kindergartner, who tucked the orange-tipped toy gun inside his backpack so that he could show it to a friend, was suspended May 29 for 10 days. After a disciplinary conference that scaled back his punishment to three days, he returned to Dowell Elementary School in Lusby. A request to remove the offense from his record was considered separately.

Howard University is shedding about 75 staff positions in a re­organization that comes at the same time a rare public rift on the board of trustees over the school’s finances and management has riveted students, faculty and alumni.

One of the most memorable slogans in higher education — “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” — is getting a new tag line with a stock market spin.

A public service advertising campaign for the United Negro College Fund, now known as the UNCF, builds on the iconic drive launched in 1972 to raise money for college scholarships for African Americans.

You don’t need a ticket to see the Class of 2013 graduate from Arlington public schools later this month.

School officials plan to broadcast the ceremonies for all three comprehensive high schools on local television and to stream them online.

A power outage — unrelated to storms across the region — at Thomas S. Wootton High School on Thursday morning wasn’t enough to get students off the hook for final exams.

Students walked into dark classes when they arrived on campus around 7 a.m. on final exam day.

The Maryland State Department of Education has approved 21 out of 22 teacher and principal evaluation plans that are required to take effect for the 2013-14 school year.

The department announced the approvals Thursday, almost a week after seven school systems whose original plans were rejected had to turn in revisions or face defaulting to the state’s own teacher evaluation model.

Bill Gates is a central figure in the modern school reform movement, thanks to his willingness to spend billions of his own dollars for projects he likes. He, for example, spent $2 billion in an effort to break up large high schools and create a network of small schools, but he abandoned that when he decided it hadn't worked. He and his foundation injected hundreds of millions of dollars into experiments to develop controversial teacher assessment systems, is pushing a project to videotape every teacher in the country to help them see how they do their job, spent at least $150 million to help the Common Core State Standards initiative, provided $100 million to build a controversial student database, and, well you get the idea. His money has deeply affected the course of school reform.

1) Frilly socks -- Kingsholm Primary School in Gloucester, England, banned them after a child with a very long frill apparently tripped and fell, according to the Independent.

2) Triangle-shaped flapjacks -- Castle View School in Essex, England, banned flapjacks in triangle shapes after one was thrown and hit a student in the eye, according to the Independent.

It could be harder for parents to transfer their children to high schools outside of their assigned boundaries under a policy change proposed by the Montgomery County Board of Education.

The rules currently allow students who transferred to a middle school outside of their assigned boundaries to move on automatically to the feeder high school where they’ve transferred.

My mother, Rebecca Worthen Chandler, was named Teacher of the Year at a charter school in North Carolina where she teaches English, bringing an unexpectedly buoyant end to what has been one of the toughest years of her 36-year career.

Washington Teachers Union President Nathan Saunders will face challenger Elizabeth Davis in a runoff election for his seat, union officials said.

Saunders and Davis were among four candidates in the first round of voting, which ended last week. Saunders got 45 percent of the votes, and Davis got 41 percent.

Consider this: On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test that is commonly referred to as "the nation's report card," Massachusetts students performed so well that the state ranked No. 1 in the nation.

Public education has been rocked over the past two decades by the choice and accountability movements, both launched by reformers in an effort to "fix" failing schools. Why haven't they worked as well as promised? This post examines this question. It is written by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and the author of Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools. He tweets @Edu_Historian.

Loudoun County Schools Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III has announced that he plans to retire next year, ending his more than two-decade tenure at the helm of a district that has grown nearly fivefold and risen to national prominence under his leadership.

Arne Duncan woke at 5:30 a.m. in his Arlington County home, was driven to the airport and folded his 6-foot-5 frame into an aisle seat in coach. The education secretary buckled his seat belt and tilted his head back for a short flight to Atlanta, another stop in his uphill effort to sell the Obama administration’s next big idea: pre-kindergarten for every 4-year-old in the country.