Education News

Sometimes less is more, so along with our page of Women’s History resources, we offer this simple idea, which you can do in as little as one class period.

Two rival college admissions tests have almost evenly split the national market. In the fall, my colleague Valerie Strauss of The Answer Sheet reported that the ACT had nosed past the long-dominant SAT for the first time in the number of test-takers.

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Teach For America is one of the most controversial school reform organizations operating today. TFA recruits new college graduates, gives them five weeks of summer training and then places them in some of America's neediest classrooms, presuming that just a little over a month of training is sufficient to do the job. Critics point out that high-needs students, who are the ones who get TFA teachers, are the children who most need veteran teachers. In fact, some veterans are now losing their jobs to TFA corps members, because TFAers are less expensive to hire, and some school teaching communities are becoming less cohesive because TFA members promise only to stay for two years and leave teaching at a greater rate than traditionally trained teachers.

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See one Language Arts teacher’s use of “Avalanche” to help his students think about the future of storytelling, why it matters and how they can use the techniques to tell their own stories. And if you’ve used “Avalanche,” let us know.

This week’s Poetry Pairing matches “For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers,” a poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts, with “Their Trip to Bountiful” by Anne Raver.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is probably mighty sorry he linked pink slips being given to some teachers to the sequester, not just because that connection is tenuous at best but because he got called out for it.

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What are the qualities that make a video go viral?

A massive influx of outside cash has turned a local campaign into a national showdown between the teachers' union and deep-pocketed education activists.

Now that President Obama has proposed a new initiative to broaden preschool programs, the debate about the value of early childhood education has gotten a lot louder. To help sort out what is true and what isn't, W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, has just released a report that details what the best research says about early education -- and what it doesn't.

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Sush Krishnamoorthy, a student in New Delhi who is applying to universities in the United States, learned about more than genetics during a candidate weekend at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi.

What is Code.org? What message does Code.org want to communicate with its new video?

Can you identify the punctuation marks that set off some words in the sentence from the article?

What's worth learning? Veteran educator Marion Brady tries to answer the question below. Brady was a classroom teacher for years, has written history and world culture textbooks (Prentice-Hall), professional books, numerous nationally distributed columns (many are available here), and courses of study. His 2011 book "What's Worth Learning" asks and answer this question: What knowledge is absolutely essential for every learner? His course of study for secondary-level students, called Connections: Investigating Reality, is free for downloading here. Brady's website is www.marionbrady.com.

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