Education News

Urban public schools should consider refashioning themselves as charters to recapture public confidence, Jack Schneider writes.

What is sequestration? What types of government programs would be affected by the automatic budget cuts?

Education historian Diane Ravitch, the leading voice in the movement opposing corporate-based school reform, has for several years said she has no definitive opinion on the Common Core State Standards. Now she has come out against them, in this post, which appeared today on her blog.

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The Montgomery County Board of Education approved a budget Monday night that would fund $18.6 million in employee raises, setting up a possible fight with the County Council over education spending.

Superintendent Joshua P. Starr’s amended budget request, released last week, set aside $12.4 million for employee raises, but he increased that number by more than $6.1 million ahead of Monday’s budget approval.

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Candice Childress, a high school senior in Las Vegas, has been named a National Merit Finalist and narrowed her college list.

Nearly all of the states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and math and are in the process of getting ready to implement them by 2014. In a number of states, however, the standards are meeting with growing resistance for reasons including questions about who was behind the initiative and whether they are better than previous standards. Alabama, for example recently said it was pulling out of the two consortia that are working on creating standardized tests aligned with the standards. In this and the next two blog posts, we explore some of the issues surrounding the standards. (And you can see more here and here and here and here.)

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Can you choose the best synonym for the word “soupçon” as it is used in the article?

See what you know about the news of the day.

This word has appeared in 8,430 New York Times articles in the past year.

Jacob J. Lew got $685,000 in severance pay when he left New York University, raising questions about why such a large bonus was given to an executive who left voluntarily.

Gov. Nathan Deal’s move to try to save the 138-school district, the state’s third largest, faces legal challenges.

Alas, I busted my deadline. As I write this, my assignment was due 13 hours ago.

In this case, I was not late in filing a story for The Washington Post. Rather, I failed the other day to complete by 11:59 p.m. a weekly quiz for an online course I am taking called “The Modern World: Global History since 1760.”

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CHARLOTTESVILLE — Philip Zelikow packs a lot into his modern world history course, roaming in a given week from the Napoleonic wars to Latin American revolutions to India circa 1800. But the professor sets a casual tone as he teaches dozens of undergraduates at the University of Virginia and tens of thousands of others worldwide through a lecture series delivered entirely online.

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All public schools in Prince George’s County are scheduled to participate in a system-wide lockdown drill on Tuesday.

The drill, which will begin at 10 a.m. and last for about 20 minutes, will test the school system’s procedures for protecting students and staff in the event of an emergency, school officials said.

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