Education News

A 2001 California law has spurred some school systems to pick board members by subdistricts to increase diversity.

Every Monday morning, we publish a New York Times photo without a caption, headline or other information about its origins. Join the conversation by posting about what you see and why in our comments section.

What sacrifices does your dream job require before you land it?

Who were the big winners at Sunday night’s Academy Awards?

Can you calculate the approximate volume of the meteor that landed in Russia on Feb. 15, 2013?

See what you know about the news of the day.

Fill in the blanks in the first nine paragraphs of the article “A Soft-Spoken Snowboarder Blazes Icy Trails” by Max Klinger.

Hundreds of new universities have opened in Japan, despite the country’s declining youth population.

This word has appeared in 493 New York Times articles in the past year.

In the Washington region, hub of the federal government, the upcoming automatic spending cuts the Obama administration detailed Sunday would strike a tough blow, with nearly 150,000 civilian Defense Department employees facing furloughs and an estimated average loss of $7,500 in pay.

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For Jacqueline Simms, teaching is like being on stage, mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting. But for Simms it extends beyond the classroom — even beyond the school day.

At Anne Beers Elementary School in Southeast Washington, she helped develop a student behavioral program, establish a mentoring program with a local law firm and set up a Saturday school program with volunteers.

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When Capitol Hill mom E.V. Downey went into business as an education consultant, she thought she’d cater to parents angling for advice on admission to private schools.

Instead, almost all of her clients are clamoring for help getting their children into a good D.C. public school.

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February is the month of the Grammy Awards for music and the Academy Awards for movies and, now, the Bunkum Awards.

Presented by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the awards are given for what the presenters say is bad educational research. How bad? Given that a great deal of educational research is bad, the winners have to shock the sensibilities of the awarders.

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Every day it seems there is an announcement about another school offering another MOOC, those Massive Open Online Courses that some think will revolutionize higher education. Here educator Larry Cuban explains why people misunderstand the potential of MOOCS. Cuban was superintendent of Arlington Public Schools for seven years and a former high school social studies teacher for 14 years. He is professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 20 years. This was first published on his blog about school reform and classroom practice.

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Many critics of modern school reform say that while reform efforts are intended to close achievement gaps and provide equitable educational experiences for all students, they are having the opposite effect. Here's that argument by Paul Thomas, an associate professor of education at Furman University in South Carolina. This appeared on his blog, the becoming radical.

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Though weapons are banned from most public universities, pro-gun forces have made gains on the issue in a handful of states, most recently Colorado.

To simplify an ever-growing list of school rankings, Virginia lawmakers have approved a new way to rate the state’s schools, and it’s borrowed straight from teachers’ grade books: A to F letter grades.

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