Education News

Can you calculate how long it would take a spacecraft to reach one of the Earth-like planets that are 1,200 light-years away?    

Candidates taking the gaokao, the famously stressful national exam that determines university admission, declined slightly for the fifth straight year.    

The National Security Agency is the super-secret organization that has been in the news because of disclosures that it has, for years, been conducting U.S. surveillance programs. But in at least one area, the NSA hasn't tried to be so secret: schools.

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See what you know about the news of the day.    

This word has appeared in 178 New York Times articles in the past year.    

Placing students in clusters according to ability, a tactic once rejected over concerns that it fostered inequality, has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country.    

Flora M. Singer was never shy about sharing her experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

She recounted the adversity she lived through in tales she told in her memoir, through her work as a volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and as a teacher in Montgomery County.

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As Joshua P. Starr enters his third year as superintendent of Montgomery County’s schools, he’ll have Andrew Zuckerman as his new chief of staff to help lead the system.

Zuckerman, 36, is scheduled to start working in Montgomery on June 17 after spending five years as an administrator in Prince George’s County, most recently working as an associate superintendent overseeing 88 schools with 46,000 students. With 14 years experience in education, Zuckerman has also worked in charter and traditional schools in Washington, Brooklyn and New Haven, Conn. Zuckerman lives in the District and has two daughters who are not yet school age.

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I am afraid the White House is pushing high speed Internet to make testing platforms easier.

— Wilhelm II (@knightofgood) June 9, 2013

For those who missed it last week, President Obama announced a new initiative to bring broadband and wireless Internet access to nearly all of the nation's public schools and libraries within five years. Click here to read the full text of the speech Obama gave at a West Virginia middle school explaining the new EdConnect program, assuming it can be funded as he proposes.

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At least 1,000 students in schools in the Netherlands will get iPads, in a teaching model developed by a foundation called O4NT.    

The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics, now 80 years old, has been helping the persecuted since the rise of the Nazis before World War II.    

Privacy concerns are growing among parents, educators and some state officials about a Gates Foundation-funded project that is storing an unprecedented amount of personal information about millions of students in a $100 million database that cannot guarantee complete security.

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An indoor cycling gym, Cyc, is the first brand to target college students specifically.    

The latest fashions in the American education system are, as usual, inspiring raucous debate. I try to take sides in these arguments. Isn’t it my job to explain who’s right? But I wonder.

There is much chatter, for instance, over education historian Diane Ravitch’s fiery assault on Ben Austin, founder of the Parent Revolution organization. The California “parent trigger law” Austin sponsored just cost a Los Angeles principal her job. Fifty-three percent of parents at the Weigand Avenue Elementary School in the city’s Watts neighborhood signed a petition to fire Irma Cobian after three years of low scores. The school board obeyed the law and let Cobian go.

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A Howard University trustee acknowledged Saturday that she had written a letter asserting that the school “is in genuine trouble” for various fiscal and management reasons, but she declined to elaborate.

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In a toy industry increasingly turning to high-tech gadgetry and movie tie-ins, the Melissa & Doug company has thrived by sticking to the basics.    

Agreement on how American schoolchildren should read and write is much easier to arrive at than agreement on what they should read and write.    

Are new standards really leveling the playing field? Or is the game prearranged so that many, if not most, of the players will fail?    

Readers react to a proposal for a longer school year and day.    

On the heels of a "doomsday" school budget for 2013-14 that has no funding for things as basic as paper and new books, the Philadelphia school system is now laying off 3,783 employees, including 676 teachers and 283 counselors, effective July 1.

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