Education News from Washington Post

Failure of the congressional supercommittee tasked with reducing the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion could lead to across-the-board budget cuts, which would have a serious impact on already-distressed public education funding.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected what could happen to public education if the trigger is pulled and across-the-board cuts kick in in January 2013. There are new reports that the supercommittee is getting ready to admit that its Republican and Democratic members couldn’t compromise after several months of negotiations — this after Congress itself couldn’t reach an agreement.

Fairfax schools officials on Monday released the results of their first-ever “trust and confidence” survey, inaugurating what is slated to become a yearly attempt to quantify the community’s perception of school leadership.

The survey comes after increasingly intense criticism that the superintendent and board disenfranchised parents and teachers by handling high-profile issues — such as discipline-policy reform and the closure of Clifton Elementary — without transparency or accountability.

Most people had heard of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno long before university trustees fired him this month amid a child-sex-abuse scandal involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. But not many had heard of the other university leaders whose names have made headlines: President Graham Spanier, Vice President Gary Schultz and Athletic Director Tim Curley.

Forget about athletics for a moment: Is Penn State the biggest collegiate scandal of our era?

It’s certainly the most publicized controversy on a major university campus since the 2006 Duke lacrosse case. But that narrative ultimately backfired on the accuser, and Duke didn’t lose its president.

I put the question to a group of college presidents Friday, asking them to recall a scandal as big as Penn State. They could name just one: the admissions favoritism scandal at the University of Illinois, which claimed the university’s president in 2009. But that story didn’t make the rounds like this one.

Maryland schools have been ranked first in the nation by Education Week for the past three years — in part because of the state’s strong education finance laws.

The 2002 Bridge to Excellence law called for an increase of more than $1 billion in state funding for education over several years, directing more money to areas with more poverty or greater needs. And the “maintenance of effort” law expects local governments to provide a steady amount of funding to public schools, in exchange for increasing state aid.

George W. Bush wanted to be known as “the education president,” and so did his father, George H.W. Bush. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, President Obama is heavily invested in reforming public education and other presidents were too.

So which U.S. president was “the best” for public education?

Stanford University had more students chosen as Rhodes Scholars for 2012 than any other American school as 32 winners across the United States were announced.

The winners were selected from 830 candidates and represent 18 schools. Stanford had five winners, and Brown, Harvard and Princeton universities each had four.

On Nov. 12, Metro columnist Robert McCartney wrote about the growing paperwork burden for public school teachers. McCartney pointed out that many spend several hours a week on data input and other tasks not directly related to planning lessons or grading homework and tests. His column drew an outpouring from readers, many of them teachers. Here is a sample from online public comments and e-mail sent to McCartney.

A conscientious couple wanted to send their child to the Arlington Traditional School, a public magnet famous for having everyone reading by the end of kindergarten. They took the standard tour but yearned for more. Could they sit quietly in one of the classes for an hour or so, they asked, to get a better sense of the place?

The Los Angeles Unified School District is refusing to give the Los Angeles Times the names of thousands of teachers and “value-added” scores that have been calculated from the test scores of their students, the newspaper reported.

The district, the second largest in the country, is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

A conscientious couple wanted to send their child to the Arlington Traditional School, a public magnet famous for having everyone reading by the end of kindergarten. They took the standard tour but yearned for more. Could they sit quietly in one of the classes for an hour or so, they asked, to get a better sense of the place?

Here is the letter that Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor sent out to alumni Friday about allegations that an assistant basketball coach had molested two former ball boys for years.

The assistant coach, Bernie Fine, has called the allegations “patently false” and vowed to “do everything in our power to find the truth,” the Associated Press reported.

Despite public ridicule — including a skewering on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — Congress has gone ahead and approved legislation that junks new standards the Obama administration was trying to set to make lunches healthier for public school children.

The move was part of a massive spending bill that dealt with a host of programs (for transportation, housing, commerce, science, etc.) but it was the assault on new meal standards for public schools that caught flak.

District officials, responding to parents’ complaints about the lack of education options in Ward 5, have proposed a plan to create three middle schools with different specialties in the Northeast community.

The scenario, which would affect about 3,000 elementary and middle school children, was presented to parents and neighborhood leaders Wednesday night. It involves the shuttering of three PS-8 “campuses” that have been unpopular with many parents since their creation in 2008 under then-Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.

Chancellor Kaya Henderson pushed back Friday at this week’s federal court ruling that the District has failed to identify and treat adequate numbers of young children with special needs, saying that the District received little credit for substantial progress.

She said that since the opening of the Early Stages diagnostic center in 2009, DCPS has dramatically increased the percentage of the pre-school age population identified as needing special education services from 2 percent to 7.4 percent. That places the District 15th among the states in meeting the “Child Find” requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

This post was written by three 1971 graduates of Poly Prep, a prestigious private school in Brooklyn. Bernard Bauer is a San Francisco-based psychologist. Harry Hellenbrand is the provost of California State University, Northridge. Kenneth Stern is an attorney, author and expert on antisemitism. The story they tell has special resonance today as Penn State grapples with a major sex abuse scandal, and other such cases at different schools are coming to light.

DCPS has released its Ward 5 plan. The main elements: conversion of an existing Education Campus or other available building into a stand-alone arts and world language middle school; a PS-8 school with an IB program, and a STEM middle school housed at McKinley SHS. It would require closing at least three existing ECs in the ward. More to come on this.

Richard Vedder, an Ohio University scholar, visited the Cato Institute today to pose this question: Are we getting all we can from higher education?

Vedder made waves last spring with a report that used government data to make a case that large public universities could be a lot more efficient. His target was the flagship University of Texas campus in Austin. He concluded, essentially, that if all the faculty at UT taught as many students as the most productive faculty, then UT tuition could be cut by half or, alternately, state subsidies could be slashed by 75 percent.

The D.C. region’s university presidents gathered this week in a downtown Washington suite. After they shut the door, George Mason’s Alan G. Merten said: Let’s talk about Penn State. ¶ Yes, his peers responded, diving into a discussion of how to prevent a similar institutional crisis on their own campuses. ¶ “It’s on everyone’s agenda,” Merten said afterward. “We are all asking, ‘What do we need to change?’ ” ¶ Penn State trustees fired President Graham B. Spanier and football coach Joe Paterno last week after former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was charged with sexually molesting several boys. Paterno and Spanier were criticized for what was seen as a tepid response to initial allegations of abuse. ¶ The charges raise questions about the culture of college athletics, but they prompt even more about how universities are run.