Education News from Washington Post

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.

Teachers in Albany, New York, are rallying today against what the organizers call "the madness" of corporate-influenced school reform that is based on high-stakes standardized tests and that many say has demonized teachers. It is the latest in a series of rallies and protests of one kind or another in a growing backlash nationwide against education and student/educator evaluation based on on how well students do on standardized tests.

Penn State head football coach Bill O’Brien gave the ultimate pre-game pep talk to students graduating from Walt Whitman High School on Friday.

O’Brien, related to one of the graduates, was the keynote speaker at the ceremony held at DAR Constitution Hall in the District.

Students taking Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests are likely to see lower scores than last year, thanks to the introduction of harder English and Science standards, state education officials reported Friday.

A vice chairwoman of Howard University’s board of trustees recently told the board that the historically black school in Northwest Washington “is in genuine trouble” because of fiscal and management problems, according to a report published Friday.

It’s official: Mayor Vincent C. Gray on Friday transmitted legislation to the D.C. Council that would give Chancellor Kaya Henderson the authority to approve new charter schools.

Gray (D) announced his intention to seek chartering authority for Henderson during his weekly radio address Sunday, and the bill has been under legal review since.

A contentious, year-long review of the Fairfax County school system’s discipline process came to an end Friday with board members voting to soften punishments for possessing marijuana and new policies regarding parental notification.

Some students at Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County will be retaking a portion of their AP Spanish exams after learning that a section of the exams has been invalidated.

There was a technical glitch in administering the free-response portion of the exam. As a result, some students may have received more than the allotted testing time for that section of the exam, according to a letter students received from Educational Testing Services, which administers the test on behalf of the College Board.

Virginia lawmakers approved school reforms earlier this year that included a new A-F system of grading individual schools. Gov. Bob McDonnell championed the change, saying it was an easy way for parents to understand how well their children's schools were actually doing. Critics think otherwise.

A recent post by Joanne Yatvin argued against ability groupings of students, saying:

Teaching to the presumed level of a whole class never works as well as hoped because students still have significant differences in work habits, paces of learning, and outside of school experiences. But there is another, more serious problem: the effects on students in the low level classes. Those kids know who they are, why they are there, and resent it. Other kids know, too. In the end, low-level classes can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: "Everybody thinks I'm dumb. I'll show them just how dumb I can be!"

District officials are anticipating a school bus driver sickout Friday and Monday and are warning employees that they can be fired for participating.

More than 1,500 bus drivers and attendants transport thousands of D.C. students with disabilities to and from school each day.

Prince George’s and six other counties in Maryland have been unable to agree with the state department of education on the best way to use student test scores to measure teacher performance in time to meet Friday’s deadline for submitting revised evaluation plans.

President Obama visited Mooresville Middle School in North Carolina on Thursday to promote a new five-year initiative aimed at ensuring that 99 percent of public schools in the country have access to the Internet. Here is a White House transcript of his appearance:

A coalition of education organizations and unions that support the Common Core State Standards issued an open letter on Thursday backing a moratorium of at least one year on the high stakes associated with new standardized tests being given to students that are aligned with the Core.

Republicans in Congress have rolled out legislation that would sharply limit the power of the executive branch and shrink the role of the federal government in public education in a rebuke to the Obama administration’s influence over education from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The Senate deadlocked Thursday over federal student loan interest rates, with no consensus in sight on how to prevent rates on certain loans from doubling for about 7 million borrowers on July 1.

Amid a swirl of competing proposals from lawmakers and the White House, preliminary votes showed that no Senate bills have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster in the Democratic-led chamber.

Many of the Prince George’s County community leaders and elected officials who attended a listening session Wednesday to offer their opinion on what characteristics the new schools chief should have said they are tired of the rapid turnover at the helm of the public school system.

A new analysis says that America's high school graduation rate hit nearly 75 percent in 2010 — the latest year for which data are available — the highest point since 1973. Furthermore, the increase since 2000 has been largely fueled by improvements in the graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics.

In the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up category: A Louisiana state senator defended the Louisiana Science Education Act — a 2008 law that allows creationism to be taught in public school science classrooms through materials that ostensibly "critique" evolution — by invoking a witch doctor that he visited and found helpful. (See video below)

Fairfax County has knocked Montgomery County from the top spot on a list analyzing graduation rates for the country’s 50 largest school districts.

Graduation rates in Montgomery slipped more than 3 percentage points, to 84 percent from the previous year for the Class of 2010, according to a report from Education Week released Thursday.