Education News from Washington Post

Superintendent Joshua P. Starr on Tuesday announced the first Montgomery County “Innovation Schools” to pilot an initiative for improving student achievement.

The following were designated as Innovation Schools:

A New York high school in Cooperstown -- home of the National Baseball Hall of Home -- is changing its sports nickname from the Redskins to the Hawkeyes. As a result, the Oneida Indian Nation is giving the school $10,000 to buy new jerseys.

Incumbent James Lander won the Democratic endorsement for the Arlington School Board in a very close primary campaign.

Lander beat out economist and children’s book author Barbara Kanninen, by 47 votes in a two-day caucus that ended Saturday.

The D.C. Council’s education committee stepped into a looming fight over school boundaries last week when it voted unanimously to ensure that parents get at least a year’s notice before boundary changes take effect.

Ordinarily, a professor would worry if only one out of every 10 students passed a class. But University of Virginia historian Philip Zelikow seems enormously pleased with such results from the course he just finished teaching on the history of the modern world.

(See Part 2 below)

The following fourth grade science quiz for a unit called "Dinosaurs: Genesis and the Gospel" has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet, and it turns out it is real.

Every year the Chronicle of Higher Education publishes the compensation of university presidents, and it just put out the list for four-year public colleges for the year. No. 1 on the list may surprise you.

Much of the national discussion about school reform revolves around recruiting and keeping top talent in the teaching field. Here's a post with a surprisingly different point of view. This was written by Esther Quintero, a research associate at the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute. It first appeared on the institute's blog.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland has only locked in about two-thirds of the students it needs for a full freshman class next school year, a shortfall that could cost the public liberal arts school $3.5 million in lost tuition.

The Montgomery County Council tentatively approved a $2.2 billion operating budget Monday for the public school system in fiscal 2014.

The budget includes $18.6 million in salary increases for employees starting in February 2014. The compensation boosts would include step increases for eligible employees and 2 percent increases for others.

Indiana, one of the most education reform-minded states in recent years, is postponing implementation of the Common Core initiative so that there can be more discussion on the quality and impact of the standards.

About 160 Prince George’s County residents have applied for appointment to four newly created positions on the Board of Education, county officials said Monday.

The positions are the result of a law that takes effect June 1, legislation that expands the nine-member elected board and gives County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D) the power to select the new schools chief.

Fairfax County schools superintendent Jack D. Dale was released on Sunday from Inova Fairfax Hospital after having emergency cardiovascular surgery last week.

School officials said Dale is not expected to resume his duties until the first week of June at the earliest after he suffered an aortic aneurysm at work.

A new United Nations report titled "Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security" says that at least 2 billion people on Earth eat insects and that they are a nutritious, environmentally sound way to feed people.

When people talk about 21st century skills, more often than not they are talking about things like creativity, the ability to work in a group and solve problems. But there's another skill that cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham writes about here that is just as important. Willingham is a professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of "Why Don't Students Like School?" His latest book is "When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education." This appeared on his Science and Education blog.

As he left the presidency of George Mason University last year, Alan G. Merten earned nearly $1.2 million in retirement benefits, making him one of the nation’s top-paid public university leaders, according to a new survey.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has a great program called Writers in Schools, a 24-year-old literary arts outreach effort that pairs nationally known authors with D.C. public schools. The foundation provides free books to students, works with educators to develop curriculum, and then sends in authors to talk with the students about their works. Following is a story I wrote for the print version of The Washington Post's Education Page that tells the story of what happened at a recent author visit that had never happened before in the history of the program.

Here is an original short story that author and screenwriter James Grady wrote for students at McKinley Technology High School in the District. During a visit to the school as part of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's Writers in Schools program, a student asked him to write a story about the kids in the book club there -- and he did. You can read a story about how this story came about in the post above.

I wrote a post the other day about Bill Gates' plan to videotape America's teachers as part of a teacher evaluation system, an enterprise that he said could cost up to $5 billion, but, he believes, is worth it. Here is veteran educator Anthony Cody to explain why it isn't.

The GED was designed to give high school dropouts a second chance at higher education and a good job. But every year, hundreds of thousands of teens take the test before their former classmates have graduated, prompting concerns that too many young people are pursuing a GED before they have exhausted their first chance at a more valuable diploma.