Education News from Washington Post

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.

When Andrianna Ayiotis begins classes as a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Southern California next fall, the Fairfax County schools student won’t yet have her driver’s license.

A junior at George C. Marshall High School, she was one of only 40 students accepted into a program offered at USC for mature and academically advanced rising seniors who are ready to start college early. In addition, the majority of her tuition will be covered through scholarships and grants.

Every year commencement speakers drone on and on, usually boring the daylights out of their audience. As the 2013 commencement season gets underway, here are some of the funnier addresses that have withstood the test of time.

My colleague Ezra Klein, the founder of the Wonkbook blog, just wrote a post about the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of the tea party. It carried this headline: "The IRS was wrong to target the tea party. They should've gone after all 501(c)4s."

For an initiative billed as being publicly driven, the Common Core States Initiative has benefited enormously from the generosity of the private philanthropy of Bill and Melinda Gates. How much? About $150 million worth.

You may not know what a DBQ is. For most of my life, neither did I. But in the high schools of this region and the rest of the country it has become an important and in some ways fearsome term.

It haunts the dreams of 400,000 teenagers who will take the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. history Wednesday. It is part of a massive reform of the AP exam system that controls the schedules of most of the nation’s high schools every May.

Thousands of breast cancer survivors and their supporters gathered Saturday on the Mall for the annual Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure, but attendance at the charity’s signature fundraising event was down for a second consecutive year.

Here is a list of commencement speakers at selected colleges and universities in the District, Maryland and Virginia.

The District college/university date speaker American May 11 Anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer Catholic May 18 Poet and critic Dana Gioia Gallaudet May 17 Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood George Washington May 19 Actress/activist Kerry Washington Georgetown May 18 Lisa J. Shannon, founder of Run for Congo Women Howard May 11 Former president Bill Clinton Trinity Washington May 18 Community health leader Maria Gomez University of the District of Columbia May 11 UDC Interim President James E. Lyons Maryland Bowie State May 17 First lady Michelle Obama Johns Hopkins May 23 Neurosurgeon Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa St. John’s May 12 James Schamus, chief executive of Focus Features St. Mary’s May 11 Gov. Martin O’Malley U.S. Naval Academy May 24 President Obama University of Maryland at College Park May 19 Retired baseball star Cal Ripken Jr. University of Maryland Baltimore County May 23 Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor Virginia George Mason May 18 U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner Marymount May 19 NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd Mary Washington May 11 Walgreens executive Steve Pemberton University of Virginia May 19 Former U.S. senator James Webb Virginia Tech May 17 Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger Washington and Lee May 22 Religion professor Harlan R. Beckley William and Mary May 12 FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III Read full article >>    

After years of pay freezes and unpaid furloughs, physical education teacher Steven Lightman received a roughly $8,000 annual salary bump this school year.

But it wasn’t because Lightman’s school system decided to give the veteran teacher a raise. He made it happen himself by switching Washington area school districts.

The following 90-second video was secretly recorded by a student at Duncanville High School in Texas as another student, Jeff Bliss, told off his world history teacher about the way she was teaching after she had kicked him out of the class.

A discussion on school reform in New York took a surprising turn this week when Paul Vallas, a pioneer of the current era of school reform, said, "We're losing the communications game because we don't have a good message to communicate."

It just so happens that in the same week that a co-author of a Heritage Foundation immigration study resigned for suggesting that Hispanics have lower IQs than whites, the Pew Research Hispanic Center released a new analysis showing that Hispanic high school graduates have passed whites in the rate of college enrollment.

Montgomery County officials have reached an out-of-court settlement with six former employees at Kemp Mill Elementary School who accused their one-time principal of misconduct and retaliation.

The settlement, which came just days before a trial was scheduled to begin Monday, puts an end to a civil lawsuit that, according to court documents, included allegations that the principal escorted unruly children into a closet-size room to calm them down and subjected staff members to unwanted touching, verbal abuse and harassment.

For a group of D.C. high school students, baseball player Jackie Robinson had been a distant historical figure they knew little about.

But as they left a screening Friday of “42,” the new film about Robinson and his sometimes painful path to integrating baseball, they were inspired by lessons that apply to their lives today.

A federal judge had several sharp and skeptical questions Friday for D.C. education activists who have sued to halt the planned closure of 15 city schools.

Opponents argue that the closures would disproportionately affect poor and minority children and therefore violate a number of civil rights laws. In a packed U.S. District courtroom Friday, they pleaded for a preliminary injunction to block the closures, citing “irreparable harm” to children if the plan put forth by Chancellor Kaya Henderson is allowed to move forward.

Hundreds of Quince Orchard High School students who took the Advanced Placement psychology exam Monday may have their tests ruled invalid after a student recorded a cellphone video at the testing center and posted it on Twitter.