Education News from Washington Post

D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray is proposing to spend $1.7 billion in coming years to renovate and rebuild dozens of schools, continuing a years-long effort to upgrade city education facilities.

Among the schools slated for modernization is Spingarn Senior High, one of the 13 schools that Chancellor Kaya Henderson plans to close this spring because of low enrollment.

A bill in the North Carolina Senate is highly revealing about how much concern its Republican sponsors really have for accountability in education.

Short answer: apparently none.

Longer answer: A bill titled "NC Public Charter School Board," introduced by two Republicans, calls for a new board to approve and oversee charters. The State Board of Education would no longer have the job of overseeing charter schools, and charter school applicants would no longer have to get permission to open from local school boards or local education agencies. They could go straight to the new board, whose members would be appointed by the governor.

Here's a video from a former Teach For America corps member named John Bilby, who taught in the South Bronx from 2009 to 2010 after going through TFA's five-week summer training and finding it totally inadequate to prepare him for what he faced.

Earlier this month I wrote a post about a lawsuit against the U.S. Education Department that charges the agency with promoting regulations that undercut student privacy and parental consent. The suit was filed some time ago by the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center over 2011 regulations involving the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, also known as FERPA, a law that is supposed to protect the privacy of student education records at all schools that receive federal education funds.

What do parents really want when it comes to school reform? Gregory Michie, a public school teacher in Chicago and senior research associate at the Center for Policy Studies and Social Justice at Concordia University Chicago, looks into the issue in Chicago, where tensions are high over the newly announced closing of 54 public schools. His latest book is "We Don't Need Another Hero: Struggle, Hope, and Possibilty in the Age of High-Stakes Schooling."

How can teachers get students to want to learn? Here is an article about the issue, from veteran educator Larry Ferlazzo, adapted from his new book, Self-Driven Learning: Teaching Strategies For Student Motivation. Some of the ideas in this excerpt were contributed by his colleagues at Burbank High School. Ferlazzo teaches English and Social Studies at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He has written five books on education, writes a teacher advice blog for Education Week Teacher, and has his own popular resource-sharing blog.

Neighborhoods in Southeast Washington, on Capitol Hill and along the eastern border of Rock Creek Park are among those most in need of school renovations, according to a school facilities plan the Gray administration released Wednesday.

A bill meant to curb the District’s rampant truancy moved forward in the D.C. Council on Wednesday after its sponsor stripped out a controversial provision that would have mandated criminal prosecution of parents of chronically absent children.

Former U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was nearly killed more than two years when a gunman opened fire in a Tucson parking lot and who still has trouble speaking, will give the commencement address at Bard College in May along with her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly.

Something had to be done for the 16,000 kids in Camden's very low-achieving public schools, but there are big questions about whether the takeover by the state government of New Jersey will do much to help. After all, the state has in the past few decades taken over three other ailing public school districts, and there is limited progress to show for it.

My colleague Valerie Strauss published an essay a few weeks back by Matt Barnum suggesting that the Teach For America program had outlived its usefulness. Barnum, a former TFA teacher, said the organization had done good work in the past, but now stood in the way of creating a corps of good teachers who would stay longer than two years. Warren County (N.C.) school Superintendent Ray V. Spain sent me this response to Barnum, which I thought was interesting enough to post here. We haven’t discussed TFA in a while. Comments welcome.

Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D) told more than 16,000 people participating in a telephone town hall to discuss his schools takeover plan on Tuesday night that someone needs to be held accountable for the county’s struggling schools system and asked residents to “put me in the hot seat.”

If you are someone who has long struggled with math, read on to find out why that might be so. This was written by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, 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.

Here's how you know that Chicago authorities are expecting a rowdy turnout at a mass rally called for Wednesday afternoon to protest the announced closings of more than 50 schools this year: Security staff have already erected barricades around the Board of Education in downtown Chicago, and authorities sent a memo to school principals telling them to report on protesters and their actions.

CHARLOTTESVILLE — University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan and her staff have developed a four-year financial plan that would increase tuition and invest in faculty, technology and new programs as the public flagship confronts economic challenges and relies less on state funding.

So the Indiana Supreme Court has ruled that the state's school voucher program is constitutional. It isn't the first time a supreme court has made a questionable call but, apart from the legal argument, the decision doesn't mean that vouchers are a good educational or civic idea.

D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray and other city officials gathered Tuesday in Southeast Washington to break ground for Ballou Senior High School’s new facility, the latest D.C. public school to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Education reformers haven't been able to persuade everybody to their point of view, so increasingly, they use threats. Here's a piece about why that approach won't work. It was written by Eric Shieh is a founding teacher of the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, "A School for a Sustainable City," in New York City, where he teaches music and leads curriculum development. This appeared on The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.

It's the other March Madness: College acceptance season is underway, with schools now sending out e-mails and letters to students across the country about whether they have been admitted or rejected. A new study says that the madness may ease over the next decade as the number of high school graduates drops.

Maryland lawmakers introduced a bill Monday that would give Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III direct control over the county’s schools superintendent and operations. But the measure, a watered-down version of Baker’s plan to take over the struggling school system, proposes keeping its $1.7 billion budget in the hands of a retooled county Board of Education, effectively splitting power between Baker and the elected board.