Education News from Washington Post

Teachers are expected to do a lot of things in the classroom -- but what about outside? Here's a look at that issue, by Angie Miller, the 2011 New HampshireTeacher of the Year and a TED2012 speaker. She teaches middle school and is a freelance write.

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) can't say he wasn't warned.

Last summer Helen Dragas, the rector of the University of Virginia's governing Board of Visitors, sparked an 18-day leadership crisis at the elite school when she pushed out the popular U-Va. president, Teresa Sullivan, and then was forced to reinstate her after a campus rebellion. Why did she do it? She still hasn't really explained though there was some suggestion that Sullivan not the transformative leader that Dragas, who runs a real estate concern, wanted.

Voters keep sending signals that they have very mixed feelings about corporate-based school reform. The latest signs come from Los Angeles, where Tuesday's races for three Board of Education seats resulted in one defeat, one win, and one runoff for supporters of school reform.

On Thursday, the Philadelphia school district's governing board, the School Reform Commission, will be voting on the most massive one-time downsizing of the system ever proposed. The district's recently revised plan, which has encountered widespread community and teacher opposition, calls for closing 29 out of 239 district schools next fall -- a step down from the original proposal to shutter 37 schools. The system is grappling with a budget gap of $1.1 billion over five years and has seen enrollment decline as more than 80 charter schools have been created since the late 1990s.

A lot of people believe that the "learning pyramid" that lists learning scenarios and average student retention rates is reliable. Here's cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham to explain why it isn't. Willingham is professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of "Why Don't Students Like School?" His newly published 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.

The school superintendent in Durham, a chief of schools in Chicago and the interim superintendent in Prince George’s County have been selected as finalists in the competition to lead the Washington region’s third-largest school system, Prince George’s County school officials said Tuesday night.

Nine aspiring charter school operators have submitted applications to open in the District as early as fall 2014, according to proposals posted on the Web site of the D.C. Public Charter School Board.

University of Virginia Board of Visitors Rector Helen E. Dragas responded Tuesday to faculty leaders who questioned her motives and processes in setting goals for the president. Dragas wrote in a letter to the U-Va. Faculty Senate Executive Committee that presidential goals are a “confidential personnel matter,” so she is limited in what she can share.

It’s common knowledge that the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia are both prestigious institutions. It’s also a given that the Charlottesville school is a bit higher than its College Park counterpart in the pecking order of state flagship universities.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan appeared at a Washington Post-sponsored conference on families today, and he sounded (mostly) highly reasonable:

Early childhood education is the absolute "best long-term investment" that the country can make for kids, families and the economy, he said. (Not, apparently, the billions of dollars he spent in the first term of the Obama administration pushing states to enact school reforms that linked standardized test scores to the evaluation of teachers and made these tests more high stakes than ever).

Most teachers would tell a panicked student simply to calm down, but that’s not what teacher Glenn Whitman did when a junior came to him in knots about a major oral history project. “Maddy,” he said, “I care about your amygdala.”

Head Start, the most important education program for 3- and 4-year-olds in the country, is in the news again, not only because there are concerns about how many children will be negatively impacted as a result of federal budget cuts in the sequestration process but also because of the U.S. Education Department's new emphasis on early childhood education. There's a lot of misinformation out there about the impact of Head Start on young children. (If you were watching "Morning Joe" today on MSNBC, you heard commentator Joe Klein incorrectly say that Head Start doesn't work at all.) So here's a piece on the real impact of Head Start, by an early childhood expert, W. Steven Barnett, who is director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

Thomas Bishop, the embattled transportation director of the Prince George’s County school system, has resigned, according to school officials.

Interim School Superintendent Alvin Crawley confirmed Bishop quit last week.

The Window Rock School District, in the heart of the Navajo nation in Arizona, is proposing the unthinkable: closing three of its seven schools as a result of the federal sequester.

The schools are among 1,600 public schools on military bases and Native American reservations that are feeling the impact of federal cuts now, months before the rest of the country’s classrooms see the effect of reduced dollars from Washington.

Here is an original look at the modern school reform movement. It was written by Natalie Hopkinson is a Washington-based writer, and author of "Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City". This appeared on The Root D.C., where she is a contributing editor. She can be reached at NHopkinson@hotmail.com.

I wrote an article for Saturday’s paper about the working relationship between University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan and Board of Visitors Rector Helen Dragas, which several sources say has been growing increasingly tense. In early February, Sullivan sent an email to the entire governing board raising “strong objections” to a list of 65 goals that Dragas sent her for the remainder of the school year.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — The small Baptist college that television preacher Jerry Falwell founded here in 1971 has capitalized on the online education boom to become an evangelical mega-university with global reach.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan offered a mea culpa of sorts Monday, saying that he misspoke on national television last week when he said that teachers were already losing jobs as a result of the budget sequester.

A 7-year-old Anne Arundel County boy was suspended for two days for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “Bang, bang”— an offense the school described as a threat to other students, according to his family.

Here's a powerful piece about how an award-winning principal went from being a Common Core supporter to an opponent. This was written by Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is one of the co-authors of the principals' letter against evaluating teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by 1,535 New York principals.