Education News from Washington Post

Three weeks after a 10-year-old Alexandria boy was arrested for showing a toy gun to another student on a school bus, prosecutors dropped charges against the child Tuesday, and his record was scrubbed clean.

The famed SAT college admissions exam will undergo a thorough redesign by the College Board, which is calling it an "ambitious effort" to "better meet" the needs of students and schools.

The SAT, first given in 1926, was revamped less than a decade ago when a written essay was added and some of the question formats were changed. Last year, for the first time, it lost its designation as the most popular college admissions exam to the ACT, by a margin of a few thousand students.

The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit university in the United States and the school with that great "I Am a Phoenix" advertising campaign, is expecting to be put on probation by its accrediting agency.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) has made a national name for himself in education reform over the past several years. He pushes states to adopt the corporate-based reforms he implemented in the Sunshine State -- including standardized test-based accountability, vouchers and online charter schools -- without mentioning that the accountability system he pioneered is in shambles. Recently a nonprofit group released thousands of e-mails showing how his Foundation for Excellence in Education has been working with public officials in states to write education laws that could benefit some of its corporate funders.

Education historian Diane Ravitch, the leading voice in the movement opposing corporate-based school reform, has for several years said she has no definitive opinion on the Common Core State Standards. Now she has come out against them, in this post, which appeared today on her blog.

The Montgomery County Board of Education approved a budget Monday night that would fund $18.6 million in employee raises, setting up a possible fight with the County Council over education spending.

Superintendent Joshua P. Starr’s amended budget request, released last week, set aside $12.4 million for employee raises, but he increased that number by more than $6.1 million ahead of Monday’s budget approval.

Nearly all of the states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and math and are in the process of getting ready to implement them by 2014. In a number of states, however, the standards are meeting with growing resistance for reasons including questions about who was behind the initiative and whether they are better than previous standards. Alabama, for example recently said it was pulling out of the two consortia that are working on creating standardized tests aligned with the standards. In this and the next two blog posts, we explore some of the issues surrounding the standards. (And you can see more here and here and here and here.)

Alas, I busted my deadline. As I write this, my assignment was due 13 hours ago.

In this case, I was not late in filing a story for The Washington Post. Rather, I failed the other day to complete by 11:59 p.m. a weekly quiz for an online course I am taking called “The Modern World: Global History since 1760.”

CHARLOTTESVILLE — Philip Zelikow packs a lot into his modern world history course, roaming in a given week from the Napoleonic wars to Latin American revolutions to India circa 1800. But the professor sets a casual tone as he teaches dozens of undergraduates at the University of Virginia and tens of thousands of others worldwide through a lecture series delivered entirely online.

All public schools in Prince George’s County are scheduled to participate in a system-wide lockdown drill on Tuesday.

The drill, which will begin at 10 a.m. and last for about 20 minutes, will test the school system’s procedures for protecting students and staff in the event of an emergency, school officials said.

In state after state, critics of education reform try to get data from state education departments to see for themselves how well things are really going and they get stonewalled. Here's the story of one such data-retrieving effort, by Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He writes the Sociological Eye on Education blog — where this first appeared — for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.

In the Washington region, hub of the federal government, the upcoming automatic spending cuts the Obama administration detailed Sunday would strike a tough blow, with nearly 150,000 civilian Defense Department employees facing furloughs and an estimated average loss of $7,500 in pay.

For Jacqueline Simms, teaching is like being on stage, mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting. But for Simms it extends beyond the classroom — even beyond the school day.

At Anne Beers Elementary School in Southeast Washington, she helped develop a student behavioral program, establish a mentoring program with a local law firm and set up a Saturday school program with volunteers.

When Capitol Hill mom E.V. Downey went into business as an education consultant, she thought she’d cater to parents angling for advice on admission to private schools.

Instead, almost all of her clients are clamoring for help getting their children into a good D.C. public school.

February is the month of the Grammy Awards for music and the Academy Awards for movies and, now, the Bunkum Awards.

Presented by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the awards are given for what the presenters say is bad educational research. How bad? Given that a great deal of educational research is bad, the winners have to shock the sensibilities of the awarders.

Every day it seems there is an announcement about another school offering another MOOC, those Massive Open Online Courses that some think will revolutionize higher education. Here educator Larry Cuban explains why people misunderstand the potential of MOOCS. Cuban was superintendent of Arlington Public Schools for seven years and a former high school social studies teacher for 14 years. He is professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 20 years. This was first published on his blog about school reform and classroom practice.

Many critics of modern school reform say that while reform efforts are intended to close achievement gaps and provide equitable educational experiences for all students, they are having the opposite effect. Here's that argument by Paul Thomas, an associate professor of education at Furman University in South Carolina. This appeared on his blog, the becoming radical.

To simplify an ever-growing list of school rankings, Virginia lawmakers have approved a new way to rate the state’s schools, and it’s borrowed straight from teachers’ grade books: A to F letter grades.

Are we headed to a "back to basics" movement?

A bill actually called "Back to Basics" in the North Carolina House of Representatives would make cursive writing part of the curriculum for elementary school students who are, instead, expert at texting and tweeting and doing everything else on a screen, the Charlotte Observer reported.

A coalition of more than 130 Massachusetts professors and researchers from some 20 schools — including Harvard, Tufts, Boston and Brandeis universities — signed a new public statement that urges officials to stop overusing high-stakes standardized tests to assess students, teachers and schools.