Education News from Washington Post

Mayor Vincent C. Gray is set to introduce legislation that would give the D.C. schools chancellor authority to approve new charter schools, a measure meant to improve academic options in long-struggling neighborhoods.

High school graduation season gets underway next week in Loudoun County. Graduation speakers this year include authors, business executives, favorite long-time teachers, a military hero, and one aspiring comedian.

It is often argued that the low education achievement levels of African-Americans and Hispanics are caused by poverty. Looking at this premise is writer and researcher Michael Holzman, a consultant to the Schott Foundation for Public Education and the author most recently of "The Black Poverty Cycle and How to End It."

Fairfax County schools superintendent Jack D. Dale will not return to work before his official retirement on June 30 as he continues to recover from emergency cardiovascular surgery, according to a letter he wrote to schools employees.

Just $10 — about the cost of a couple of large lattes — could provide a Montgomery County schools student with a free backpack full of school supplies in August.

The school system recently launched its “MCPS: Give Backpacks” drive in preparation for the next school year and has set an ambitious goal, aiming to collect enough donations to supply 50,000 students with backpacks.

A community activist group that opposed Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III’s plan to restructure the public school system collected about 4,500 signatures, falling short in its attempt to block a new law that gives Baker new powers over the schools from going into effect on Saturday.

It's always useful to know where people are coming from, so we can thank former Florida governor Jeb Bush for making it so easy to understand where he stands on public education. He has nothing but disdain for it.

The following letter from Sandy Hayes, president of the National Council of Teachers of English to organization members, supports a moratorium on the high-stakes consequences of standardized tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten made the call for a moratorium in April because teachers haven't had enough time to properly absorb and create curriculum around the standards. A number of organizations and education activists from different sides of the education debate have supported the call, though Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change, a group of former and current state education superintendents, opposed it. Hayes also details five ways to help improve literacy that would be better investments than more high-stakes tests.

A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school, according to his family and a lawyer.

University of Virginia astronomer John Hawley, and Steven Balbus, a former U-Va. colleague who is now at the University of Oxford, are co-winners of the Shaw Prize, which is commonly known as the "Nobels of the East."

When Joseph Urgo became president of St. Mary’s College of Maryland three years ago, trustees considered him a devoted scholar who could steer the small, public honors college toward greater financial stability.

The Gray administration is seeking to establish a unified enrollment lottery for the city’s traditional and charter schools in time to determine admissions for the 2014-15 school year, officials said Thursday.

Tea party groups over the past few weeks have suddenly and successfully pressured Republican governors to reassess their support for a rare bipartisan initiative backed by President Obama to overhaul the nation’s public schools.

More than 300 national business leaders signed an open letter in support of greater federal investment in preschool that was sent to Congress and the White House this week and presented Thursday to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Fourteen Fairfax County schools students received National Merit scholarships financed by colleges and universities around the country.

Of the 14 awardees, seven are students from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the elite magnet program for Northern Virginia.

D.C. Public Schools officials said this week that 16 schools will open this fall with new principals, roughly matching last year’s leadership turnover.

Officials would not discuss reasons for individual principals’ departures, saying only that some are resigning or retiring, and others have received letters of “non-appointment” — another way of saying they’ve been fired.

Bobbi Snow is the co-founder of The Community Public Charter School, an arts-infused, literacy-focused school for non-traditional learners in Charlottesville, Va., open to all Albemarle County middle school students. Snow wrote the following piece while recently proctoring Virginia's high-stakes Standards of Learning exams, which students took over a period of three weeks. The tests about which she writes were math and science, each with 60 questions. At Snow's school the tests are untimed. Students, who get lots of snacks to fortify them, take the exams in small groups, though Snow wrote in an email, "they still get so disregulated."

Parents in Montgomery County aren’t the only ones struggling to understand the new standards-based report cards that replace traditional A, B, C, D letter grades with different codes.

At least one parent in Fairfax County said recent changes to progress reports in her child’s school system has left her confused too.

Most young scientists get their first research experience by working on someone else’s project. But at Loudoun County’s Academy of Science, budding scientists pursue their own.

More than 100 of their research debuts were on display in the Dominion High School library Wednesday, covering a range of scientific inquiry into such topics as containing invasive species and curing cancer.

There's some deep irony in this:

In 2002, Arne Duncan, then the head of the Chicago public schools system, announced that he was closing three elementary schools because they had been failing students for years. It was the start of a strategy of closing down schools that were academically failing or under-enrolled and reopening them as a new school.