President Barack Obama visited an early education center in Decatur, Ga., Thursday to make his case for dramatically expanding pre-school access. After sharing a classroom with 16 young children -- one of whom asked, "Are you our teacher?" -- Obama elaborated on his State of the Union plan,...

Chicago School Drama? Two notable things happened in Chicago Public Schools land on Wednesday. First, 39 or 50 aldermen (code for city councilmen) signed a resolution that calls for a moratorium on charter schools next year. (Sort of similar, ish, to the closure and colocation moratorium several New...

President Barack Obama is traveling to Georgia today to press a plan he announced in his State of the Union address to dramatically expand preschool. The plan would include smaller class sizes, better-paid teachers, and exams for 4-year-olds.

While the White House is beginning to circulate details on...

Just one day after President Barack Obama unveiled hisbig promise to America's smallest children, both advocates and allies are raising major questions about its prognosis.

Obama proposed a major expansion of preschool for all children, but it's unclear if he can deliver on it -- especially in a...

School board races in Los Angeles are heating up -- and they're getting expensive.

The nation's second-largest school district is at the center of a broader battle over the future over education reform. Since 2010, Superintendent John Deasy has run the district, implementing policies consistent with the national...

During Tuesday night's State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed several major education initiatives, including a big push to expand pre-kindergarten and a potential revamp of the federal aid system for college students.

"Tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to...

President Barack Obama proposes a major initiative to expand preschool opportunities for 4-year-olds in Tuesday's State of the Union address.

The Huffington Post reported last month the White House was considering such a plan. A fact sheet circulated Tuesday by the White House as a supplement to the...

Netflix Reauthorizes No Child Left Behind? Or so quips this EdWeek headline. Real-life Congress hasn't yet reauthorized NCLB (since 2007!), but characters on the Netflix series "House of Cards" do. "[Writer Beau] Willimon noted on Twitter that he hinged the plot on education because it affects us all...

President Barack Obama made K-12 education a major component of his 2012 State of the Union Address -- so much so that the topic garnered the most traffic on sites like Twitter. But this year, education advocates are expecting something entirely different.

The White House mostly...

McDonnell Gets By With A Little Help From His Friend As Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) continued his push for education reforms in Virginia, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) stopped by for a little nudge in the right direction, reports the Associated Press. "Jindal was in Richmond for U.S....

NEW YORK -- At 4 p.m. Thursday, Claire Brown Goss, a pregnant working mother of two, learned that her town of Ashland, Mass., planned to shut down its schools on Friday in anticipation of this weekend's blizzard. Ten minutes later, she received a call from her babysitter who lives a...

Arne Takes The Stand As we reported yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan faced both praise and skepticism yesterday as he testified before a Senate oversight hearing on his No Child Left Behind waivers. In the spirit of non-jargony brevity, and because it's Friday, we give you...

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan faced an angsty Senate education committee Thursday as he was forced to defend his administration's workaround of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee chaired by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) held an oversight hearing on the...

Happy Waiver Day! Today, the Senate's Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee will hold an oversight hearing on the No Child Left Behind waivers, featuring none other than U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the big cheese himself. Catch our preview here.

Mandatory Reading? In Idaho, a lawmaker...

The Obama administration has been under fire for watering down the No Child Left Behind Act by granting waivers that exempt states from its stringent test-based annual goals. Now, the critique is coming from close quarters.

Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust -- an influential lobbying and...

Gates's Gigantic Growth? Michigan State University Professor Sarah Reckhow takes a look at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's funding patterns over on Alexander Russo's blog. "The decade from 2000 to 2010 was a time of enormous growth and evolution for the Gates Foundation," Reckhow writes. "Warren Buffett's...

When it comes to education, the role and effects of technology has been a tough nut to crack. As tomorrow's Digital Learning Day approaches, education groups and officials are offering up their recommendations.

Congress is marking the event with a bill. On Tuesday afternoon, Rep. George Miller...

Last night, former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee stopped by The Daily Show to promote her memoir, "Radical."

"Radical" traces Rhee's development from her childhood in Toledo, Ohio to the creation of StudentsFirst, the national lobbying group she created in 2010 to spread her policy agenda from coast to coast. Rhee has become the standard bearer of what's known as the "education reform" movement, a group of advocates that push policies such as charter schools and teacher evaluations that rely on students' standardized test scores.

Host Jon Stewart's mother is a teacher, so he pressed Rhee on many of these policies, especially his (and teachers') dissatisfaction with the heavy emphasis on standardized tests. "They have this idea of the test being the almighty word. ... that does not really .. measure the possible teacher's potential or success .. yet it is the thing that they are tied to .. for money," he said. "How do we move [away from this]?"

"It's a balance," Rhee responded. "You can't have no accountability. ... The bottom line is there's no one in the country that I know of that advocates that we evaluate teachers solely on the basis of test scores."

Stewart also engaged Rhee on the role things like poverty and nutrition play in the classroom. Out of all those factors, Stewart said, "teachers are the only ones we look at and go, so that's it, you're fired." Rhee said that within the education realm, the most schools can do and their top goal should be making sure "every kid is in a high-quality school every day taught by a highly-effective teacher."

Charter schools, a prominent item on Rhee's agenda, also confused Stewart. "We've sort of thrown up our hands and said this aint gonna work .. so let's start a charter school or something .. but those often fall prey [to the same issues as traditional public schools]," he said. He then said that charter schools make public schools, which can't choose their students, "a repository for the worst, most difficult, most troublesome cases," so they should be hit with "resources and nutrition and literacy" to close achievement gaps early.

Rhee said she agrees on the importance of addressing poverty, but parents can't wait. "To say to them ... suck it up for a little while and we might be able to improve the school later on is not good enough," she said.

Why, Stewart then asked, do we not target the resources we send to charter schools to fixing lower-performing schools instead of creating an entirely new infrastructure? Rhee's answer: "let's free them up" to make it easier for different types of schools to excel.

"But isn't that the antithesis of the testing regime?" Stewart asked. Rhee said "we have to have measures by which we understand whether or not kids are learning...

Rhee The Radical? Former Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee continues the book tour for her memoir, "Radical," stopping last night at the Daily Show. She talked to host Jon Stewart about standardized testing, school accountability, and poverty. Stewart's mother was a teacher, so it's always interesting to see him...

Rhee-grets, She Has A Few? Former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is out with a new memoir this week (called "Radical"), and she's making the talk show rounds to promote it. Yesterday, she told George Stephanopolous on "This Week" that maybe she shouldn't have fired that principal...