education

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and the mayor's hand-picked Chicago Board of Education have their sights set on closing 54 public schools this year.

Cuts to government spending like the now-reviled “sequester” are not only “dumb” as my colleague Robert Borosage explained this week. They are literally making us dumber. Unfortunately, cuts to essential funds for educating our children aren’t limited to the dreaded sequester.

The 2014-2015 Free Application for Federal Student Aid will provide a new option for dependent applicants to describe their parents’ marital status as “unmarried and both parents living together.” Additionally, the form will also use terms like “Parent 1 (father/mother/stepparent)” and “Parent 2 (father/mother/stepparent)” instead of gender-specific terms like “mother” and “father.”

While Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius continue to promote the president's proposal, researchers say existing programs are inadequate, and until their shortcomings are fixed there is little desire by lawmakers to get behind Obama's call for more preschool.

Hundreds of Chicago students are taking up the mantle in the fight against the role of standardized tests in public school closures as they walked out of state exam Wednesday. Their message: "We are over-tested, under-resourced and fed up!"

Hey, New Jersey, this is your future, and it's starting in September. The states that adopted tests early are figuring out that they don't contribute to a quality education, and they're pulling back.

Basically, if you're a poor child and your family depends on welfare to survive, you better keep your grades up or you and your family will suffer. No pressure or anything.

The bill aims to make it legal for schools to "educate students about the history of traditional winter celebrations, and allow students and district staff to offer traditional greetings regarding the celebrations."

Can you imagine having every written artifact in history and much more available to you in a matter of seconds? It will revolutionize information science, and could help universities save millions of dollars (maybe even more) through centralization.

A closer examination of one of the nation’s hottest new education-reform movements, a seemingly populist crusade to empower poor parents and fix failing public schools, reveals that the “parent-trigger” movement is being heavily financed by the conservative Walton Family Foundation, one of the nation’s largest and most strident anti-union organizations.