Around the Web

By Gary Gately
With the reputation of U.S. for-profit colleges in tatters, one company has found a convenient way to circumvent regulation in this country: by operating primarily in overseas markets.
Baltimore-based Laureate Education, the world’s largest for-profit higher-education company by enrollment (with about 1 million students now enrolled worldwide), operates in a sector plagued by government scrutiny in the U.S.

By Greg Botelho
(CNN) The United States’ two biggest school districts get the same threat.
One — in Los Angeles — decides to call off school, with the superintendent saying students won’t go back until he’s absolutely sure everything is safe.
The other — in New York — decides just the opposite, dismissing the threat as an apparent “hoax.”

By Antonio Gois
Tying teacher pay to student test scores. Creating public schools of choice with private operators. Setting common standards for all students. Those issues probably are familiar to any American reporter who covers education.

First Lady Michelle Obama upped the funk when she danced to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” and now she’s rapping her heart out to convince high school kids to “Go To College” in a  College Humor music video. Yes, you already read it right the first time: the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) showed off her rap skills in a music video.

The sweeping bipartisan education bill signed into law on Thursday contained a nugget of good news for the tech industry: Computer science has been recognized as important an academic subject as math and English, potentially introducing it into more classrooms across the U.S.

The Great Recession may be officially over, but state spending on K-12 education hasn’t recovered.

With a new federal law, the nation’s education landscape is getting an overhaul and advocates say they expect the changes are a step in the right direction for students with disabilities.

With his signature Thursday, President Barack Obama is setting the nation’s public schools on a sweeping new course of accountability that will change the way teachers are evaluated and how the poorest performing schools are pushed to improve.

Hear that collective whoop from the Capitol? That’s the sound of education advocates and lawmakers cheering at the finish line as the first rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in more than a dozen years sails through Congress and on to the White House.