From The Washington Post

Education has become an experience, for a great number of students, that embodies a doctor’s visit and less like a visit to your local Science Center. Students are basically poked and prodded for data to satisfy funding allocation procedures by the very adults charged with forging a new and exciting path of study.

Last week we published an Around the Web article, Is the U.S. All Wrong? Teacher Training Breaking the Mold, that garnered a lot of conversation. Education thought leader Regie Routman provides her perspective discussing the role Professional Development/Learning play in educating teachers.

From The Washington Post The number of black teachers has dropped in nine U.S.

From The Hechinger Report Why Americans should not be coming up with their own solutions to teacher training issues A look at British Columbia, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore by MARC TUCKER Professional development of American teachers costs up to $18 billion a year with at least half of that spent on workshops for teachers. But no matter how much we spend, it doesn’t seem to result in much improvement in student achievement. Several other countries are doing a better job than the U.S.

From POLITICO Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush offered a sweeping school choice-centric education plan Monday with proposals that would allow parents to spend government dollars on the pre-K program of their choice and give college students a $50,000 line of credit to pay tuition. Bush unveiled his plan on Martin Luther King Jr. Day as he fights to stay relevant in a GOP race dominated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, invoking education as a civil rights issue.

From: The Atlantic by Melinda Anderson A year after leading thousands of protesters in the famous Selma-to-Montgomery march, Martin Luther King Jr. brought his campaign to end racial discrimination to Chicago. Rather than voting rights, the target was housing inequity in a city known in 1966—and even today—as the most racially segregated in the nation.

From U.S. Uncut – Detroit’s students are trying to learn while breathing in black mold and sitting in classrooms filled with buckets catching toilet water leaking through the ceiling. And that’s not even the worst part. Republican Governor Rick Snyder is not only using the financial emergency management laws to poison children in Flint; he’s doing the same thing in Detroit via the public school system, which the state has controlled for the last seven years.

Excerpt from The Atlantic By ALANNA SCHUBACH  The irony of the cuts in funding for academic science is that the Obama administration has simultaneously made a big push for greater investment on STEM education. The president has called upon American universities to graduate 1 million more STEM majors than they do currently, a move that would ostensibly broaden the pool of applicants to graduate from science programs—the same ones that downsized in the wake of the sequester.

Jan 8, 2016 · by Beth Fertig From: WNYC Attorneys for New York students with autism and other disabilities claimed a major victory this week, after a federal judge granted class action status to a case that alleged the denial of education services. The ruling could affect more than 20,000 New York City students. The original plaintiffs, eight New York City students and their parents, sued in 2013 to prevent the loss of services including individualized instruction, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and support staff.

Statement from Augusta County Public Schools

Dr. Steve Joel, Superintendent of Lincoln Nebraska Public Schools discusses how he and his leadership team have engaged the community to support district efforts including their Career Academy . Dr. Joel also talks about his background in education and how is path was forged along the way.

In this country, President Obama signed a new education law last week. Much of the focus has been on testing and a debate over whether the law moved too far away from rigorous standards. But one group celebrating the law advocates for arts education. NPR’s Elizabeth Blair explains why.

By Larry Dignan Springboard, a startup that aims to put a human twist on online education, has raised $1.7 million and has a few big name backers including LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue. The bet: Online education success rates can improve with human mentors.

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.