Around the Web

Friday is graduation day at an unusual K-8 school in California — and there is only one graduate. He’s part of an experiment in San Francisco called AltSchool that could re-define how your kids get an education, reports Ben Tracy.Read and watch the rest of the story at CBS News.

Over 3,000 protesters have gathered in Moscow to call for science and education reforms in Russia, amid budget cuts and the closure of a leading scientific foundation over a “foreign agent” tag.Read the rest of the story at RT.

Photo credit:  Sakeeb SabakkaNew data show that 81 percent of class of 2013 graduated in four yearsby Holly Yettick and Sterling C. Lloyd The on-time graduation rates in the nation’s public high schools have hit historic highs. The U.S. Department of Education reports that 81 percent of the class of 2013 graduated within four years, as tabulated by the Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate (ACGR).Read the rest of the story at Education Week.

by Franz StrasserWhile the cost of college education in the US has reached record highs, Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike. An increasing number of Americans are taking advantage and saving tens of thousands of dollars to get their degrees.Read the rest of the story at BBC News.

Photo Credit: Daniel X. O’Neilby Fran Spielman and Lauren FitzPatrickWANTED: CEO for nation’s third-largest public school system to replace chief forced out by federal investigation.Read the rest of the story at the Chicago Sun-Times.

photo by Dahal vai ganeshfrom the Associated PressKATHMANDU — Thousands of children affected by last month’s earthquake in Nepal returned to schools on Sunday, a working day in the Himalayan nation, five weeks after the disaster killed more than 8,600 people and destroyed many homes.Read the rest of the story at NBCNews.com

For decades, “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic” were considered the most fundamental subjects in American K-12 schools. These days, in order to boost our nation’s global competitiveness, many schools and colleges are emphasizing STEM subjects—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math—over the liberal and fine arts. The White House has even announced the goal of increasing by one million the number of students who receive undergraduate degrees in STEM subjects over the next decade.Read the rest of the story at Phys.org

In 1963, kids in the 10th percentile of income fell behind children in the upper echelon of wealth by about a year or so. Today, that gap is closer to four years.by Sarah GarlandOn a weekday afternoon in July, Jessica Klaitman pulled her 16-month-old daughter Hannah out of a stroller in the lobby of the New York Kids Club, a “child-enrichment center” with four classrooms, a dance studio, and gym space in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y.Read the rest of the story at The Atlantic.

by Erica GoodeJohn F. Nash Jr., a mathematician who shared a Nobel Prize in 1994 for work that greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a book and a film, both titled “A Beautiful Mind,” was killed, along with his wife, in a car crash on Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86.Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.