Patrice Wingert

The good news: Latino and black high-school graduation rates have slightly improved. The bad: those rates are not increasing fast enough to make up for the demographic shifts in the country's public-high-school population.

Remember the uproar back in February when President Obama commended Rhode Island school leaders for threatening to fire the entire staff of Central Falls High School, the lowest-performing high school in the state, after negotiations over a transformation plan fell apart?

With a $19 billion deficit looming, and the state's credit rating taking a beating, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced late Friday that he had no choice but to take a cleaver to the state's budget after he and the legislature agreed not to raise taxes again, as they did last year.

News today that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and AFT President Randi Weingarten have at last reached a tentative agreement on a ground-breaking teachers' contract for teachers in the nation's capital comes with an added advantage for D.C. schools: it likely boosts their chances of winning the next round of the Race to the Top competition.

Delaware and Tennessee, two states that have aggressively pursued school reform, are the winners of the first round of the U.S. Department of Education's $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition.

It's never seemed like much of a debate. Should the government spend $61 billion over the next 10 years to continue to subsidize the private lenders who have long acted as middlemen for student loans that are guaranteed by the federal government?

On the eve of March Madness, Education Secretary Arne Duncan used his bully pulpit Wednesday to lobby the NCAA to ban from post-season play any college that fails to graduate at least 40 percent of its players.If such a policy were in place right now, a dozen teams including top-seeded Kentucky, which graduates only 31 percent of its players, would be out of contention.

The first lady rolled out her campaign against childhood obesity Tuesday, and put a special emphasis on the need to get healthier choices onto school-lunch trays.

When Michelle Obama became first lady, she stressed that her "No. 1 job" would be "first mom." Following through on that focus, today at the White House, she elevated her personal concern for her own kids' health and eating habits into a massive national campaign aimed at solving the U.S. epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation.

When Michelle Obama became first lady, she stressed that her "No. 1 job" would be "first mom." Following through on that focus, today at the White House she elevated her personal concern for her own kids' health and eating habits into a massive national campaign aimed at solving the U.S. epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation.

When the Obama administration first proposed having states duke it out for a share of a $4 billion education-reform fund, critics expected the whole enterprise to either be largely ignored or dissolve into political infighting.

President Obama's aggressive push for education reform has been one of his few domestic success stories, so it's not surprising that he's decided to build on that with a 6.2 percent increase in federal education spending next year.

Michelle Rhee, the tough-talking D.C. schools chancellor, is used to taking her lumps from the press, the teachers' unions, and city politicians as she tries to overhaul one of the nation's worst public-school systems.

Public-university presidents have been getting a lot of bad press recently: endowments are dwindling, state support is shrinking and tuitions, which have been rising faster than inflation for years, are jumping even more to close the gap.

Exactly how much will the modern celebrity wife put up with?Not as much as she used to.That may be a reasonable conclusion based on Jenny Sanford's decision to call it quits to her marriage to South Carolina Gov.

Twenty years ago, most middle-school kids spent most of their day in tracked classes. Even if they had bland names like English A, B, or C, every kid knew if they were in the smart or the dumb class, and research indicated that the kids most hurt by tracking were the kids at the bottom.

Education reformers are buzzing today about New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's ambitious new education goals for New York City schools that will not only up the ante for all states vying for a piece of the federal $4.35 billion Race to the Top school-reform fund, but is likely to spur sharp resistance from teachers' unions.

Could your height be determined (at least in part) by your grandma's weight? That's the startling implication of a new study published in the November issue of the journal Endocrinology.

In 2005, Oklahoma's reading and math standards were rated easier than average; by 2007, they decreased the rigor even more, making all their tests among the easiest to pass in the nation, and below the national standard of "basic" achievement.

As I predicted Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan's major speech at Columbia University this week called on America's teacher colleges to follow the lead of Louisiana, which has been setting the pace nationally in terms of overhauling its schools of education.

It's the book every medical writer in the country wants to ignore. Suzanne Somers's latest "health" tome hit the bookstores this week, and this time she's offering her advice on how to cure and prevent cancer.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has spent the past several months dangling $4.35 billion in Race to the Top money at states to entice them to include data detailing students' year-to-year academic growth when evaluating teachers' performance (an idea that the teachers' unions have long dissed).Now he may be poised to push states to dramatically overhaul their teacher colleges by urging states to follow Louisiana's lead and include information specifying how well new teachers perform in real...

Calls to create a national test have long been fought back by advocates of local school control, but the release of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress results that showed no gains nationally in fourth-grade math scores—as well as shocking gaps between students' scores on that test vs.

Education reformers were pleasantly stunned when the American Federation of Teachers announced today that two of the winners of their new Innovation Fund grants planned to use the money to create teacher-evaluation systems that give weight to students' standardized test scores.

For a decade and a half, Rock the Vote has tried various ways to encourage 18- to 30-year-olds to go the polls. They've hooked up with MTV, put on concerts, sent out "street teams" to proselytize, and set up voting drives on college campuses.

The debate over whether sexual orientation is a choice was reignited this week with the release of two new-and opposing-studies on the outcome of "reparative" therapies, which purport to convert gays and lesbians into heterosexuals.