NEWS: Big Stories Of The Day

Wide variation in House, Senate stimulus plans SF Chronicle
...fund special education and the No Child Left Behind K-12 law; $14 billion to boost the maximum Pell Grant by $400 to $5250; $1.1 billion for Head Start. ...

Minnesota charter schools are in for a change Star Tribune
As interest in the independently run but publicly funded schools explodes, so does legislators' desire to monitor them more closely.

Test Scores Provide Valuable Measure Of Success in D.C. Washington Post
Brian Betts , a new principal in one of the District's most troubled neighborhoods, excitedly displayed his school's latest reading test results. Tall green bars on the graphs meant that in some classes a majority of students were proficient. This was big news for Shaw Middle School at...

Mayor and Bishop Propose a Plan to Save Schools NY Times
The plan would save 4 of 14 parochial schools in Brooklyn and Queens, converting them to public charter schools.

Time to end Black History Month? EdWeek
New York is among several states that have passed laws mandating or encouraging teachers to broaden their history classes. New Jersey was the first to do so, in 2002, after Assemblyman Bill Payne conceived and wrote the Amistad Commission bill, named after the Africans who took over their slave ship, ended up in Connecticut and won freedom in court.

What to do when your kid provokes you into an inhuman rage. Slate
It's as if they had commissioned a study of the most effective ways to set you off and then implemented the findings with great care and foresight.