Opponents of the Common Core State Standards got a boost in recent weeks, as Missouri and North Carolina moved to reassess their involvement, while the governors of Utah and Wisconsin distanced themselves from the standards.  Less clear is what exactly those opponents have won. The early pattern suggests that the common standards could undergo some relatively minor changes but still persist in states where opposition has led to high-profile bills and big headlines.

In July, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his department's new Excellent Educators for All initiative, which seeks to ensure that students in high-need schools have equitable access to effective teachers.   The secretary, in a July 7 letter to the nation's chief state school officers, called for states to demonstrate how they will put strong teachers in all classrooms-not just in the well-resourced ones.

Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.
 

The Entire History Of Human Culture... In 5 Minutes   by Kevin Short on the Huffington Post.  

If you could compress 2,600 years of cultural history into one moment, it'd look something like this. The stunning visualization created by Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, depicts the birth and death locations of history's most influential people.  Schich's team pulled information from Freebase, a database of historical figures. The mapping starts in 600 B.C., around the dawn of the Roman Empire, and ends in 2012. The blue dots represent birth locations, and the red dots show death locations.

A Virginia company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers - in which children as young as 5 can learn at home at taxpayer expense - is facing a backlash from critics who are questioning its funding, quality and oversight.

K12 Inc. of Herndon has become the country's largest provider of full-time public virtual schools, upending the traditional American notion that learning occurs in a schoolhouse where students share the experience. In K12's virtual schools, learning is largely solitary, with lessons delivered online to a child who progresses at her own pace.