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    William McGuinness

    William McGuinness

    Senior Editor, Huffington Post College

  • Most Of This State's Schools Failed Federal Tests

    More than two-thirds of North Dakota's public school districts failed to meet annual federal education standards, and one superintendent says it's bound to get worse. The Annual Yearly Progress report released Friday shows that 126 of the 177 districts in the state either failed to meet the goals for math or reading, did not have enough participation in testing or showed substandard graduation rates.

  • IN Texas, An Easy Way To Track Ed Reform Bills

    At the start of the 83rd legislative session, education reform measures, including bills that strengthen the state's charter school system, increase the chances for students to take virtual courses, overhaul teaching requirements and address accountability for underperforming school districts, were top priorities for many advocacy groups and some lawmakers, including Senate Education Chairman Dan Patrick, R-Houston. Much of that legislation's fate will be determined in the final weeks of the session. Use the dropdown menu to see where different education reform bills have — and haven't — gone by category.

  • Aimee Copeland's New Hands

    University of West Georgia student Aimee Copeland received new, bionic hands this week, after losing both hands, two feet and a leg last year when a freak zip-line accident exposed her to a flesh-eating bacteria, according to ABC News. The 25-year-old Gwinnett County, Ga., resident was on a vacation with friends last May when she fell while zip lining and cut her leg. While Copeland was receiving stitches to close the wound, a doctor noticed necrotizing fasciitis in the wound.

  • Dear Mike Jeffries, Are These Real 'Cool Kids?'

    Anup Samanta responds to Abercrombie and Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries declaring his target market “The Cool Kids,” on The Good Men Project. It is republished here with permission. Since you are a seasoned business executive, please define the “cool kids” market segment that is the “bread and butter” (inappropriate metaphor for your body image conscious stakeholders, but I really couldn’t help it) for your business.

  • Fed Maps Show There's More To Student Debt Crisis

    New data released by the New York Federal Reserve Bank shows that the percentage of delinquent student loans dropped slightly in the first quarter of 2013, even though overall student debt levels continue to rise, The Wall Street Journal reports. The maps, which illustrate the share of each state's population with student debt and the percentage of each state's borrowers now delinquent on their payments, reveal an apparently complicated relationship between the two. Northeastern states have above average percentages of residents with student loans, but tend to have lower delinquency rates.

  • Major CEO's Harsh Advice For College Grads

    While happy graduation speeches may be the norm, the class of 2013 at New York State’s Alfred University will get some no-nonsense advice from its speaker, AIG CEO Robert Benmosche. In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, the Brooklyn-born business titan and former Coca-Cola delivery truck driver said that at the May 18 commencement, he'll get right to the point: Graduates who are about to enter a struggling economy need to suck it up and figure it out. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Judge Bans Student From PUBLIC Schools

    The Duval County Public School District in Florida says Circuit Court Judge Henry Davis cannot ban a 14-year-old girl from every public school in the county, even if Davis says the student poses a serious danger to others, CBS News reports. Davis issued his injunction after a March fight hospitalized eighth grader Aria Jewett. According to First Coast News, the membranes surrounding her brain had torn, and cerebrospinal fluid was leaking after what Jewett now calls an ambush.

  • New Yorker Takes On Massive Online Courses

    Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. Where some scholars are gnomic in style, Nagy piles his sentences high with thin-sliced exposition.

  • 'Naked Pope' Faces Charges Over Scandalous Costume

    A Carnegie Mellon University student faces misdemeanor charges after she dressed as the pope during an art school parade last month. Police said her costume was indecent because it failed to cover her pubic hair, which was crafted to resemble a crucifix, not because she parodied the leader of the Roman Catholic church, CBS Pittsburgh reports. Campus police charged the “pontiff” and another student in the parade with misdemeanor indecent exposure.

  • PHOTOS: A Radical School Experiment Turned Out All Right

    Photographer Michael Barker helped the ALPHA Alternative school, one of Canada's first "free" schools and a radical experiment in education, celebrate its 40th anniversary with a portrait series that tracked down ALPHA's earliest students to see how they turned out. Barker partnered with performing arts producer Ariel Fielding, who conducted interviews with the featured former students.

  • Niall Ferguson's Big Step Back Over 'Homophobic' Comments

    Editor's note: The following editorial was written by Harvard professor and economist Niall Ferguson and was originally published in the Harvard Crimson. As HuffPost's Mark Gangloff noted, this apology is generating a good deal of its own controversy. Last week I said something stupid about John Maynard Keynes.

  • Are These 5 College Even Worth The Cost?

    The graduates from these colleges tend to work in education, social work and criminal justice -- all customarily underpaid professions -- so perhaps it's unsurprising that these institutions have landed in the bottom five of PayScale.com's list of colleges with the lowest return on investment, or ROI. Sure, some of these students literally do God's work (looking at you, Valley Forge Christian College), but does it have to cost so much?

  • Randi Weingarten Declares Victory

    PALO ALTO—Three thousand miles away from New Haven, the city became Exhibit A in a showdown between a national union president and a charter school proponent about the future of school reform. The president, Randi Weingarten (pictured) of the American Federation of Teachers, wielded New Haven as a weapon of political rhetoric Friday in a debate against Kevin Chavous, a founding board member of the American Federation for Children and the Alliance for School Choice. The pair squared off on a panel about school choice at the 66th annual Education Writers Association National Seminar at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

  • Louisiana Court Nixes Funding For School Vouchers

    Louisiana's Supreme Court issued a 6-1 decision on Tuesday that struck down Gov. Bobby Jindal's (R) plan to power a private school voucher program with state funds, the AP reports. Justice John Weimer wrote "the clear, specific and unambiguous language of the constitution" does not allow the state government to divert state funds earmarked for public schools in the state's Minimum Foundation Program to pay for private or parochial tuition, according to the Times-Picayne, which added that the court did not consider the program on its merits.

  • Has College Confidential 'Turned Sour?'

    In an article this week, I describe the culture of College Confidential, the Web site many people love and/or hate. Mr. Hawsey, now vice president for enrollment management at Emory & Henry College, in Virginia, described his motivations for starting the free Web site: to educate the public about how colleges recruit and select applicants, and determine financial-aid awards.

  • SLIDESHOW: Avoid These 15 Wikipedia Wormholes!

    It happens every day, but when finals roll around and cramming begins, falling victim to the siren song of a Wikipedia wormhole can eat up precious time students need to study facts, figures, equations and all that. Since HuffPost College really wants our readers to do well this week, we've checked out Wikipedia pages most likely to destroy your night and leave you red-eyed and unprepared. How did we pick the entries to include, you ask?

  • Inside Bartow High, One Of America's Best High Schools

    It would be easy to mistake the International Baccalaureate School at Bartow High School for a typical suburban high school. This year, the school ranked No. 2 on Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s ranking of America’s best high schools. This year’s crop of essays included a comparison of medication and psychotherapy for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder, a study of Josef Stalin’s legacy in Russian culture, and an analysis of whether the psychological effects of solitary confinement can be avoided through rehabilitation.

  • LOOK: Dad Makes Himself At Home In Rented Graduation Gown

    Ancient traditions have left us the fashion of graduation day, and it's a cruel marketplace that charges around $100 just so students can look matchy-matchy on the day they receive their degrees. After paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for one's education, one might hope for a free, ridiculous outfit at the end of the process, right?

  • Principal Fires Security Staff, Hires ART Teachers

    Most would think that firing the security staff of a poorly performing, inner-city school is a dangerous idea. In 2003, Orchard Gardens was introduced to its Boston-area community as a school where young students would start at the base level and move up to more expansive views as they grew older, according to Architectural Record.

  • Are Active Shooter Drills In School Too Real?

    Cammie DeCastro, principal of the Pine Eagle Charter School in Halfway, Ore., admits that the plan she had to protect her school from an armed gunman is in tatters after two masked men stormed in and appeared to open fire on a meeting room full of teachers last Friday, The Oregonian reports. If the exercise had been real, teacher Morgan Gover told the newspaper, only two of her colleagues would have survived. Pine Eagle Charter's drill is similar to that of other schools across the country, conducted with perhaps greater urgency in the wake of the recent Sandy Hook massacre.