Bright and Early: The Education Newsblitz

If you missed Al Sharpton talking education on the Colbert Report last night, you can catch up with this link — it starts about 16 minutes in. Now for your newsblitz:

• We explore how discipline differs at Innovations Academy, an unconventional charter school where kids mediate their own disputes and come up with classroom rules together. It’s called “positive discipline.”
• Also from VOSD: My coworker Adrian Florido wrote a fascinating story about a UCSD professor who developed a cell phone tool to help migrants and who is now under investigation by the university. The Union-Tribune also reports on the issue.
• Helix High is facing a possible revocation of its charter. Grossmont school officials will discuss it tomorrow, the Union-Tribune reports.
• KPBS explores how parents’ lives have changed to help get their kids into college with the author of The Rugrat Race.
• Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters calls schools’ funding woes “a Gordian knot.”
• Some Oakland schools on the state lists of perennially failing schools that are supposed to undergo dramatic overhauls might opt to not make any changes and not get any money, the Tribune writes. An earlier article in the Contra Costa Times explained that while state officials say schools have to make the changes, they have no way of enforcing that.
• Educated Guess blogs about a new think tank report that questions how well those dramatic overhauls will work. It focuses on a Los Angeles middle school as a poster child for failed reforms. Check out the report here.
• Los Angeles kids who go to school in other districts will be free to keep doing that — for now, the Los Angeles Times reports. L.A. Unified had earlier said it would stop the practice.
• USA Today reports that some California schools are tackling teacher-on-teacher bullying to set a better example for the children.
• Education Week writes about a new study finding that English learners’ test scores went up on many state tests, but they still fall behind their classmates.
• The Washington Post reports that the long, contentious fight over a teachers’ contract in D.C. schools is over. The tentative deal includes a voluntary plan where teachers earn bonuses when kids improve on standardized tests. Teacher Beats weighs in on some of the new provisions, including a 21 percent pay increase.
• The Associated Press writes about the increasingly bizarre case of a student whose school first tried to cancel prom because she wanted to bring a female date, then held a separate prom without her.
• And a new study finds dismal results for kids aging out of the foster care system, The New York Times writes.

— EMILY ALPERT