One of the most-talked-about education reform initiatives currently making waves through schools nationwide and in Washington is national standards. But as educators, congressmen, and policy groups work together in an impassioned network to devise a common set of standards for K-12 math and reading for states to adopt, questions are emerging about the vision's feasibility.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been using the promise of $350 million in stimulus aid to urge states to abandon the current hodgepodge of individual standards. But experts say that complications are bound to crop up.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation renewed its commitment to improving college graduation rates for low-income and minority students by giving $16.5 million in grant money to expand remedial education programs at the community-college level.

Fifteen community colleges and five states with model remedial education programs received the grants last week. The model programs share qualities such as accelerating the speed at which students complete remedial courses, providing students one-on-one support with class work and homework, and offering courses with open entry and exit dates so that students who miss registration deadlines can still enroll, says Hilary Pennington, director of special initiatives in the Gates Foundation's United States program. She added that the foundation hopes the grant recipients can act as replicable models to other community colleges and states looking to improve their remedial education offerings.

No Child Left Behind, the federal education law hailed as George W. Bush's most significant domestic achievement—before it became unpopular with teachers and parents—might be on its way out, if recent events are any indication. The quaint red schoolhouse that was constructed outside the Education Department's Washington headquarters seven years ago after the legislation was signed, as a symbol that every child must be taught and every child must learn, has been torn down by construction workers.

Many are calling the demolition proof that President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are eager to make their mark on national education reform and the No Child Left Behind law in particular. NCLB logos on the department's elevators also have been targeted for removal. Matthew Yale, Duncan's deputy chief of staff, told the Washington Post that the department is even considering a contest to rename the law.

"We want to think about something that's forward-thinking instead of something that seems to have a negative connotation," he said. "We want to think of something that talks about future and potential."

Parents of children with disabilities will encounter fewer obstacles obtaining needed services—and school districts might see themselves go into the red by millions of dollars—thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision that special-education students' parents may seek government reimbursement for private school tuition even if they have never received special-education services in public school, the New York Times reports.

The case before the court involved a struggling Oregon high school student, identified in court documents only as T.A., who was found ineligible for special-education services in the Forest Grove district after school officials evaluated him for learning disabilities. His parents removed him from public school in his junior year and enrolled him in a $5,200-a-month residential school. Only after T.A. enrolled in the private school did doctors say he suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other disabilities.

Forget passing handwritten notes underneath desks or inking your arm with essential math formulas before a killer test. If students today want to cheat, they have a more insidious tool at their disposal: cellphones. More than one third of teens with cellphones admit to having stored information on them to look at during a test or texting friends about answers, a new survey finds.

And teens' parents, while realistic about the frequency of cheating in schools, might need to overcome their own blind spots: More than 75 percent of parents responding to the survey say that cellphone cheating happens at their children's school, but only 3 percent believe their own teen is using a cellphone to cheat.

"I believe my kids' consciences would prevent them from doing it, as they are good kids deep down," one parent said in an interview for the nationwide online poll, conducted by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based education company.

Congressmen are challenging some of the biggest programs in the fiscal 2010 education budget request that Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently outlined to Senate and House appropriations subcommittees.

President Obama's budget proposal asks for $46.7 billion in discretionary funding, or $1.3 billion more than the 2009 level.

The most pointed questions Duncan faced involved a shift of $1.5 billion in Title I funding—federally funded programs for schools with high percentages of students from low-income families—into the department's School Improvement Grants program, which targets historically struggling schools and attempts to turn them around. Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, expressed concern about how the Title I cut might play out after $81 billion in federal education stimulus funding expires in two years.

On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, compared the reading and math state achievement test scores of students in charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia—amounting to 70 percent of U.S. charter school students—to those of their virtual "twins" in regular schools who shared with them certain characteristics. The research found that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have seen if they had enrolled in local traditional public schools. And 46 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their traditional public-school companions. That means that only 17 percent of charter schools have growth in math scores that exceeds that of their traditional public-school equivalents by a significant amount.

In reading, charter students on average realized a growth that was less than their public-school counterparts but was not as statistically significant as differences in math achievement, researchers said.

"We are worried by these results," Margaret Raymond, director of CREDO and lead author of the report, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, said at a news conference. "This study shows that we've got a 2-to-1 margin of bad charters to good charters."

President Obama expects all Americans to complete at least one year of postsecondary education, and a report released this week by Education Week highlights both the obstacles to attaining that goal and the hopeful signs that—at least in some states—success appears to be within reach.

"Diploma Count 2009" places the national graduation rate at about 70 percent for the class of 2006 and notes that this rate has increased nearly 3 percentage points since 1996. According to the report, New Jersey has the highest rate, 82.1 percent; Nevada has the lowest, 47.3 percent. But with about 30 percent of American students failing to graduate high school, and many other qualified students opting out of the college application process, the report states, Obama's goal can easily seem unrealistic.

Some sets of data highlighted in the report, however, paint a more positive picture of high school students' college readiness. Education Week found that about 2,200 school districts across the country exceeded expected graduation rates for the class of 2006 by at least 10 percent. The report also identifies states that are helping to prepare their students for college by installing statewide data systems that can track students' academic performance. Federal Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says he wants to see all states implement such systems.

• Click here for a link to the full report.

Sonia Sotomayor—President Obama's pick to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter—has not yet been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but her history of education decisions is already drawing close attention from education law experts as they consider the direction she might take on schools if confirmed, Education Week reports.

She has handled only a small number of K-12 education cases during her 17 years on the federal bench, but the trials—which have focused on such key issues as special education, racial discrimination, and student freedom of expression—could offer clues on future school policy matters if she joins the court.

Mathematics teachers in one coastal Connecticut school district were frustrated with students' inability to retain what they learned in Algebra I and apply it to Algebra II, so they decided to approach high school mathematics instruction in a new way. The teachers shrank the number of topics covered in each course by about half and published their custom-made curriculum online last fall, the New York Times reports.

The new curriculum's lessons were written by Westport, Conn., teachers and sent to HeyMath! of India, a company that adds graphics, animation, and sound to the lessons before posting them on the Web. But teachers say the new curriculum is as much about bringing classroom instruction into the digital age as it is about having the opportunity to teach students fewer concepts in greater depth.