NASA and Disney Parks, which collaborated to send toy space ranger Buzz Lightyear into a 15-month orbit aboard the International Space Station, are together launching two new educational design challenges, NASA has announced.

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A 12-year-old charter school serving 3,400 mostly poor students in Houston has become a favorite of billionaire donors, including Bill Gates, the Walton families, Michael Dell and John Arnold, a former Enron trader turned hedge fund manager, Forbes magazine reports.

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In a major policy shift, the nation’s largest teachers’ union will ask its local bargaining units to waive contract language that might hamper school districts from staffing troubled schools with highly qualified teachers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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As he travels across the country seeking to advance his school-reform agenda, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has drawn help from an unlikely pair: the Rev. Al Sharpton, an outspoken progressive Democrat, and former Republican House Speaker New Gingrich, an equally outspoken conservative.

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A new analysis backs up earlier reports that the achievement gaps between so-called advantaged and disadvantaged students has narrowed in the past decade, according to Education Week. The trend appears to have been bolstered in the 1990s by the standards-based-reform movement.

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Schools in five Ohio cities – Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton — are reshaping their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) curricula with state financial support. At Cincinnati’s Hughes STEM High School, the result has been what science teacher Ronnda Cargile calls “a total new mind-set,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

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California’s Berkeley High School, which already contains a number of small, themed academies, will launch a green energy school next year funded by the state and the Pacific Gas & Electric Co., according to the Oakland Tribune. The school will emphasize teaching STEM subjects.

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October has been designated by Congress National Principals Month. 63 top principals from across the country were recognized at an awards banquet in Washington, D.C.

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Students are making their way to the National Mall in Washington to reassemble the solar-powered houses that they designed as part of the 2009 Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the Department of Energy.

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Tags: Solar Engineering, U.S. Department of Energy