Education

Every year universities compete to lure a graduation speaker that will put them in the spotlight. This year Rutgers got President Obama. Johns Hopkins got Spike Lee. And who landed Oprah? Not a big-name school, but Charlotte's own Johnson C. Smith University. She gave a much-anticipated send off to about 300 students on Sunday.

Oprah Winfrey is speaking this Sunday at Johnson C. Smith University’s commencement. The media mogul has a personal connection to three young women at the Charlotte school. They’re graduates of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, the school she opened in South Africa in 2007. 

Academic standards don't usually grab headlines. But the debate over Common Core has changed that. The North Carolina Board of Education got a look at a proposal for new high school math standards Wednesday. Those are the first changes the North Carolina department of Public instruction has recommended, since state lawmakers decided to do away with Common Core in 2014. They may be new, but after all the controversy over Common Core, they aren't that different.   

CMS has hired a lot of consultants over the years without much attention. But that isn’t the case with the board’s latest selection. After all, it has to do with student assignment.  The CMS board voted Tuesday night to pay Alves Educational Consultants Group $135,000 to help design a plan.   

The CMS board has been greeted by an emotional public the last few months, as it’s gone through the early phases of the student assignment process.

At a public hearing Wednesday night, that emotion subsided a bit to make way for questions about the board’s draft of principles for a new assignment plan. Most of the 200 or so people who turned out approached the principles with a mix of support and skepticism. 

The CMS school board meeting had a surprise ending Monday night. The board released a draft of guiding principles for student assignment. This is a big step that took more than a year of discussion to make. The draft includes continuing the policy of guaranteeing access to “home schools” and makes socioeconomic status a factor in magnet lotteries. 

More dogs are showing up on college campuses – and not just service dogs. Some students want to bring comfort pets to campus because they say they need them, and federal housing laws require colleges to make exceptions to their no-pet policies for these students.