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E. D. Hirsch Jr. is being dragged back into the ring at the age of 85

Invitations to speak have come from Spain, Britain and China. He has won a prestigious education award. Curriculums developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation, which Mr. Hirsch created to disseminate his ideas, have recently been adopted by hundreds of schools in 25 states and recommended by the New York City Department of Education for teachers to use in their classrooms.

“This is a redemptive moment for E. D. Hirsch, after a quarter-century of neglect by people both conservative and liberal,”

Ahead of a new round of Iran nuclear talks, the country's supreme leader voiced support on Wednesday for the negotiations, but he insisted there are limits to concessions that Iran will make in exchange for an easing of sanctions choking its economy.

But his mention of Iran's "nuclear rights" was widely interpreted as a reference to uranium enrichment.

Iran would get some sanctions relief under such a first-step deal, without any easing of the most harsh measures — those crippling its ability to sell oil, its main revenue maker.

the president’s policy is empowering Iran. Whether diplomacy and sanctions would ever have worked against the hard-liners running Iran is unlikely. But abandoning the red line on weapons-grade fuel drawn originally by the Europeans in 2003, and by the United Nations Security Council in several resolutions, has alarmed the Middle East and effectively handed a permit to Iran’s nuclear weapons establishment.

The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.

Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.

The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics (1998) show that 55.6 percent of those who teach two or more classes of social studies in grades 9-12 do not have either a major or a minor in history. (There is no reason to believe that the situation has improved since these data were collected.

it takes a well-educated teacher to bring these developments to life, to enable students to understand the connection among events, and to truly grasp the importance of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments.

there is no getting away from the fact that teachers will not be able to bring the study of history to life unless they know enough history to get beyond whatever the textbook says.

the United States’ top spy said Thursday the greatest online threat isn’t a crippling digital strike against American infrastructure — but the near-constant, lower-grade attacks that are carried out routinely

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also raised eyebrows among House lawmakers when he declined to describe a recent breach of servers belonging to the Office of Personnel Management as an “attack.” Rather, Clapper called the operation, which U.S. officials privately attribute to China, “a passive intelligence collection activity, just as we do.” The breach resulted in the exfiltration of the personal information of some 21.5 million current, past, and prospective federal employees.

In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Clapper described a permissive online environment in which hackers worldwide are able to operate essentially without impunity. That environment has resulted in difficulties for U.S. officials to deter future attacks, Clapper said, and has led American intelligence officials to conclude that cyber threats will probably intensify in the near future.

The Iran nuclear deal is now sealed — from Washington’s end. But since this has been one of America’s most important foreign policy shifts in the last four decades, it’s worth looking back and grading the performance of the key players.

His prediction last week that Israel won’t be around in “25 years” was perfectly timed to complicate President Obama’s effort to get the deal through Congress.

Through this deal Khamenei gets Iran out from under crippling sanctions, which his people want, by pushing the breakout time for Iran to make a nuclear bomb from two months to a year — for 15 years — but getting the world to bless Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear enrichment program, even though it cheated its way there. And he’s done it all while giving his hard-line base the feeling that he’s still actually against this deal and his negotiators the feeling that he’s for it. So all his options are open, depending on how the deal goes.

One summer about 85 years ago in a small Alabama town, a scrappy tomboy named Nelle met her new next door neighbor, Tru, a bookish, dapper dresser with a high-pitched voice and a mischievous streak.They made an unlikely pair. She often went barefoot in overalls while he dressed so fastidiously that a teacher said he stood out like a bird of paradise in a flock of crows. But both were oddballs who took refuge in detective novels, and they quickly bonded over their mutual love of Sherlock Holmes and the Rover Boys, spending long afternoons reading mysteries in their treehouse sanctuary. To entertain themselves, they started writing their own stories on her father’s Underwood typewriter, taking turns as one of them narrated while the other typed.

They grew up to be two of the South’s greatest writers — Harper Lee and Truman Capote — and their lives and work were intertwined long after that first summer. Ms. Lee drew on their friendship in her portrait of the characters Scout and Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and in her newly released novel, “Go Set a Watchman.”

Their broken friendship has been restored — in fiction, at least — in a forthcoming middle-grade novel, “Tru & Nelle,” by Greg Neri. Though Ms. Lee and Mr. Capote have each individually been the subject of numerous biographies, documentaries and feature films, “Tru & Nelle” is the first book to focus primarily on their childhood bond.

My co-author, Mindy Marks, and I found a whopping 10-hour decline in time spent studying outside of class for full time students at four-year universities between 1961 and the 2000s.

One theory is that increased market pressures have empowered students, causing colleges to cater more to students’ desires for leisure. Students do appear to prefer leisure and easier classes. A given instructor in a given course tends to receive lower ratings from students during terms when he or she grades less generously or requires more.

The Delta Study finding that spending for non-academic and recreation facilities has been increasing relative to spending on academic instruction also seems consistent with this explanation.

When testing is commonplace and the teachers are supportive — as my children’s were, for the most part — the tests felt like so many puzzles; not so much a judgment on your being, but an interesting challenge.

When we moved back to New York City, my children, then 9 and 11, started at a progressive school with no real tests, no grades, not even auditions for the annual school musical. They didn’t last long. It turned out they had come to like the feedback of testing.

Admissions officers are chasing not so much a more perfect student as a more perfect class. In a given year, this elusive ideal might require more violinists, goalies, aspiring engineers or students who can pay the full cost of attendance. Colleges everywhere want more minority students, more out-of-state students and more students from overseas.

Over the last 15 years, he says, growing applicant pools reflected an earnest push for greater diversity among the wealthiest institutions.

To each applicant, Chicago assigns a “fit” rating based on holistic measures — say, intellectual curiosity or evidence that a student applied a favorite subject to life.

An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!

Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.

Education thrives in China and the rest of Asia because it is a top priority

More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August

we’re seeing a fundamental change in the admissions process,

“Where many of the older admissions professionals came in through the institution and saw it as an ethically centered counseling role, there’s now a different dynamic that places a lot more emphasis on marketing.”

Nouriel Roubini, whose consistently bearish views have been consistently right

“The Way Forward” ought to at least give our politicians pause.

its prognosis, if we continue on the current path, is grim. “Unless we take dramatic steps, it will be Japan all over again,” says Alpert. “Continuous deflation, no economic growth, in and out of recessions. And high unemployment.” Adds Hockett: “It will be like the economic version of chronic fatigue syndrome. A low-grade fever all the time.”

A study of students enrolled in the Virtual High School, for example, found that 75 percent of the students passed their courses with a C or better while 25 percent got a D, F, or Incomplete or dropped it.

It seems to me online learning can actually be less distracting than being in a classroom of 30 students, provided the students have access to computers. Indeed, two of the predictors of success are home access to a computer and/or a school period given over to online work. Other predictors were age, grade point average, technology use, self-efficacy and achievement beliefs, organizational skills, and risk taking.

Suppose that an authoritarian government decides to embark on a program of curricular reform, with the explicit goal of indoctrinating the nation’s high school students. Suppose that it wants to change the curriculum to teach students that their government is good and trustworthy, that their system is democratic and committed to the rule of law, and that free markets are a big problem.Will such a government succeed?

New research, from Davide Cantoni of the University of Munich and several co-authors, shows that recent curricular reforms in China, explicitly designed to transform students’ political views, have mostly worked. The findings offer remarkable evidence about the potential influence of the high school curriculum on what students end up thinking

they give us some important insights into contemporary China as well.

This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens — nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s, and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.

Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State aggressively target youths as young as 14.

“This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.

As a historian, I was influenced by E. H. Carr’s thinking about the past and present as part of a continuum that stretches into the future. In What is History? (1961), Carr argued that concern with the future is what really motivates the study of the past. As a teacher and political activist, I also strongly believe that schools should promote active citizenship as essential for maintaining a democratic society.

in an effort to survive, the NCSS has largely abandoned its commitment to these ideas, twisting itself into a pretzel to adapt to national Common Core standards and to satisfy influential conservative organizations that they are not radical, or even liberal. I suspect, but cannot document, that the organization’s membership has precipitously declined during the past two decades and it has increasingly depended financial support for its conferences and publications from deep-pocketed traditional and rightwing groups who advertise and have display booths.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since the introduction of NCLB, there has been a steady reduction in the amount of time spent in the teaching of social studies, with the most profound decline noticed in the elementary grades.”

For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.

The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

The council, in a meeting that took place on Feb. 10, voted first to reject Ms. Beyda’s nomination, with four members against her. Then, at the prodding of a faculty adviser there who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students revisited the question and unanimously put her on the board.

The boy's death happened at about 6:25 a.m. on the tracks just south of the city's Churchill Avenue, near the elegant century-old high school on an oak-studded Spanish Mission campus, directly across the street from Stanford University, in a ZIP code synonymous with success. Two student suicides earlier this school year at neighboring Gunn High School led to a flurry of community meetings and teen outreach, and the district has been working to overhaul its teen mental-health policies since a much-publicized cluster of student suicides in 2009.

the very life of the school district has been altered in ways large and small. Social studies classes start with meditation. Teachers and staff have been taught to help identify teens struggling with depression or in distress. The district is accelerating construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High School, where students can talk to counselors and mental health professionals and nutritionists to decompress.To reduce stress, the school district -- home to the progeny of top Stanford faculty and many of Silicon Valley's tech titans -- reformed its homework policy in 2012, but the plan was never fully implemented. Now it is back on the school board's agenda. The district also recently contracted with a data-analysis firm called Hanover Research Group to analyze homework, grading practices and curriculum.

Both Gunn and Paly have convened sessions to listen to students. A similar communitywide gathering was held last week, and another is scheduled. Teachers offer academic accommodations -- like not collecting homework, or delaying tests -- and Paly economics teacher Alexander Davis created a "Gratitude Wall" in his classroom for students to write what they are grateful for on sticky notes.Paly, many students say, is a place where teachers care about their well-being. But the causes of suicide are complex.The school offers an array of electives and resources. "There's journalism, glassblowing, theater -- there may be a little more pressure, but a lot more opportunity here," said senior Jack Brook. "People are happy when they find a passion, and there's a lot of opportunity to find a passion here."

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was “the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams’s reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.”

The national poet, Walt Whitman, captured the general understanding when he wrote that “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history… A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that the scale of the atrocities and their character began to enter even scholarship, and to some extent popular consciousness, though there is a long way to go.