Watch: School goes makeup-free for one day

How long does it take you to get ready in the morning? According to a student-made video by the teens at Plano Senior High School in Texas, girls from the school take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours to get ready for school in the morning, the Huffington Post reports. However, when male students were interviewed, they said it only took them between 10 and 25 minutes. This discovery inspired them to create “Operation Beautiful,” a school-wide initiative encouraging PSHS students to go makeup-free for 24 hours on Friday. For students Madeline Milby, Binna Kim and Monica Plenger, the goal was to focus on their inner-beauty and encourage girls to cut down on the hours they spend putting on makeup and doing their hair.

“I think there’s pressure for girls to look a certain way, to meet a standard. The standard is being pushed through media and magazines and everything,” Milby told ABC News. “I’m really hoping it’ll make the girls at school feel more comfortable and see that they’re beautiful without makeup and they don’t need to use makeup to cover up themselves.”

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Report: CPS has capacity to close, consolidate 80 schools

Chicago Public Schools’ Commission on School Utilization late Wednesday released its final report on the district’s plan to shutter dozens of its schools, the Huffington Post reports. The report claims the nation’s third largest school district has the capacity to consolidate 80 schools over the next two years, an astoundingly unprecedented move for a district that has never before closed more than 11 schools in one year, Catalyst Chicago notes.

(Read the full report. View a map of schools on the district’s possible closure list.)

The CPS-appointed commission reportedly based the number 80 on the number of seats available in “better-performing schools” that students would — and should — be transferred to under the plan, according to Fox Chicago……Read More

Could this school’s police program be a model for the country?

Every school day, Simpsonville, S.C., police officer Justin Chandler patrols the halls of Plain Elementary School, the Huffington Post reports. But Chandler is not a school resource officer, a position typically filled by specially trained officers who are stationed at schools to bolster security. Unlike many armed guards in public schools, Chandler’s position comes at no extra cost to local taxpayers. According to a segment of “Today” that aired Wednesday, the town pays Chandler his regular police salary, and he voluntarily works out of the school, instead of the local police station. “All I needed from the school was a desk and WiFi,” Chandler told “Today.” While sources of funding for school resource officer programs vary by locality, many districts receive financial backing from the government or through private grants…

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12 year-old has higher IQ than Einstein, Hawking

Move over Albert Einstein, Neha Ramu has you beat, the Huffington Post reports. Ramu, 12, achieved the highest possible score of 162 on the Mensa IQ test, the Telegraph reports. To put it in perspective, that’s a higher IQ than Einstein, Bill Gates or Stephen Hawking, who are all believed to have a score around 160. The high score places Ramu, the daughter of Indian eye specialists in London, in the top 1 percent of intelligence ratings among people in the United Kingdom, according to Asian News International. Ramu’s parents told the Telegraph they didn’t realize their daughter was so gifted until she scored 280/280 on an entrance exam for Tiffin Girls‘, a high-achieving grammar school…

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8 ways high schools are helping students de-stress

Do you feel like most of the kids at your school are stressed out? With mounting academic pressure and increasing competition for college admissions, high schools across the country are starting to take note of their students rising anxiety levels, the Huffington Post reports. According to a recent mental health survey, nearly 10 percent of young people ages 13 to 18 have an anxiety disorder, yet only 18 percent of those struggling with anxiety are receiving mental health care. To meet the demand for support and resources for struggling students, many schools are bringing in new programs that promote healthy habits, well-being and effective stress management. More and more schools are thinking outside the box for creative solutions to their students’ overwhelming workloads and 24/7 digital lives…

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‘Bully’ documentary gets its own documentary on ‘Anderson Cooper 360’

A bully’s worst fear is revenge, so it’s special when a victim of bullying can turn those slurs and taunts into nationwide popularity, the Huffington Post reports. Alex Libby was 12 years old when director Lee Hirsch included him in a documentary entitled “Bully.” The film, which was released in 2011 and acquired shortly thereafter by the Weinstein Company, gave the boy his chance to change things — for himself and others. Ever since, he’s lent his face, time and energy to a worldwide movement against bullying. CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” will feature Libby’s story Thursday night in a documentary, called “The Bully Effect,” about the children featured in “Bully.”

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American Federation of Teachers brings nurses’ union onboard

One of the largest labor unions in the U.S. will get a bit larger on Thursday, when the 1.5-million strong American Federation of Teachers enters into a new affiliation with the National Federation of Nurses union, the Huffington Post reports. Both unions billed the affiliation as mutually beneficial: The AFT expands its ranks in the growing health care sector, while the nurses’ union, which has 34,000 registered nurses in four states, hitches itself to a national federation with heavy clout both in the workplace and in politics. Leaders from both unions described the affiliation as a natural fit, given the professional commonalities between teaching and nursing. Just as the AFT has been battling school boards over issues like classroom size, they said, so too have nurses been fighting hospitals and health care companies over staffing levels and nurse-to-patient ratios…

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State of the Union likely to focus on littlest learners

President Barack Obama made K-12 education a major component of his 2012 State of the Union Address — so much so that the topic garnered the most traffic on sites like Twitter. But this year, education advocates are expecting something entirely different, the Huffington Post reports. The White House mostly has been tight-lipped about its State of the Union plans, but to the extent that the administration is saying anything, they’re looking at Tuesday night’s speech as an opportunity to “bookend” their K-12 plans, sources say. Instead of focusing on the compulsive, public kindergarten through high school school system, advocates are expecting the president to offer more of a focus on early education, with a little bit of higher education thrown in. That might be because the Education Department is already in implementation mode on K-12. Obama campaigned in 2008 on rewriting the No Child Left Behind Act, the 2002 law that expired in 2007. Since Congress failed to revamp it, upon Obama’s urging, the administration offered states a way to sidestep the law’s punitive regulations: They could get waivers in exchange for agreeing to parts of Obama’s education reform agenda…

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High school turns to puppies for stress relief

The four-legged member of the counseling team at the high school in suburban Chicago waits patiently, as a crush of students fills the hallways. Her tail wags with the first pat on the head, then another and another, the Associated Press reports. “Puppy! Ohhh, puppy dog!” one teenager croons, as he affectionately tousles the ears of the 18-month-old golden retriever. Junie began her role as a therapy dog at Prospect High School less than four months ago. It’s just one of a number of ways high schools across the country are trying to address what some call an epidemic of stressed-out, overwhelmed students…

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Three states push to require teaching climate change denial

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — known by its critics as a “corporate bill mill” — has hit the ground running in 2013, pushing “models bills” mandating the teaching of climate change denial in public school systems, the Huffington Post reports. January has just ended, yet ALEC has already planted its “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” — which mandates a “balanced” teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms — in the state legislatures of Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona so far this year. In the past five years since 2008, among the hottest years in U.S. history, ALEC has introduced its “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” in 11 states, or over one-fifth of the statehouses nationwide. The bill has passed in four states, an undeniable form of “big government” this “free market” organization decries in its own literature

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Feds: Teacher scammed federal program of hundreds of thousands

A New York City substitute teacher is accused of running a scam through a tutoring service that between 2005 and 2012 billed the government for millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of which the U.S. attorney claims are fraudulent, the Huffington Post reports. Michael Logan, 48 years old, allegedly recruited teachers and former students to collect signatures from students at school and extracurricular events to inflate attendance records for the TestQuest tutoring company, the New York Post reports. According to court papers, the falsified attendance sheets allowed the company to claim more federal funding than it was eligible for. Logan was a manager for now-shuttered TestQuest, whose services were intended to assist disadvantaged students in the city. Funding for tutoring programs is based on the volume of students tutored, and is provided by the federal Supplemental Education Services program through the city’s Education Department…

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Obama education agenda is racist, civil rights leaders say

The standards-based education reform movement calls school change “the civil rights issue of our time,” the Huffington Post reports. But about 220 mostly African American community organizers, parents and students from 21 cities from New York to Oakland, Calif., converged on Washington Tuesday to tell U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan he’s getting it backwards on school closures. Members of the group, a patchwork of community organizations called the Journey for Justice Movement, have filed several Title VI civil rights complaints with the Education Department Office of Civil Rights, claiming that school districts that shut schools are hurting minority students. While most school closures are decided locally, the Education Department’s School Improvement Grant gives underperforming school districts money for shakeups or turnarounds, including closures…

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