In the blueprint for overhauling federal education policy that President Obama sent to Congress on Monday, his administration seeks to confront some of the major educational challenges that have developed during the eight years that President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law has been a powerful influence on the nation’s public schools.

Coming to a high school graduation near you: President Barack Obama. The White House and the Education Department are giving public high schools the opportunity to compete to have the president speak at their commencement ceremony this spring. The winning school must demonstrate how it's helping prepare students to meet Obama's goal of the U.S. having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

President Barack Obama will urge states to better prepare high school students for college and careers when he meets Monday with the nation's governors. In remarks released Sunday by the White House, Obama praises governors for working in tandem with his Race to the Top program to reward school systems that raise standards and prove that through tougher student assessments.

Senior House Republicans and Democrats plan to announce Thursday that they will team up to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, a rare show of bipartisanship in the polarized Congress. Last month, the Obama administration launched talks with lawmakers on an overhaul of the 2002 law, which mandated an expansion of standardized testing and established a national framework for school accountability.

The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.

A little-noticed but unusually detailed study of teaching practices, reported by Robert Rothman in the November/December issue of the Harvard Education Letter, delivers a depressing message you should keep in mind whenever you read anything about raising school achievement. I don’t care if it’s by an education school dean, or a state governor, or the U.S. secretary of education, or even me. If this new study is true then none of us really knows what we are talking about.

Robert Balfanz is an accomplished, even famous researcher. But he also has one foot firmly planted in the reality of a high school, which anchors him and his research in the raw, complicated realities of being a kid these days, particularly an urban kid. As the co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center, at Johns Hopkins University, Balfanz’ research examines huge samples of students from sixth grade on, to see who drops out, why, when, and what can be done to prevent it.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing state officials in Florida of failing to ensure that students in Palm Beach County receive a high quality education, as evidenced by their poor graduation rates.

A new $1 million-plus initiative could help reduce Houston's dropout rate by at least 3 percentage points before this year's senior class graduates, Superintendent Terry Grier said Thursday. As his first major initiative as Houston ISD chief, Grier is launching a credit-recovery program similar to ones he headed up in San Diego and Greensboro, N.C.

Graduation rates in Memphis City Schools have slipped again, falling nearly 5 percentage points in a year to 62.1 percent. Last year, the Memphis rate was 66.9 percent. The national average graduation rate is about 69 percent. MCS missed its target by 12 points.