Education

The State Senate is scheduled to debate a bill tomorrow that creates a separate board to oversee the growing number of charter schools in North Carolina.

Senate Bill 337 has gone through several revisions since it was introduced by Republican lawmakers two months ago. One of the provisions in an earlier bill, for example, removed the requirement that charter school teachers be college graduates. That requirement has since been re-instated.

Duke University has dropped out of a consortium of schools that will offer for-credit online courses. Duke faculty made the decision last week in a close vote.

In ending Duke’s participation in the Semester Online program, faculty on the Arts and Sciences Council said the decision to offer for-credit online courses had not been fully vetted by them. Some faculty members also expressed concern over the partner universities not being as highly-ranked as Duke.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project has donated its collection of extremist literature – pamphlets and flyers issued by the KKK, neo-nazis, racist skinheads, border vigilantes, and neo-Confederates – to Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The nearly 90-box collection will be housed there to allow scholarly research on the histories of extremist groups in the U.S.

This fall about 13,000 middle school students in the Guilford County Schools district will receive tablets. It’s part of a $30 million Race to the Top grant that Guilford won last year. Administrators and teachers will receive training from a company called Amplify in the coming months.