D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan has rejected arguments from charter school advocates that city funds must be distributed to charters and DCPS on a uniform per-student basis.

Nathan’s letter to Robert Cane, executive director of FOCUS, is a bit of a slog, but it seems to come down to three points. First, Nathan finds that there’s nothing in the D.C. School Reform Act of 1995 (SRA)--the law passed by Congress that launched the charter movement here--that prevents the city from treating the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula as a legal minimum. Second, the mayor, the D.C. Council and the old D.C. Board of Education have all established precedent over the years by giving extra money to DCPS. Third, Congress could have objected, but it hasn’t.

In a forthcoming story, higher-education scribe Jon Marcus addresses a small but growing community of companies that are offering college coursework at bargain-basement prices.

Saylor.org, a Washington-based nonprofit founded by entrepreneur Michael Saylor, is offering 200 online college courses for free.

The plan for a Winston Churchill library and research center at George Washington University took shape on a cocktail napkin at a hotel bar in Grosvenor Square in London.

Stephen Trachtenberg, the former president of GWU, sketched it out after dinner with his friend Laurence Geller, a British hotel magnate and Churchill authority.

This week, Montgomery County officials unveiled their capital spending plan and state lawmakers began debating education spending priorities in Annapolis. Here are a few developments to watch that could have an impact on the bottom line for Montgomery schools.

January is the beginning of the college admission season for high school juniors and their parents. It’s just a formality, of course. In this region, the most college-focused in the nation, every season is college admission season.

There have been some new developments in the sad tale of the Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvalnia, but its future still remains uncertain.

I wrote last week that the district had run out of money — a result of drastic budget cuts, bad management, student attrition to charter schools and other factors — and was staying open thanks to unionized teachers and staff who agreed to work for free.

I keep hearing from college professors that too many of their students don’t write well. So here’s a primer written for college students on how to write an academic paper, though some of the advice would be useful for anybody writing anything. The author is Steven Horwitz, a professor of economics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. He is the author of two books, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective and Monetary Evolution, Free Banking, and Economic Order.

You roll into class with your cup of coffee, grab a seat and open up your laptop. The professor at the front of the room is one of the most well-known and powerful people on campus, the university president.

The District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education has posted a draft of its application for relief from the federal No Child Left Behind law, which you can read here.

If the waiver is approved by the U.S. Department of Education after formal submission late next month, the District will be out from under NCLB’s requirement of 100 percent reading and math proficiency by 2014.

This was written by Brendan Wolfe, associate editor of Encyclopedia Virginia, a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities that is the first online reference work about the Commonwealth that aggregates in a single resource information on Virginia history, business, politics, geography, arts, religion, culture, and folklife.

During my 20 years as a local reporter and columnist, I have noticed our schools deal with all of the big national education issues — student assessment, budget cuts, teacher quality, disabilities, misbehavior, test manipulation, instructional time and many more.

A retired D.C. teacher who has written critically about Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee said security guards escorted him out of an education data summit where the two were speaking on Wednesday.

Charter schools have boomed nationwide in recent years, buoyed by bipartisan support from politicians such as President Obama and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. But they have barely gained a foothold in Virginia.