Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

New Jersey must provide about $500 million for its poorer school districts, the state Supreme Court said on Tuesday, complicating the state's ongoing budget negotiations.

The court ruling, concerning what are known as the Abbott districts, is the latest development in a decades-long battle over state education funding for poor and other disadvantaged students. Last year, Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, and the Democrat-controlled state legislature cut education spending by more than $800 million.

Depending upon how the funding gap was calculated, the shortfall could have been as high as $1.7 billion, but the court strictly limited its decision to the Abbott schools.

More than 100 superintendents from across the state, including many from East Valley school districts, converged on the lawn of the state Capitol on Wednesday to push for an additional $300 million to educate English-language learners.

The figures show that in a total of 1,338 primary and secondary schools - more than one in 20 of all schools in England - children with English as their first language are in the minority.

It's a nickname no principal could be proud of: "Dropout Factory," a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That dubious distinction applies to more than one in 10 high schools across

A Washington, D.C., civil rights group is suing the City of Manassas and Manassas City Public Schools, alleging that the city and school system have taken systematic measures to "target, discriminate against and evict the city's Hispanic residents." The l