WASHINGTON — Could the nation’s best-known and most controversial education reformer be headed to New Jersey ? Michelle Rhee , who recently resigned as schools chancellor in Washington, D.C ., is being talked up as a potential candidate for New Jersey education commissioner or Newark school superintendent after she leaves her current job on Oct. 31. Gov. Chris Christie is her fan and Newark Mayor Cory Booker is her friend. Both have top education jobs to fill. Right now, the official word is that Rhee isn’t in the running for either job. “We don’t have any comment except to say that the governor admires what Michelle Rhee accomplished in the D.C. schools and wishes her well,” Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said in an e-mail. And Booker spokeswoman Anne Torres said in e-mail that “at this moment in time, there are no plans to talk to Ms. Rhee about the position.” Christie fired his education commissioner, Bret Schundler , in August after the state failed to win a $400 million competitive grant from the Obama administration. Clifford Janey, Newark’s superintendent, was told shortly after the Schundler dismissal that his contact wouldn’t be renewed. In 2007, Janey was fired as the Washington, D.C. schools chancellor and was replaced by Rhee. The Newark job pays $280,000 a year and the statewide commissioner position about half that. Newark’s schools will receive $100 million in Facebook stock over the next five years from the social networking site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg , making New Jersey’s biggest school district the center of education reform efforts. Rhee didn’t return telephone messages left with her aides Wednesday and Thursday. She told ABC’s Good Morning America she’s looking to remain in K-12 education but wants to move closer to her fiance, Kevin Johnson , the mayor of Sacramento , and a former player with the Phoenix Suns basketball team. But the Garden State could still be on her mind, according to one of her acquaintances, Derrell Bradford, executive director of a Newark school-choice group called Excellent Education for Everyone. Before she announced her resignation Wednesday, Rhee e-mailed Bradford several times to learn about Newark’s schools and the reforms underway there, but Bradford said she never directly expressed an interest in working there. Newark and Washington are both overwhelmingly minority school districts with high levels of per-pupil spending — over $20,000 a year in Newark — and substandard student achievement, Bradford said. Turning Newark around is the type of challenge Rhee would love, he said. “The stuff she is about is the core of the education reform agenda,” he said. “People make the mistake of believing that education reform is something you can hatch and implement in the classroom. It is really about political and social change.” In Washington, Rhee toughened teacher evaluations, closed badly performing schools and linked teacher pay to student achievement. She stressed scores on standardized tests, which rose for the first two years of her tenure. Elementary school math and reading scores dipped this year, though middle-school and high-school scores continued improving. Rhee, 40, was admired by Washington’s white residents for her aggressive reforms, but her critics, including many of the city’s black residents, derided her as arrogant and uncompromising. She is lionized in Waiting for ‘Superman,’ a documentary about American schools. In her most controversial statement, she told a business magazine that some of the 266 teachers she fired last fall either had sex with children or hit them. She later said only one of the teachers had been accused of sexual misconduct. Joseph Del Grosso, president of the 5,500-member Newark Teachers Union, said what he’s read about Rhee worries him. The next superintendent should seek to work with union members, not antagonize them, he said, and would “not use the whip but use logic and temperance to figure out solutions.” “People want to be involved. People don’t want to be dictated to,” Del Grosso said. “The dictatorial superintendent hardly ever lasts.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Another teenage lesbian is suing a rural Mississippi school district, this time over a policy banning young women from wearing tuxedos in senior yearbook portraits. Ceara Sturgis’ dispute with the central Mississippi Copiah County School District started in 2009, well before a student in another Mississippi school district, Constance McMillen, found national attention in her fight to wear a tuxedo and take a same-sex date to prom. On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit for Sturgis, claiming the Copiah County district discriminated against her on the basis of sex and gender stereotypes. Her photo and name were kept out of her senior yearbook. The ACLU first contacted the district in October 2009 about the issue, but officials said they would adhere to a school policy. By the time Wesson Attendance Center yearbooks were released this spring, school officials had made clear Sturgis’ photo in a tuxedo wouldn’t be included. But Sturgis was surprised to see even her name was left out of the senior section. “I guess in the back of my mind I knew that was going to happen, but I did have a little hope. I cried. I put my head down and put my hand over my face,” Sturgis said Tuesday. The suit challenges the district’s policy allowing male students, but not female students, to wear a tux for senior portraits. The suit alleges a violation of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination based on gender. Sturgis, who has worn masculine clothing since ninth grade and begins classes at Mississippi State University on Wednesday, said she felt as if she was being punished “just for being who I am.” District Superintendent Rickey Clopton didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment. Sturgis graduated with a 3.9 grade point average and participated in numerous extracurricular activities, including band and soccer, her attorneys said. “Inclusion in the senior yearbook is a rite of passage for students, and it is shameful that Ceara was denied that chance,” Christine P. Sun, senior counsel with the ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project said in a statement Tuesday. “It’s unfair and unlawful to force students to conform to outdated notions about what boys and girls should look like without any regard to who they actually are as people.” The ACLU attorney also represented McMillen, who drew inspiration from Sturgis in challenging Itawamba County school officials about McMillen’s plans for prom this year. “I inspired her to do what she did and now we are friends,” Sturgis said. But Sturgis didn’t face the same hostility as McMillen. Sturgis said her classmates and teachers were supportive, but she hopes hoping the suit will help other gay teenagers who feel they must conceal their gender identity. “There are students who are hiding it their sexuality,” Sturgis said. “They have come up to me and told me they are. I had already decided what I was going to do, but it just took a little while.” While she finished her senior year, Sturgis was living last fall with her grandparents in Wesson, a town of about 1,700. The students took their yearbook portraits at a studio and Sturgis tried on one of the “drapes” that females students are required to wear. “The thought of a portrait of her in the ‘feminine’ clothing as a representation of her senior year embarrassed her, and she began crying,” the lawsuit states. Sturgis later put on the tuxedo and was photographed. School officials informed Sturgis’ mother, Veronica Rodriguez, early in the school year that the tuxedo photograph wouldn’t be allowed, according to the suit. At the time, Clopton said federal court decisions supported the school’s policy. The lawsuit names the school district, superintendent Clopton and school principal Ronald Greer. It seeks unspecified damages and attorneys’ fees. The filing comes weeks after McMillen reached a settlement in her federal lawsuit against the Itawamba County School District. The north Mississippi district had canceled its prom rather than allow McMillen attend with her girlfriend. The district agreed to pay $35,000 and follow a nondiscrimination policy as part of the settlement, though it argued such a policy was already in place. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Slow readers of the world, uuuuuuuu…niiiiite! At a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more meaning and pleasure out of the written word. Thomas Newkirk isn’t the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called “slow reading” movement, but he argues it’s becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible. “You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute,” he said. “That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good.” Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly “taste” the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they’ve become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books. READING: Proficiency at 4th grade linked to nation’s success COLLEGE: One-third need remedial reading, math “One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he’d come to a word and it would almost act like a hyper link. It would just send his mind off to some other thing,” Newkirk said. “I think they recognize they’re missing out on something.” The idea is not to read everything as slowly as possible, however. As with the slow food movement, the goal is a closer connection between readers and their information, said John Miedema, whose 2009 book “Slow Reading” explores the movement. “It’s not just about students reading as slowly as possible,” he said. “To me, slow reading is about bringing more of the person to bear on the book.” Miedema, a technology specialist at IBM in Ottawa, Ontario, said little formal research has been done on slow reading, other than studies on physical conditions such as dyslexia. But he said the movement is gaining ground: the 2004 book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Changing the Cult of Speed sprang from author Carl Honore’s realization that his “rushaholism” had gotten out of hand when he considered buying a collection of “one-minute bedtime stories” for his children. In a 2007 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , the executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press describes a worldwide reading crisis and calls for a “revolution in reading.” “Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don’t even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words,” Lindsay Waters wrote. Though slow, or close reading, always has been emphasized at the college-level in literary criticism and other areas, it’s also popping up in elementary schools, Miedema said. Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher at Mast Way Elementary School in Durham, N.H., has her students memorize poems upward of 40 lines long and then perform them for their peers and parents. She does it more for the sense of pride her students feel but said the technique does transfer to other kinds of reading — the children remember how re-reading and memorizing their poems helped them understand tricky text. “Memorization is one of those lost things, it hasn’t been the ‘in’ thing for a while,” she said. “There’s a big focus on fluency. Some people think because you can read quickly … that’s a judge of what a great reader they are. I think fluency is important, but I think we can err too much on that side.” It’s all about balance, said Patti Flynn, an assistant principal in Nashua, N.H., and mother of a 10-year-old girl. Her school has offered, and her daughter has participated in, numerous reading challenges that reward students for reaching certain milestones — a pizza party for a class that reads 100 books, for example. Though such contests may appear to emphasize speed rather than reading for pleasure or comprehension, they also are good incentives for children who weren’t motivated to read, she said. The challenges have encouraged parents to make reading a priority at home, Flynn said. “The goal shouldn’t be to be whipping through a certain number of pages, the goal should be to make sure kids are gaining some conceptual understanding,” she said. Her daughter, Lily, said she considers herself a “medium-speed” reader and had to increase her speed to finish about 10 books for her classroom’s 100-book challenge. But she said she enjoyed the process and feels like she understood and remembers what she read. “It was fun,” she said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.