Education & Learning

Community College of Allegheny County President Alex Johnson is leaving Pittsburgh to head up a community college in Cleveland.

Johnson, who became president of CCAC in 2008, has been appointed president of Cuyahoga Community College. He is expected to begin duties there on July 1, according to a news release from CCAC.

Johnson had previously served as chancellor of Delgado Community College in New Orleans and was president of Cuyahoga Community College's Metropolitan Campus from 1993 to 2004.

Two high school students from the Pittsburgh region are finalists in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair this week in Phoenix, where more than 1,500 high school students from more than 70 countries will present their solutions for real-life problems. Last year's fair was here in Pittsburgh.  

Rishi Mirchandani, a sophomore at Fox Chapel Area High School, has developed a new algorithm for dividing something that is desired by multiple individuals. 

Most adults remember what they were doing and how they felt on September 11, 2001. But many children today weren't even born when Flight 93 crashed in Somerset County.

"Normally, we're telling the story to people who lived it," Flight 93 Memorial superintendent, Jeff Reinbold told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. "What happens is the parents come to one of our rangers and say, 'You tell them.' It became apparent to us no one is talking to the youngest kids."

The Heinz History Center on Tuesday kicked off the Healthy Heritage Cooking Series, a three-month pilot program designed to introduce students to Italian, Syrian and Bulgarian cooking and connect health to history.

Viviana Altieri, who directed an Italian cooking demonstration, is the executive director of Mondo Italiano, a local meet-up organization that promotes Italian language and culture. She said food traditions have always been important to mankind and that the Healthy Heritage series will broaden students’ cultural horizons.

Data collected from one of the largest studies ever conducted on teacher effectiveness will be made available to only 10 groups nationally. One of those teams will be led by a University of Pittsburgh professor.

“It’s a huge dataset and allows us to answer questions that we previously weren’t able to pose or answer because data simply wasn’t available to do so for average researchers like myself,” said Tanner LeBaron Wallace, a professor in Pitt’s Department of Education.

A state-owned railroad museum in Strasburg plans to build a $6.1 million roundhouse of the type used to service and repair locomotives during the glory days of American rail.

Director Charlie Fox of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania said the structure will provide shelter for the most significant pieces of the museum’s collection.

Happily announcing a trio of major gifts from locally-based corporations, Pittsburgh Promise Executive Director Saleem Ghubril said Monday that the city's scholarship fund now expects to raise $90 million more by 2015, three years earlier than expected.

Students from southwestern Pennsylvania will join with those around the country to participate in the national Day of Silence on Friday.

Students in middle schools, high schools and colleges will take a vow of silence to draw attention to bullying and harassment of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people.

Nationally, researchers say 160,000 children skip school each day due to fears related to bullying.

A growing protest movement has triggered discussions about our country's emphasis on public school standardized testing. According to parents such as Kathy Newman, a Pittsburgh Public School parent, CMU English professor and volunteer coordinator for the grassroots education group Yinzercation, the pressures and stakes of assessments like the PSSAs are too high. So they're opting their kids out. Kathy joins us for a discussion about how standardized testing impacts the quality of a public school education.