What Arne Duncan's resignation means for the education debate, 2016 election and beyond. The education world reacted with surprise to the early October announcement that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is stepping down, and former New York education commissioner and current acting Deputy Secretary John King Jr. is stepping into the role at the end of the year. As with any political transition, there's plenty of spin and speculation.

Many schools with old Confederate names are also failing to adequately teach their students. All else equal, can we at least stipulate that it's hardly ideal to send black students to schools named for Confederate heroes? OK, maybe we can't. That's still a pretty controversial point for some. What about sending them to schools that are both named for Confederates and doing a poor job educating students of color? That happens every day in too many public schools. Now, one of them, Fairfax County's Stuart High School, is getting some national attention and pushback.

Speculating about how many and what kind of students were opting out of standardized tests was a fun education parlor game this spring. Highly energized proponents claimed the opt-out movement was a diverse cross-section of public school students. Critics responded that, no, it was a movement of affluent white parents and not that many of them.

An American spacecraft flew by Pluto on Tuesday morning to have a look around. That sentence was the stuff of science fiction when most of us were born. And that's not all. Last November, a European spacecraft landed on a comet. On a comet speeding through space! We've also been poking around Mars, and at the end of April a pathbreaking NASA mission to Mercury ended after four years of orbiting that planet. Meanwhile, here on Earth, there is a lot of head scratching about how to get more American kids interested in science, technology, math and engineering – the vaunted STEM subjects.

Chris Christie, New Jersey's bombastic governor, made waves last Thursday when he announced that his views on the Common Core education standards had evolved. Once a vocal proponent of the standards more than 40 states have adopted, Christie now wants New Jersey to go its own way.