Education

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President Obama congratulates graduates of the 2012 class of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on Wednesday. (Associated Press)

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said that "millions of children are getting a Third World-education" in the U.S. and that he supports school choice initiatives. He held up the voucher system in the District of Columbia Public Schools as a model that could be used nationwide. He spoke Wednesday before the Latino Coalition's 2012 Small Business Summit in Washington. (Associated Press)

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Second grader Logan Foglesong, age 7, turns dirt during a groundbreaking for the new Irving Elementary School near the ruins of St. John's Regional Medical Center. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

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Dignitaries wait to turn dirt during a groundbreaking for the new Irving Elementary School near the ruins of St. John's Regional Medical Center. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

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Dignitaries wait to turn dirt during a groundbreaking for the new Irving Elementary School near the ruins of St. John's Regional Medical Center in Joplin, Mo., on Tuesday. The ceremony is the first of three groundbreakings for new schools. (Associated Press)

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Malachi Leary, 8, of Wooster, Mass., right, sporting Navy colors, watches as his sister, a first year Naval Academy plebe, participates along with her classmates in the traditional Herndon Monument climb, Annapolis, Md., Tuesday, May 22, 2012. The tradition, dating back to 1940, is the culmination of the first year in the Naval Academy where the plebe class has to help each other climb the obelisk covered in lard, remove the "dixie cup" hat at the top and replace it with an upperclassman's hat. (Andrew Harnik/The Washington Times)

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** FILE ** Education Secretary Arne Duncan speaks during the daily news briefing at the White House in Washington on Friday, April 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

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Maryland's Joe Cummings has 45 points this season and 111 for his career. He's two shy of cracking the top 30 in school history. (Associated Press)

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Michael Morton poses March 29, 2012, for a photo in Austin, Texas. Morton is one of more than 2,000 people falsely convicted of a serious crime who have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new national registry, or database, assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. (Associated Press)

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South Korean astronomy students use telescopes and special sunglasses to observe an annular solar eclipse in Seoul, South Korea. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

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South Korean astronomy students use telescopes to observe an annular solar eclipse in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, May 21, 2012. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

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Italian policemen, background left, walk on the site where an explosive device went off outside "Francesca Morvillo Falcone" high school in Brindisi, Italy, Saturday, May 19, 2012. Several students were wounded. (AP Photo/Max Frigione)

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David Caruth, director of institutional research at the University of the District of Columbia, has written a book about overcoming poverty, dyslexia and the damage from a lightning strike that stole his ability to walk, read and write. "It doesn't matter how big the challenges are, there are ways to work through them," he says. (Rod Lamkey Jr./The Washington Times)