During the final presidential debate on Monday, President Obama gave a sliver of air time to the idea of class size. And on a visit to Brooklyn on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan agreed that classes would be smaller “in an ideal world,” but reiterated the administration’s stance that having a good teacher matters more than how many students are in the classroom.

The education secretary is on Twitter, asking teachers: What is one positive lesson you learned from another teacher this year? #teachtalk

New York received a vehement finger-wagging on Monday from the United States education secretary, Arne Duncan, about whether it was fully complying with the terms of its agreement that has so far yielded the state about $700 million in federal Race to the Top money.

Eva S. Moskowitz’s Success Academy Network of charter schools will be moving into two locations in Brooklyn, Cobble Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant, despite resistance to co-locating the Cobble Hill school with three existing schools in a Baltic Street building. The crowd was large and rowdy, and Twitter posts were flying, but the Panel for Educational Policy voted in favor of the proposal, as expected.

On this Veteran’s Day, disappointing news related to the No Child Left Behind law: the number of failing schools in New York State has skyrocketed, with 1,325 of the state’s 4,685 public schools now on the failure list. New York City schools accounted for 640 of them. State Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch says: “If student performance doesn’t improve, schools must be held accountable. We are watching.”

A Silicon Valley school where computers are taboo, and a new way to use technology to help people with autism communicate. A drive at the city’s elite schools to provide homework holidays, and concerns that city high school graduates are not doing enough work to help them succeed in college. These were some of the educational issues in the news this weekend.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the United States secretary of education, Arne Duncan, are on the same page when it comes to providing states with relief from the No Child Left Behind goals. Mr. Bloomberg stressed alternative ways of assessing progress, in remarks that stood in marked contrast to his address to the same group last year, when he delivered a feisty and boastful account of the miracle taking place in New York City schools.

In answers to readers, the secretary of education says the nine-month school calendar made more sense in the agrarian economy, that parents should make sure that their child see no cracks between them and the school – “there’s no us versus them,” and that the administration doesn’t think Washington knows best.

UPDATED — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used a visit to Cleveland today to again bash the No Child Left Behind law. ‘It was bad for children, bad for education, bad for standards,” he said. “But it made politicians look good, so they did it.’

Dissatisfaction over Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s handling of the city’s schools; protests over lost pre-kindergarten seats, school contamination and budget cuts; and, oh yes, SchoolBook are all in the news today — the last day before the public schools open to students in New York City.