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After a two-year salary freeze, Fairfax County teachers are lobbying the School Board to spend anticipated federal funds on pay raises instead of hiring hundreds of new instructors.

With budgets shrinking and enrollment growing, teachers have not received even cost-of-living raises, and some are among several thousand employees who have been hit by non-salary pay cuts. County teachers – pleading low morale and difficult schedules – are looking to a possible $21.3 million federal windfall for respite.

But that plan might clash with both the School Board’s plans and the spirit of the Obama administration’s $10 billion education jobs bill, which federal officials said was intended to save or create 160,000 teaching jobs.

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Northern Virginia Community College will be part of a $15 million, nationwide initiative announced Wednesday to give adults the chance to complete degrees they started but did not finish.

An estimated 37 million U.S. adults fall into the nebulous category of educational attainment commonly termed “some college.” And in the Obama administration’s campaign to regain the world lead in rates of college completion, they are the low-hanging fruit.

The Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolis nonprofit group focused on college completion, announced a four-year effort to support 19 initiatives that are projected to yield 45,000 additional degrees.

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President Obama reopened Monday what is often a sore subject in Washington, saying that his daughters could not obtain from D.C. public schools the academic experience they receive at the private Sidwell Friends School.

But the city, accustomed to the mantra that its schools need reform, seemed to view the judgment as self-evident.

Obama made his comments on NBC’s “Today” show in response to a woman who asked whether Malia and Sasha Obama “would get the same kind of education at a D.C. public school” that they would get at the D.C. private school that has educated generations of the city’s elite.

“I’ll be blunt with you: The answer is no, right now,” Obama said.

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Education Secretary Arne Duncan predicted Wednesday that efforts to overhaul D.C. schools will continue full steam under presumptive mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray.

Duncan added that he hopes Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, appointed by the incumbent whom Gray defeated in this month’s Democratic primary, stays on for several years to come.

Rhee, who in her three-year term has become a polarizing figure in city politics, campaigned for the reelection of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and last week termed the primary outcome “devastating for the schoolchildren of Washington, D.C.” Her remarks, she later said, were not intended as a comment on Gray himself but as a lament that the results could be perceived as a blow against reform.

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Montgomery County stretches across a diverse terrain of more than 495 square miles. But if political wisdom in the heavily Democratic county holds, four of nine County Council members will live within three miles of one another by year’s end.

Three council members already do, right along the Takoma Park-Silver Spring border.

Hans Riemer, a Silver Spring political organizer, joined three neighborhood incumbents in winning Democratic nominations in Tuesday’s primary. If the four are victorious come November — as many assume they will be in a county where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1 — their tree-lined patch of Montgomery north of the District line will deepen its remarkable grip on local government power.

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