NewsTrust - Education Reform - Most Recent Stories

Why We're Failing Math and Science

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Oct. 26 (Interview) - The U.S. lags far behind other developed countries at the K-12 level in terms of measured performance in math and science courses. What can be done to change that?

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The New Untouchables

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Thomas L. Friedman - Oct. 21 (Opinion) - Those who create services, opportunities and ways to recruit work can compete on the world market. That is the key to understanding our education challenge today.

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Democrats should take Obama's lead and push harder for education reform

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet Democrats have too often resisted reform as disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools.

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From North Carolina, a model of how to transform education

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Oct. 16 (News Analysis) - In small numbers, in an ordered environment, these poor children can quickly be brought up to the level of the rest, and indeed exceed them in many cases. But when they form the majority of a school's pupils, the teachers can't cope, discipline breaks down, and learning stops. A school for poor children soon becomes a poor school.

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The Prospects for No Child Left Behind

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

epi.org - By Richard Rothstein - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - Many critics of NCLB have been dismayed by Duncan’s apparent resolve. But they may be reacting too soon. The principles for re-authorization that Duncan has announced represent a radical departure from NCLB and open uncharted territory in education policy.

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College for $99 a Month

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Monthly - By Kevin Carey - Oct. 05 (Special Report) - Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

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The Evolution Of Technology In Schools

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Daniel Brusilovsky - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - Schools try to keep up with the current technology trends, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of technology innovation. You would think that schools in Silicon Valley would be the most up to date on technology—with the latest computers, projectors, drawing boards—but coming from a first hand perspective, as a student at a local school, it’s the complete opposite. I go to a high school where there are no technology classes that even teach students the basics of web development, or video production, or anything of that matter.

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Spanking Linked to Lower IQ in Children

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

medscape.com - By Janis C. Kelly - Sep. 24 (Research) - Groundbreaking research suggests children who are spanked have lower IQs than those who are not, and that the difference is large enough to lower national IQ scores in countries where corporal punishment of children is routine.

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Must-know figures could change for Texas students

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By April Castro - Sep. 16 (News Report) - Does civil rights activist Cesar Chavez belong alongside Benjamin Franklin as an example of a model American citizen? Should Texas schoolchildren be required to identify Rush Limbaugh? How big a place does the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — most famous for his victory in integrating the nation's schools — deserve in the history books? The conservative-dominated Texas State Board of Education debates changes beginning Thursday to the social studies curriculum of the state's 4.6 million K-12 students, and both conservatives and liberals say the other is attempting to rewrite history

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Big Food vs. Big Insurance

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Michael Pollan - Sep. 09 (Opinion) - The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care.

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Dream of a Common Language. Sueño de un Idioma Común

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Texas Monthly - By Nate Blakeslee - Aug. 24 (Special Report) - ... the dual language experiment has been a success by any measure. By the sixth grade, kids in the program—regardless of which language they spoke when they first enrolled—are outscoring native English speakers on the TAKS tests. They can also read, write, and speak Spanish at a sophisticated level.

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Dan Walters: Voc ed bill on right track, but facing uphill battle - Sacramento Politics - California Politics

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Sacramento Bee - By Dan Walters - Aug. 17 (Opinion) - Not only does the decline in what's now called "career technical education" or CTE, exacerbate the state's dropout crisis (at least a quarter of kids don't finish high school), but it ill serves the larger societal interest in having skilled workers...It's problematic, however, whether a decree from Sacramento, even one that's logical and fair, would succeed in restoring vocational education to the honorable position it deserves, since the education establishment seems bent on strangling or co-opting it.

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For U.S. Education Dollars, States Must Buy In to the President's Reform Plan

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - Jul. 30 (Editorial) - PRESIDENT OBAMA is unabashed in his demand that any state wanting extra educational dollars share in his administration's reform agenda. That means tougher standards, more charter schools and holding teachers accountable. It's encouraging that even before a penny has been doled out, this aggressive stance is forcing states to rethink traditional approaches to education.

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Obama's View of Education Is Stuck in Reverse

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A. Giroux - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - While President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have focused on public education, they have done so by largely embracing the Bush administration's view of educational reform, which includes more testing, more empirically based accountability measures, more charter schools, more military academies, defining the purpose of education in largely economic terms, and punishing public schools that don't measure up to high-stakes testing measures.

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Obama Uses Funding to Pressure Education Establishment for Change

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael Shear, Nick Anderson - Jul. 23 (News) - The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.

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Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Todd Lewan - Jul. 11 (Poll) - -- Climbing into his Volvo, outfitted with a Matrics antenna and a Motorola reader he’d bought on eBay for $190, Chris Paget cruised the streets of San Francisco with this objective: To read the identity cards of strangers, wirelessly, without ever leaving his car.

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Vietnam War Architect Robert McNamara Dies at 93

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Howard Zinn, Marilyn Young, onathan Schell, Amy Goodman - Jul. 07 (News Analysis) - Over half a million Americans went to war on his watch, a war that ultimately killed over 58,000 American soldiers and at least 3 million Vietnamese. ... Less well-known is McNamara’s key involvement in the firebombing of 67 japanese cities shortly before the end of World War II that destroyed 50 to 90 percent of the cities. He described the bombing operations he analyzed under the general Curtis Lemay in a 2003 documentary by Errol Morris, “The Fog of War.” In a single night on March 10th, 1945, he told Morris, quote, “We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women, and children.”

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The underworked American

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

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Harvard to Endow Chair in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jun. 04 (News Report) - Harvard University will endow a visiting professorship in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, a position that, it believes, will be the first endowed, named chair in the subject at an American college.

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Colleges Weighing 3-Year Degrees to Save Undergrads Time, Money

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Valerie Strauss - May. 22 (News Report) - The four-year bachelor's degree has been the model in the United States since the first universities began operating before the American Revolution. Four-year degrees were designed in large part to provide a broad-based education that teaches young people to analyze and think critically, considered vital preparation to participate in the civic life of American democracy. The three-year degree is the common model at the University of Cambridge and Oxford University in England, and some U.S. schools have begun experimenting with the idea. To cram four years of study into three, some will require summer work, others will shave course lengths and some might cut the number of credit hours required.

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Teaching Pioneer Deborah Meier on Obama's Education Policy and the Future of Charter Schools

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez, Deborah Meier, Amy Goodman - May. 20 (Interview) - As part of the Obama administration’s education plan, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has urged states to consider partnerships with successful charter school operators. We speak to Deborah Meier, who has spent nearly four decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer and public advocate. She is considered to be the founder of the small schools movement and founded a number of public elementary and secondary schools in New York and Boston that serve predominantly low-income African American and Latino students.

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The Economics of Curricular Convergence

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

aejmc.org - By Michael Bugeja - May. 15 (Opinion) - Several years and re-accreditations have passed since journalism and communication schools began revamping their curricula to incorporate convergence. Given the economic downturn, it is time for curricular re-assessment—this time because of budget cuts. Many programs face two choices: lose courses or lose people. Accredited journalism and mass communication programs may be suffering more than other academic units because seats in our skills classes and laboratories should be set at 15 and should not exceed 20, according to the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

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Don't abandon public schools

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Philadelphia Inquirer - May. 11 (Editorial) - Vouchers are not the answer to what's wrong with America's public schools. But a pilot program for District of Columbia children deserved better than the shoddy treatment it received from Congress. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program was created by Congress in 2004 for families who wanted to escape abysmal, unsafe schools. But last month, when it came time to reauthorize the voucher program in the federal omnibus spending bill, Congress left out the $14 million program.

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Teaching in the Downturn

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

tolerance.org - By Jennifer Holladay & Tim Lockette - May. 11 (Special Report) - Few of today's teachers can remember an economic situation quite like the one we now face. To find analogies for the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent credit crisis, we have to search not our memories but our textbooks. The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath suddenly make more sense now. Generations of students have groaned at the task of memorizing acronyms like FDIC or FNMA: now they seem to leap off the pages of the history books. What will happen next? Will the economy bounce back, or will a wave of foreclosures create an invisible "Dust Bowl," uprooting hundreds of thousands of people? And how do we teach in this environment? To help our readers navigate these uncharted waters, we called in the experts. In the interviews below, social critic Meizhu Lui offers her take on where the crisis may lead us, and psychologist Melanie Killen talks about how to help your students cope in a time when the economic news is grim.

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Crossing the Gap

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

tolerance.org - By Tim Lockette - May. 11 (Special Report) - Brandon Saunders has trouble believing there are places like New Trier High School — a public school with an ivy-walled, university-like campus, with gyms for almost every sport, a multi-room college counseling center, and bright-eyed teachers planning their lessons in cubicle-like offices as up-to-date as any in corporate America. "It's immaculate," he said after seeing New Trier's campus. "I was blown away." Amanda Cohen has trouble believing there are schools where kids have to share textbooks, where parents are asked to supply toilet paper, and where no one comes to fix a bathroom without a door.

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