The Parent-Teacher Talk Gains a New Participant

STREAMWOOD, Ill. — For years attendance was minimal at Tefft Middle School’s annual parent-teacher conferences, but the principal did not chalk up the poor response to apathetic or dysfunctional families. Instead, she blamed what she saw as the outmoded, irrelevant way the conferences were conducted.

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Empty Shelves, Filled With Imagination

WHEN Geri Ellner began her job this school year as the librarian — or in the current parlance, as a library media specialist — at the Brooklyn Collegiate, a public school for Grades 6 through 12 in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, she did not have much of a book collection.

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More white parents choose public schools

Her father, Tim Clo, was asked if he would send her to a public school in East Nashville, a working-class neighborhood that over the past decade has attracted legions of young professionals and their families.


The oddity was that East Nashville parents and neighbors seemed as interested in Kenya's education as her parents, Clo said. Parents were adamant that Clo should send his daughter to Lockeland Design Center elementary school.

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Teenage pregnancies go UP (despite free contraception and sex education for five-year-olds)

The number of teenage pregnancies leapt last year, despite all Labour's efforts to increase sex education and contraception among children and the young.

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Math Gains Reported for U.S. Students

American fourth- and eighth-grade students made solid achievement gains in math in recent years and in two states showed spectacular progress, an international survey of student achievement released on Tuesday found. Science performance was flat.

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Academy drops 'easy' A-levels for international test

The Government's education record was dealt a blow today after a new London academy said pupils will study the International Baccalaureate instead of A-levels.

The move to continental diplomas is a response to A-level "grade inflation", the decline in foreign languages at school and a desire to challenge pupils.

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College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

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Going Off to College for Less (Passport Required)

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Isobel Oliphant felt she was making an offbeat choice when she graduated from Fox Lane High School in Bedford, N.Y., and enrolled at the ancient university in this quiet coastal town of stone ruins and verdant golf courses.

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Students shortchanged in math teaching

Math can be hard enough, but imagine the difficulty when a teacher is just one chapter ahead of the students.

It happens, and it happens more often to poor and minority students. Those children are about twice as likely to have math teachers who don't know their subject, according to a report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group.

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Women Gain in Education but Not Power, Study Finds

GENEVA (Reuters) — Women still lag far behind men in top political and decision-making roles, though their access to education and health care is nearly equal, the World Economic Forum said Wednesday.

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How Teachers Can Be Happier

Teachers aren't very happy these days. This is partly due to some changes in the nature of the work, and—if it's any comfort—also partly due to the fact that everyone's less happy. For teachers in particular, there are many aspects of the profession that have grown more hard to take. I find on the web a survey from the NEA describing positive and negative aspects of the work over the last forty years. In the 1960s, factors like "positive attitude of pupils and parents" and "pupil progress and ability" had a significant impact on job satisfaction. After the 60s, those factors just disappear from the survey. In the most recent year of the survey, difficulties with administrators was a bigger source of job dissatisfaction than difficulties with students.

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Some experts call school time-out rooms 'abuse'

DES MOINES — After failing to finish a reading assignment, 8-year-old Isabel Loeffler was sent to the school's time-out room — a converted storage area under a staircase — where she was left alone for three hours.

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Balancing act with books Schools try to find right mix to keep students interested

English teacher Jason Baker tries to hook his students on such giants of American literature as Hawthorne and Hemingway by conjuring the authors' timeless images of a scorned single mother or a love-struck soldier. But the portrayals end decades before his students were born—a gap he and other teachers hope to narrow by rethinking their reading lists.

Read full article Chicago Tribune

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Professors Use Technology to Fight Student Cheating

Teachers, long behind in the cheating arms race, may finally be catching up. They are using new technologies, including text-matching software, webcams, and biometric equipment, as well as cunning stratagems such as Web "honey pots," virtual students, and cheat-proof tests. The result: It appears to be getting at least a little harder for students to plagiarize from websites, text-message answers to friends during tests, or get others to do their homework.

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Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds

The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.

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A Dead Language That’s Very Much Alive

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. — The Latin class at Isaac E. Young Middle School here was reading a story the other day with a familiar ring: Boy annoys girl, girl scolds boy. Only in this version, the characters were named Sextus and Cornelia, and they argued in Latin.

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Teachers to Be Measured Based on Students’ Standardized Test Scores

New York City is beginning to measure the performance of thousands of elementary and middle school teachers based on how much their students improve on annual state math and reading tests.

To avoid a contentious fight with the teachers’ union, the New York City Department of Education has agreed not to make public the reports — which described teachers as average, below average or above average with various types of students — nor let them influence formal job evaluations, pay and promotions.

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Campaigns Differ on How to Help With College Costs

The price of college continues to surge, and financial aid isn't keeping up. The Wall Street meltdown has hammered the stock market and college savings. And a college degree is ever more essential for finding a good job.

No wonder polls show voters want to know what, if anything, the two presidential candidates would do to make college more affordable.

Read full article EdWeek

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Panel Urges Reduced Use of College-Admission Tests

As legions of high school students prepare to spend long Saturday mornings this fall taking the SAT or ACT college-entrance tests, a national commission is recommending that colleges and universities should consider dropping the tests as a requirement for college entry.

Read full article EducationWeek

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Schools Issue Laptops to Eighth Graders

It's Christmas this week for eighth graders in Nebraska and New Mexico. According to local news reports, several school districts in both states have issued personal laptops to every eighth grader to use at school and at home this coming school year. I knew these one-laptop-per-student programs were common at the high school level. But now that middle schools are issuing laptops to eighth graders, people are naturally questioning the wisdom of the idea.

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Bonuses Given at Schools That Failed

Efforts by the Bloomberg administration to add accountability to the public school system have included moving quickly to shut down schools deemed beyond repair, and rewarding those that make significant progress on standardized tests. Those initiatives seemed to collide last week, when teachers and principals at five of the failed schools earned cash bonuses for their successes.

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U.S. community colleges at a 'turning point'

By Betty Young's count, it's been nearly three years since Jay Leno has made any cracks at the expense of community colleges. She should know: In the fall of 2005, after he had taken what she thought was a string of cheap shots, Young rode her Harley-Davidson more than halfway across the country to his Tonight Show studios and asked him to lay off.

He made no promises, but Young, a graduate and longtime president of community colleges, considers Leno's silence on the subject these days a victory. Perhaps more important, her public relations trek served as a sort of rallying cry for community college leaders nationwide. Tired of their image as the Rodney Dangerfields of higher education, they have become increasingly vocal in their demand for respect. Nothing less than the nation's economic future is at stake, they argue.

Read Article USA Today

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McCain - Obama: Debate about education

In TV Ads on School Issues, Campaigns Reach Back Years to Question the Opposition
By David J. Hoff

The campaigns of Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama engaged in a sharp and testy exchange on education last week, making the topic the center of debate for the first time since the long race for the presidency began.

Read full article EducationWeek

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Don't let college bankrupt you

For all the scare stories this spring about how hard it was going to be for students to get loans, the loan season is ending quietly with money secured. But I have a different take on this story. Why are we glad that students and parents find it so easy to get further into hock? Students who borrow are graduating with a median $20,000 in education debt that schools know about (that doesn't count direct loans from other places where students borrow, like banks). Kids have no idea how tough it could be to repay or what might happen if they can't (for some horror stories, see studentloanjustice.org). Families starting to think about college should troll for places they can afford, while borrowing as little money as possible.

Read full article NewsWeek

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