Education News: June 6 & June 13, 2008

Following are some of the top headlines from the world of education for the week ending June 6 & June 13, 2008.

Mandated Tutoring Not Helping Maryland, Virginia Scores
(Source:  The Washington Post, 6/13/08):  New research from the Center for Research in Educational Policy indicates that the tutoring that comes as a result of the No Child Left Behind law does not seem to be helping Maryland or Virginia students improve their test scores.  According to the 2002 federal education law, schools whose students don’t perform well enough on math and reading tests must use federal funds to provide free tutoring.  While some isolated tutoring companies are helping students improve, most are not.

Bush Loyalist Fights Foes of ‘No Child’ Law
(Source:  The New York Times, 6/12/08):  U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is waging an intense campaign to ensure that the No Child Left Behind law remains in effect after President Bush leaves office.  The law has changed the face of public education in the U.S., but has remained unpopular and may well be overturned.  Secretary Spellings has visited over 20 states to speak on the law’s merits and assure the public that she will do everything in her power to make necessary changes to the law.

Gas Prices Making Schools Ponder 4-Day Week
(Source:  The Lexington Herald-Ledger, 6/12/08):  Rising fuel costs have prompted five or six Kentucky school districts to consider switching to a four-day school week.  The districts will review research on this practice before deciding whether to make the switch.

Parents to Help Govern Baltimore Schools
(Source:  The Baltimore Sun, 6/11/08):   Baltimore education officials have unveiled a new plan to dramatically increase parental participation in the city’s public schools.  Facets of the plan include establishing PTA groups at schools that don’t have them, forming small committees of parents and community members to evaluate principals, and offering classes to help parents prepare for their children’s transitions to middle school and high school.

Survey: Homework, ‘Other Things’ Keep Kids from Reading
(Source: USA Today, 6/11/08):  New survey results released by Scholastic found that homework and a preference for doing other things were the two top reasons kids gave for not reading for pleasure.  The survey also found that children aged 9 and up don’t draw much of a distinction between reading books and reading online.  According to the new research, 22 percent of children rarely, if ever, read for pleasure.

L.A. Teachers Stage Massive Protests over Budget Cuts
(Source:  The Los Angeles Times, 6/6/08):  A majority of teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District spent the first hour of the school day on Friday, June 6th, staging massive protests against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest budget proposal, which cuts funding for certain programs and does not include a cost-of-living increase.  Some parents and students participated in the protests as well.

Parents Find Frustration with Process at NYC Schools
(Source: The New York Times, 6/6/08):  In an attempt to equalize access to New York City’s pre-kindergarten programs and middle schools, the city instituted a new streamlined application process to replace the old patchwork one, but glitches multiplied.  The intention of the new system was to make the application process fairer, but in 200 cases or more, it failed to give priority to siblings of current students and to prospective students who lived in the neighborhoods of the schools they applied to.

Leaders of 4 ‘F’ Schools Are Now Up for Bonuses
(Source:  The New York Times, 6/6/08):  Last fall, Mayor Michael Bloomberg rolled out a new rating scheme for New York City schools that assigned to each a grade ‘A’ through ‘F’.  But this spring, the principals and assistant principals at four schools that received an ‘F’ and five that received a ‘D’ are eligible for performance-based bonuses ranging from $5500 to $15,000 for principals and from $2750 to $7500 for assistant principals.  The discrepancy arose from using different measuring systems for the administrator bonuses and the schools’ letter grades.

Accelerated Math Adds Up to a Division over Merits
(Source:  The Washington Post, 6/4/08):  Schools across the country are pushing more and more students to complete Algebra I by the end of middle school as part of a national goal to see 80 percent of eighth graders completing the course by 2010.  At many schools, including some in the DC area, schools are pushing even harder, prompting students to go two and three years beyond their grade level in math.

Opponents of Evolution Adopting a New Strategy
(Source:  The New York Times, 6/4/08):  Opponents of the theory of evolution have gradually abandoned strategies that do not pass courts’ muster and are now focusing on strategies that sometimes do.  For instance, rather than petitioning for intelligent design to be taught alongside evolution, anti-evolution groups are now demanding that the theory’s weaknesses be presented alongside its strengths.  One such case is now playing out in a Texas court and could have large ramifications for the entire country.  Texas is the country’s largest textbook customer, and textbook publishers are often unwilling to create different versions of their books for different states.

To Keep Kids Safe, Chicagoans Join the Walk to School
(Source:  The Christian Science Monitor, 6/3/08):  In one area of Chicago, parents, volunteers, and police accompany area students to and from school each day in an effort to curb the growing problem of youth violence that has been plaguing the city.  Since the start of the school year, 24 Chicago public school students have been slain.  Throughout the city, journalists, clergymen, public officials, and others have been working to raise awareness about the problem and combat it, but only time will tell if their efforts will be successful.