December 6, 2006
Education Week, Vol. 26, Issue 14
School Climate & Safety
Opinion
School Safety: A Learning Matter
Cathy Paine discusses the preventative measures schools and communities should take, and also what they should not do, to keep children safe at school.
Education
Opinion
Chat Wrap-Up: Technology and Learning
On Nov. 17, Larry Cuban, Sara Hall, Don Knezek, and Keith R. Krueger answered questions on the ways that educational technology has changed K-12 schooling, and continues to do so.
Education
Events
January
5-10—Science: 2007 Winter Meeting, sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Astronomical Society, for physics teachers, in Seattle. Contact: AAPT, 1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3845; (301) 209-3311; Web site: www.aapt.org/Events/calendar.cfm.
5-10—Science: 2007 Winter Meeting, sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Astronomical Society, for physics teachers, in Seattle. Contact: AAPT, 1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3845; (301) 209-3311; Web site: www.aapt.org/Events/calendar.cfm.
Standards
Opinion
Outsider in the Locker Room
Education professor William A. Proefriedt laments the "self-deception and illusory thinking" behind the insistence that high expectations for students and school officials will produce desired academic results.
Equity & Diversity
Opinion
Putting Single-Sex Schooling Back on Course
Law professor Rosemary Salomone writes that the time is now for educators to put single-sex schooling back on track and to rescue it from "the extreme rhetoric on both sides of a perplexing ideological divide."
Federal
Prepared for College?
It takes support from teachers—and a little courage—for teenagers who don’t speak much English to meet college recruiters who come to their school.
Federal
Team-Teaching Helps Close Language Gap
The St. Paul, Minn., school district has gained notice for its success in educating a large population of students of Hmong heritage who are learning English.
Equity & Diversity
Scholars Debate Outlook for Closing Black-White Gap in IQ
The gap in IQ scores between African-Americans and whites narrowed over the 20th century, agreed experts at a debate held last week. They disagreed, though, on exactly when that narrowing occurred.
School Choice & Charters
Amish Teaching Is Diverse, Author Discovers
An anthropologist who visited Amish schools in five states has published a scholarly book showing such schools are not frozen in time and are diverse in how they educate children to live apart from the world.
Education
‘Not Our Way’
A description of coloring by students, whom Amish call “scholars,” in a school run by the Swartzentruber Amish, the most conservative of Amish groups in the United States.
Science
Video Games Trickle From Rec Rooms to Classrooms
While many educators may see video games as distractions from schoolwork, others are starting to view them as a vehicle for honing students’ mathematical, problem-solving, and reading-comprehension skills.
Accountability
Accreditation Makes Virtual Teachers College ‘Real Thing’
When Western Governors University introduced its teacher-preparation program, there were those who scoffed at the idea that teachers could be trained from scratch—virtually. Now, three years later, it has earned the imprimatur of national accreditation while seeing its enrollment multiply from fewer than 100 students to 4,500.
Mathematics
‘Focal Points’ Being Eyed in Math-Standards Revisions
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is promoting its new, much-publicized curriculum guidelines among state officials and textbook publishers, two crucial audiences for the organization as it seeks to refine how that subject is taught.
Law & Courts
Dallas School Roiled by Segregation Ruling
A civil rights group criticized Dallas school officials last week because they haven’t removed an elementary school principal who was found by a federal judge to be illegally segregating African-American and Latino children from their non-Hispanic white peers.
Education
People in the News
Lawrence "Bud" Bergie
Lawrence "Bud" Bergie has been hired as the chief information officer for the 29,500-student Pittsburgh public school district. Mr. Bergie, 51, is currently a senior consulting partner with Sapient Consulting Group, a Chicago- based corporate-consulting firm.
College & Workforce Readiness
Math, Science Academies Favored to Challenge Top-Tier Students
Yearlong research projects. Courses in quantum mechanics and vector calculus. These may sound like staples of the college experience, but such demands are also the norm at a particular brand of high school around the country: math and science academies, which offer students with superior talent in those subjects a demanding, highly concentrated academic environment.
Education
People in the News
Robert Rayborn
Robert Rayborn has been named the head of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Assessment for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit organization that provides research-and-development assistance. Mr. Rayborn, 57, was most recently the president and chief operations manager of Concord, Calif.-based TruNorth Research, which specializes in creating English-Spanish vocabulary lists for California students.
Education
People in the News
J.D. Hoye
J.D. Hoye has been appointed the president of the National Academy Foundation, a New York City-based philanthropy that supports career-themed academies designed to prepare high school students for future jobs. Ms. Hoye, 52, is currently the president of Keep the Change, an Aptos, Calif.-based company that specializes in workforce development and education reform.
School Choice & Charters
A National Roundup
Foundation Donates $10.5 Million to ‘Green Dot’ Charters in L.A.
Green Dot Public Schools, which operates 10 charter high schools in Los Angeles, has been awarded a $10.5 million grant from the Broad Foundation.
Federal
U.S. Urged to Rethink NCLB ‘Tools’
With more U.S. public schools entering the restructuring phase under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, experts convened in Washington last week agreed that the remedies for schools and districts that don’t meet their achievement targets have so far had more bark than bite.
School & District Management
Institute’s Grads Run Ky. District
Graduates of a statewide parent institute will form a majority on the school board in the 35,000-student Fayette County district in Lexington, Ky., starting in January.
School Choice & Charters
High Court Declines to Hear Maine ‘Tuitioning’ Case
The U.S. Supreme Court last week rebuffed an appeal by eight Maine families who contend that their state has wrongly refused to pay their children’s tuition at religious high schools because the state only provides such benefits for certain students enrolled in nonreligious private schools.
Education
Letter to the Editor
Let Accountability Begin With the NCLB Law Itself
The federal No Child Left Behind Act has poisoned schools with inappropriate and excessive testing, reduced reading instruction to mindless phonemic-awareness and phonics exercises, and encouraged the elimination of in-school free reading.
Federal
U.S. Eyes Accreditation in Higher Ed. Push
The Department of Education is considering ideas for revamping accreditation of higher education to place greater emphasis on measuring student-learning outcomes and making data about individual colleges more accessible to the public.
Education
Letter to the Editor
School Crime Data Are Inadequately Tabulated
Patrick Mattimore’s Nov. 8, 2006, letter to the editor claiming that violent crimes in schools are neither increasing nor widespread cites multiple academic and federal sources supporting such an assertion.
Education
Letter to the Editor
No Child Left Behind Law ‘Must Be Stopped’
The No Child Left Behind Act comes up for renewal in 2007. If it is reauthorized, virtually all of the country’s public schools will be labeled as failing by 2014, and many will be closed or privatized. Educators need to launch a campaign to save our schools from this legislation.
Education
Letter to the Editor
Clarifying the Two Types of Childhood Diabetes
Your Nov. 8, 2006, Health Update item "NIH Study of Children Aimed at Preventing Juvenile Diabetes" is confusing and misleading. The piece mixes up juvenile—or type 1—diabetes with type 2 diabetes (which previously was known as adult-onset diabetes).
Federal
Glitches, Data Errors Delay Illinois Test-Score Release
More than eight months after taking Illinois’ achievement test, about 1 million of that state’s public school students and their districts still don’t know the results because of incomplete testing materials, scoring glitches, and data-entry errors.