November 10, 1982
Voters in two states had an opportunity to alter the composition of their state boards of education. In Mississippi, they opted for the change; in Arizona, they retained the status quo.
In addition, the department said public outcry over the proposed revisions "has brought to light a number of opportunities to improve upon" the proposal that Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell unveiled Aug. 4.
P. Michael Timpane, dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, spent six months in 1981 studying the business world's interest in urban public schools. His work, supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, resulted in a report entitled "Corporations and Public Education in the Cities." Thomas Toch spoke with Mr. Timpane recently about the findings in the report and his perspective on the issues surrounding corporate involvement in public education.
Mr. Knapp, who has been serving as the science foundation's director of mathematics and physical sciences, will replace John B. Slaughter. Mr. Slaughter recently left the foundation to become chancellor of the University of Maryland at College Park.
In unanimously reversing a lower state-court ruling, the appellate court found that Joseph Arneson had been denied his due-process rights as a tenured teacher when Unified School District 236 in Lebanon, Kan., did not renew his contract for the 1981-82 school year.
Sheldon Berman, a social-studies teacher who is taking a year off to direct the organization's efforts, estimated that at least 100 public and private schools in greater Boston, and 300 to 500 others elsewhere in the country, held special classes, convened meetings of parents and teachers, or worked nuclear issues into the day's regularly scheduled science, art, English, and even physical-education classes.
Under a mandate from the Florida legislature, the state department of education administered a four-hour "College-Level Academic Skills Test" (clast) to more than 16,000 sophomores at 28 community colleges and 7 state universities in its public-college system. According to Ernest R. Ross, director of the testing program, the examination's subtests in reading, writing, and computation skills were developed from the recommendations of faculty task forces in the state system. Their job was to identify the skills all students should have to qualify for an associate degree or to complete their sophomore year at a four-year institution.
The California proposition would have allowed the state to lend textbooks to private schools; the Massachussetts measure would have stricken language from the state constitution prohibiting the state from aiding or maintaining private schools.
Leaders of numerous New Right political organizations said that like-minded members of Congress were able "to minimize their losses" in last week's elections and should be able to press forward with their "social-issues agenda" by emphasizing local lobbying efforts.
"The decline of public confidence in education is but a reflection of a much more encompassing and pervasive erosion of confidence in public authority and public institutions," says Hans Weiler of the university's Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance.
The School Nurse Achievement Program (snap) has been piloted in about 12 states since 1980 through a grant from the Education Department's Office of Special Education.
According to Susan Raymond, the group's vice president for program operations, the center will use a pragmatic and "problem-based" approach to link corporate interests with the search for solutions to public problems.
Federal attorneys announced on Oct. 29 that they had filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan against the Highland Falls-Fort Montgomery Central School District, which is surrounded by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
The survey, "Militarism in Textbooks: An Analysis," is believed to be the first to look at how history texts treat the subjects of war and the military. It was conducted for the Council on Interrracial Books for Children, a New York-based nonprofit organization concerned about equitable representations of minorities in textbooks and children's books. Sharon Wigutoff, an analyst of children's books, and Sergiu Herscovici, a political-science researcher at the City University of New York, reviewed the books for the council.
Stanley Cochran, a teacher in the Fort Myers, Fla., public-school sys-tem, spurned orders to use the new text in his general-chemistry classes because he said the book was "insulting" and "comic-like."
California's Wilson C. Riles, superintendent of the nation's largest state system of public schools, was defeated last week in his bid for a fourth term by William Honig, a lawyer who has spent much of his career in education.
Albert Shanker, president of the 600,000-member union, described the shortage of qualified teachers as "just the tip of the iceberg." Mr. Shanker asked the group to study the overall labor market in relation to public education.