August 28, 1985
U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman's Aug. 14 order stemmed from a 1981 motion by the Metropolitan Nashville Public School System seeking to force the state to pick up all its desegregation costs since 1971, when busing was first required in the 69,000-student, countywide district.
The report synthesizes existing research on eight programs initiated during the Great Society era, including Chapter 1 aid to disadvantaged children, Head Start, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, and the Job Corps. According to the committee, the research "demonstrates the proven success and cost-effectiveness" of federal efforts to help impoverished children.
As part of a statewide campaign to reduce its tax load by $50 million, the General Motors Corporation has so far persuaded four Michigan communities to lower their assessments on gm plants, reducing local funds available to schools in those areas.
gm's tax-cutting campaign follows a similar effort by the Ford Motor Company to reduce its property taxes in Dearborn. If successful, it could force the state to increase aid to the districts involved or lead to a reduction in aid to other districts and the elimination of programs. An increase in local taxes is a third possibility.
Among a core group of 371 schools that participated in both surveys, annual support increased by an average of 6.6 percent. The totals represented growth in the proportion of gifts by alumni and other friends (from 70 to 75.5 percent) and a slight decline in the proportion of foundation and corporate donations.
The academic group's 20-member board of directors had voted in June to seek membership on the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.
State spending on schools will rise by 8.6 percent in fiscal 1986, compared with an overall spending increase of 6.8 percent, the report states. Spending on higher education will rise by 8.3 percent.
The study compared 1980 test results of a randomly selected nationwide sample of high-school seniors at public, private, and parochial schools with those of a similar group of students who took the examination in 1960.
Mastery-learning approaches to education are difficult to design and implement, they say, because teachers have to understand and believe in the concepts. When they don't, the approach can be mechanistic and fragmented.
Edmund and Sharon Pangelinan were released after Morgan County District Judge David Bibb ruled that their children, whom the couple removed from the Decatur City Schools on religious grounds in 1983 and kept in hiding in Tennessee, could not be considered "unsupervised, truant, and out of control" un-der Alabama law at the time the state filed its truancy suit, according to A. Eric Johnston, the couple's lawyer.
In the case, U.S. District Judge Jack E. Tanner in 1983 ruled that Washington was guilty of sex-based wage discrimination and awarded back pay and substantial pay increases to more than 14,000 women employees. (See Education Week, Sept. 28 and Nov. 23, 1983.)
Ms. Ridler, the director of the Columbia Heights Child Care Center near Minneapolis, is encouraging her staff and her charges' parents to master the venerable language of Pig Latin, on the theory that "chil-dren don't need to know everything."
Mr. Woo bases his conclusion on an examination of the faculty-recruitment methods used by colleges and universities.