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Nineteen-year-old man is eighth person to die in Glynn County massacre Police to offer $25,000 reward for information in case By Terry Dickson, Jim Schoettler, Teresa Stepzinski Story updated at 7:51 PM on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2009 Related Stories » Glynn police chief says he's uncertain if killer of 7 still on loose BRUNSWICK, Ga. - The only survivor among four siblings attacked in a Glynn County mobile home massacre died today, increasing the carnage to eight dead, police said tonight.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. - As cryptic as ever, Glynn County Police Chief Matt Doering wouldn't say this afternoon whether the man charged with tampering with evidence and obstructing police in their probe of Saturday's mobile home massacre is tied to the deaths.

FORT GORDON, Ga. — By his own account, Donte’ A. Dungey had no motivation in high school, sleeping through classes and sometimes showing up only for the free lunch to reduce the burden on his mother, who was struggling with nine other children. Held back three times and scheduled to enter the 10th grade at nearly 18, he knew that “high school just wasn’t going to work for me,” he said. But he was also ready to change. More than five months ago, Mr. Dungey took up residence in a program for dropouts called Youth Challenge, run by the National...

A Colorado school district does away with grade levels To overcome low test scores and a high dropout rate, the district is implementing radical reforms. Westminster, Colo. - School districts across the US are trying to improve student performance and low test scores. But few have taken as radical an approach as Adams 50. For starters, when the elementary and middle-school students come back next fall, there won't be any grade levels – or traditional grades, for that matter. And those are only the most visible changes in a district that, striving to reverse dismal test scores and a soaring...

...When the Diocese of Brooklyn last week proposed closing 14 more elementary schools, it was not the deepest but only the latest of a thousand cuts suffered, one tearful closing announcement at a time, as enrollment in the nation’s Catholic schools has steadily dropped by more than half from its peak of five million 40 years ago... (snip) The Archdiocese of Chicago and dioceses in Memphis and Wichita, Kan., have begun or expanded radical experiments in recruiting new students and financing their educations. Administrators in a dozen dioceses, including Brooklyn’s, are rethinking the century-old norms of parish-run schools, where overworked...

Teachers unions routinely claim that the interests of students are their top priority. So we would be interested to hear how the Pennsylvania affiliate of the National Education Association explains the proliferation of teacher walkouts in the middle of the school year. According to a recent study by the Allegheny Institute, Pennsylvania is once again the worst state in the country for teacher strikes. No less than 42% of all teacher walkouts nationwide occur in the Keystone State, leaving kids sidelined and parents scrambling to juggle work and family, potentially on as little as 48 hours notice required by state...

This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy. Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates. Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an...

BAGHDAD -- A sandstorm was forming out in the desert, and the temperature was only in the 80s as we gathered in the pre-dawn darkness earlier this fall, assembling at the starting line of the Akron Half Marathon here. On Sept. 14, two weeks before the Akron Marathon was run in Ohio, its organizers coordinated the staging of a shadow race here at the Camp Victory complex. This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful that I was able to run a half-marathon in Baghdad. I am grateful not just for the joy of completing the race, but for what the ability to hold...

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported an important effect of the 2008 presidential campaign: For the first time, traffic at left-leaning political Web sites overtook traffic at right-leaning competitors. The Drudge Report and Free Republic had the largest number of unique visitors in September 2007, but in September 2008, that honor went to the Huffington Post. Political strategists have been analyzing the impact of the Internet on American political communication since at least the mid-1990s.

Can Barack Obama bring change to American education? The answer is: Yes he can. The question, however, is whether he actually will...Democrats are fervent supporters of public education, and the party genuinely wants to help disadvantaged kids stuck in bad schools. But it resists bold action....The explanation lies in its longstanding alliance with the teachers' unions...The Democrats benefit enormously from all this firepower, and they know what they need to do to keep it. They need to stay inside the box. And they have done just that. Democrats favor educational "change" -- as long as it doesn't affect anyone's job,...

Nearly two decades have passed since the enactment of the landmark Milwaukee Parental Choice Program by the Wisconsin legislature. The program and its many supporters had hoped this experiment in school choice would lead the way in transforming American schools. But it is by now clear that aggressive reforms to bring market principles to American education have failed to live up to their billing. It is time to find out two things: What happened? And what comes next?

Barack Obama says he believes in universal preschool and if he's elected president he'll pump "billions of dollars into early childhood education." Universal preschool is now second only to universal health care on the liberal policy wish list.... ..."Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes," says James Heckman, a University of Chicago Noble laureate in economics whose work Mr. Obama and preschool activists routinely cite. "But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations."... ...If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children....

Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid. The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time. [snip] Most states that report strong performances on their own tests do poorly on the more rigorous and respected National Assessment of Educational Progress,...

Teachers' unions are expert at presenting the interests of their members and of public school students as one and the same. Which is why it's always illuminating to see how the nation's largest teachers' union, the National Education Association, spends its political money.[snip]It's a shame the NEA doesn't spend as much money and effort trying to improve lousy schools as it does trying to keep taxes high.

...As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school. America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed...

It's an AP article so I can't excerpt, just summarize. Sweden generally has a system of government schools with a national curriculum, but for the past 16 years has also allowed "independent" private schools, which are government funded, cannot charge tuition, but can choose their own teaching methods. Some comparison to vouchers in our country, discussion of methods schools use to attract students, and some of the differences between private and public schools there.

...Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others...

The District will use a $7.5 million education reserve fund to pay for the seven former Catholic schools slated to reopen as secular charter schools next month, and it will be able to find more money if necessary, officials said this week. The D.C. Council allocated $366 million in May for 63 charter schools as part of its fiscal 2009 budget. Financing for the Center City Public Charter Schools was omitted, officials said, because Center City's application was not approved by the charter school board until June 16.The Catholic school conversions are unusual, they said, because most charters spend 12...

By usual measures of student progress, America's high school career academies have been a failure. One of the longest and most scientific education studies ever conducted concluded they did not improve test scores or graduation rates or college success for urban youth. People like me, obsessed with raising student achievement, saw those numbers and said: Well, too bad. Let's try something else. And yet, because the career academy research by the New York-based MDRC (formerly known as the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.) was so detailed and professional, we have just learned that the academies accomplished something perhaps even better than...

Matthew Nuti finished 10th grade at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology with much to be proud of. He excelled in oratory on the Model United Nations team. He was a starting lineman in junior varsity football. His English teacher complimented his classroom wit. Like virtually all students at the very selective public magnet school in Fairfax County, he scored near the top on the Virginia state Standards of Learning exams. Oh, and he had a 2.8 grade point average for the school year. At most schools, that would be a B-minus, not too bad, but at Jefferson...