Free Republic

With the increasing emphasis on standardized testing over the past decade, large urban school systems have famously declared an end to so-called social promotion among youngsters lacking basic skills...Now the 8,400-student East Ramapo school district in this verdant stretch west of the Palisades is going further, having revived a controversial retention practice widely denounced in the 1980s to not only hold back nearly 12 percent of its first graders this spring but to segregate them in a separate classroom come fall. ...the principal of Hempstead Elementary here, said that merely holding back students without a special program to address their...

One of the most ambitious pay-for-performance initiatives in Washington area schools is drawing strong teacher interest and local union support even though many national labor leaders have long asserted that it is unfair to link teachers' paychecks directly to their students' test scores.... ...The program's criteria exclude some teachers from certain bonus pools. Half of the bonus money is tied to scores on state tests given in third through eighth grades and in high school: Up to $2,500 is won when the school meets test score targets, and up to $2,500 is given for improving a given class's scores. The...

Students are performing better on state reading and math tests since enactment of the landmark No Child Left Behind law six years ago, according to an independent study [by the District-based Center on Education Policy] released yesterday.[snip]Because standards vary from state to state, some analysts have questioned the reliability of state tests as a gauge of academic performance. The study, which included data from 50 states, found that achievement on state reading and math exams has improved in most of them. The trend is largely mirrored on national exams, the study found, although the gains tend to be smaller. One...

...Governments from Los Angeles to Scotland may not much like President Hugo Chavez's brand of Cuba-inspired socialism but they will soon try to replicate Venezuela's achievements on their own streets... ...About 200 children gather for four hours of music and choral practice six days a week in what Venezuelans simply call "The System." "The orchestra is my family, nothing has ever grabbed me like this before," said Francisco Henriques, 14, practicing trombone on the roof of his hillside home, accompanied by his cat, Trumpet. "Music is everything I have ever wished for." As well as instilling discipline and self-esteem, the...

...they take lingering looks at Douglass’s teachers and administrators as they work and at its students as they, more often than not, don’t work. Though eventually the Raymonds (just barely) take sides — they seem not to be fans of Mr. Bush’s program — their dismaying film isn’t really asking whether No Child Left Behind can help Douglass. It’s asking whether anything can. The film finds a few success stories among the school’s 1,100 students, but it is filled largely with teenagers who are drowning in apathy and attitude, those who seem well beyond any “To Sir With Love”-style rescue....

...The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges. “Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

The United States has a long and dishonorable history of dumping the least-qualified teachers into schools that serve poor and minority students....The picture has improved significantly, however, in New York City, where state law has abolished temporary licenses for uncertified teachers, raised standards in teacher preparation programs and spawned innovative strategies for recruiting better teachers. [snip]...The qualification index took into account several factors, including certification, experience, the teacher’s SAT scores and the rank of the undergraduate college the teacher attended....Higher salaries have clearly played a role in strengthening the city’s teacher corps. But the state kicked off the quality movement...

County prosecutors allege Omar Khan, 18, of Coto de Caza, and Tanvir Singh, 18, of Ladera Ranch, broke into Tesoro High School in Las Flores to steal tests and change their own and others' grades on the school computer network.

...It's been decades since schools first outlawed failure and adopted the false mantra that all students are guaranteed success. Our national education law, No Child Left Behind, rests on two mutually exclusive wishful absurdities...schools have to raise standards so they reflect world-class college expectations...At the same time, every student, including those with learning handicaps or simply less than average ability, has to meet those elevated standards, or else the school is in trouble. There's no such thing as high standards that everybody can meet. That's why we can't all make it as major league ballplayers or Marines. The one essential...

....a new study released today by the independent, nonprofit research organization RAND Corp...Among its key findings, the study showed that the children who could especially benefit from preschool are the least likely to be in it, such as, Latinos, blacks, those whose parents have low education and those from economically disadvantaged families. [snip]Josue's mother, Esperanza Juarez, believes preschool has laid solid academic and social foundations for her son's future. "The teachers taught him manners, to wait his turn and to say 'thank you,'" she said. "This is a very good program. It will help him be more successful in his...

A new study argues that the nation’s focus on helping students who are furthest behind may [be] yielding steady academic gains for low-achieving students in recent years at the expense of top students. The study...said those at the bottom moved up faster than those at the top.{snip}The report included results of a survey of a nationally representative sample of 900 teachers. Seven in 10 teachers said their schools were more likely to focus on struggling students than average or advanced students when tracking achievement data and trying to raise test scores. And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they...

Students in the D.C. school voucher program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, generally did no better on reading and math tests after two years than public school peers, a U.S. Education Department report said yesterday.The findings mirror those in previous studies of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program...

This week, a complex and controversial piece of legislation began to make its way through the British parliament. One of the provisions of the bill permits the creation of “savior siblings”...Another is a reduction of the legal time-limit on abortion, which up to now has been 24 weeks. A third provision — and the most controversial of all — permits the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos, or “cybrids,” for medical research...It is this third provision that I want to focus on. [snip]The hybrids under discussion in the British bill are totally different. The idea is to take an animal egg...

For a quarter-century, A Nation at Risk has set the terms of debate on education, with mixed results....Worse yet, Risk has distorted the debate on economic policy. In 1983, the economy really was at risk. Industries such as auto, steel, consumer electronics, and clothing and textiles were closing factories; unemployment approached 10%; and workers' wages were flat lining. Risk offered an explanation that was simple, seductive — and wrong. The report claimed that increased market shares for Japanese automobiles, German machine tools and Korean steel reflected those nation's superior schools. This analysis should have seemed flimsy then — and foolish...

Courtney Crews wiped the tears from her eyes and took a deep breath. She stared at the softball diamond in front of her, pulled the catcher's mask over her face and settled into a crouch behind home plate. [snip] Courtney, 18, tried to narrow her focus as she caught the 50-mph pitches being hurled at her. It was April 8, and Courtney, roughly 10 weeks from graduation, was supposed to be enjoying the final moments of her high school experience, getting ready for the senior prom and making summer vacation plans with classmates. Instead, she was at the end of...

Police charged five Montgomery County teens and one adult yesterday with being linked to what authorities said was a scheme to steal guns from a student's home and sell them to classmates, a sale broken up when a 14-year-old potential customer accidentally fired a bullet into the wall of a restroom stall. The gunshot, at lunchtime Wednesday, jolted the Albert Einstein High School community in Kensington, a campus with some of the premiere academic offerings in southern Montgomery County and one of the most diverse student populations in Maryland. It also revealed divisions within the student and parent community on...

A gunshot in a boys' restroom yesterday morning at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington set off an investigation that yielded three guns and several other weapons, stowed in a student's locker, officials said. Police said students took the guns to school in hopes of selling them. One of the guns went off accidentally as students were examining it in a second-floor restroom, they said. [snip]"The big news here is there was not an intent to harm a student," said Lucille Baur, a police spokeswoman. "Students brought the guns in with the purpose of selling the guns, and in the...

school in Sydney on Monday, smashing windows, terrorizing students and hitting a teacher over the head, police said. Eighteen students were also slightly hurt. The five, between the ages of 14 and 16, were arrested after storming into suburban Merrylands High School and would likely be charged with assault and other crimes, Police Detective Inspector Jim Stewart said... ...when he tried to stop the attackers, and 18 students were treated for cuts from broken glass and other minor injuries, Stewart said...Police were questioning the suspects — who were not identified because they are minors — about their reasons for the...

Twenty-five years ago, the federal government report "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" launched an era of efforts to improve public schools that continues today. ...the report fueled new interest in education reform, launched the standards movement and influenced the Bush administration's creation of the No Child Left Behind law. Here are some key events related to school reform since "A Nation at Risk" was published...

The bottom line is clear, says Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl: The Catholic Church can no longer afford to run a full complement of inner-city parochial schools serving a population that is, by an overwhelming majority, non-Catholic. So, facing a deficit of about $50 million over the next five years, the church is moving to convert at least seven D.C. elementary schools into secular, taxpayer-funded charter schools. "We simply don't have the resources to keep all those schools open," Wuerl said in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors the other day. "We have exhausted the resources available to us."...