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HOUSTON (AP) -- Houston is about to become the biggest school district in the nation to tie teachers' pay to their students' test scores. School Superintendent Abe Saavedra wants to offer teachers as much as $3,000 more per school year if their students improve on state and national tests. The program could eventually grow to as much as $10,000 in merit pay. The school board is set to vote on the plan Thursday. Five of the nine board members have said they support it. "School systems traditionally have been paying the best teacher the same amount as we pay the...

October 8, 2005 -- The City Council Education Committee yesterday paved the way for a new bill requiring the city to translate report cards and other school-related documents into nine languages. The Department of Education already translates many documents into Spanish, Russian and Chinese and is aiming to provide services in six other languages through an expanded translation unit this fall. But supporters of the bill said the department's efforts do not go far enough. Councilman Hiram Monserrate (D-Queens), lead sponsor of the bill known as the "Education Equity Act," said the measure attempts "to engage parents who may not...

Beginning this year, the University of Washington will no longer automatically admit top students based on their high-school grades and test scores. The university is ditching a statewide student-ranking system called the Admissions Index, which it relied on to admit about half its students. The university is also getting rid of an internal system called the "grid," which ranked remaining students on a combination of academic and personal factors. Instead, university staffers plan to read and review every one of the 16,000 annual freshmen applications to come up with a "holistic" assessment of each candidate. Besides academic performance, they will...

If Sen. John F. kerry was to spend all of the money from the Irag war on domestic plans. wouldn't there still be this defisit.

<p>August 11, 2003 -- He's the namesake of the city's new gay high school - but slain civil-rights leader Harvey Milk would have opposed singling out homosexual youths, a relative says. Andy Milk, nephew of the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco, said his uncle fought for integration and acceptance of gays and other minorities into mainstream society, not segregation.</p>

Charter schools, regarded by hundreds of thousands of families as an alternative to low-performing public schools, rely heavily on young, inexperienced, uncredentialed teachers and often do not have the resources to provide the instructional help that many of their students need, a new study has found. The study, which was conducted by researchers at the University of California and Stanford University and draws on a national survey of charter school educators, suggests that some charter schools, particularly those serving low-income and minority students, may be replicating problems of the public schools they were intended to replace. "Unless government can equalize...