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Call it the Common Core Curve. The New York Times reports that the higher performance expectations cited frequently by Common Core curriculum advocates turned out to be a little embarrassing to Empire State educators when it came to proficiency in algebra. Under the new curriculum, performance on the statewide aptitude tests dropped from a pre-CC 72% to 63%. The answer? In New York, one proposal is to lower the bar: In 2013, concerned that high school graduates were not prepared for college, the State Board of Regents revamped the exams students must pass to graduate, starting with the English...

n an online rant, a Bronx public school principal has likened standardized testing to slavery, redlining and crack cocaine in damaging the lives of minorities. “Public school high-stakes standardized testing is a form of modern-day slavery, and it is designed to continue the proliferation of inequality,” Cornerstone Academy for Social Action Middle School Principal Jamaal Bowman says in an Aug. 31 blog entry titled “The Tyranny of Standardized Testing.” “America was born of horror for black people and that horror continues today for brown and poor people as well. Slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, crack cocaine and now standardized testing were...

China Just Flew This Gigantic Airship To the Edge Of Space The technology could have communications and military advantages for China. China just flew a 250-foot airship to near the top of the Earth's atmosphere. The solar-powered behemoth can stay airborne for half a year and requires no fuel to get it more than 12 miles into the air—just fill it with helium and let it go; the sun powers it once it reaches its cruising altitude. Airships predate airplanes, but have been largely supplanted by them. However, they remain superior for pretty much anything that doesn’t require the speed...

The existence of parallel universes may seem like something cooked up by science fiction writers, with little relevance to modern theoretical physics. But the idea that we live in a 'multiverse' made up of an infinite number of parallel universes has long been considered a scientific possibility - although it is still a matter of vigorous debate among physicists. The race is now on to find a way to test the theory, including searching the sky for signs of collisions with other universes. It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory, it...

One thing about teaching that is easy for parents, policy-makers and others to forget is that working with students for hours every weekday to help them learn is very, very hard work. Even in the best of schools and even with supportive administrators, teachers have unrelenting jobs. In recent years, a growing number of teachers have found that reforms which force them to test students more than ever, collect more data than ever and attend more meetings than ever, are making the job literally impossible. That’s what happened to Scott Ervin, who has worked as a teacher, principal and discipline...

Editor's Note: this column was co-authored by Lisa Henson, an attorney, activist, and mom, regarding the No Child Left Behind Re-authorization and the Common Core testing opt-out movement.The latest attempt to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB), sponsored by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patti Murray (D-WA) and euphemistically named the Every Child Achieves Act), has surprisingly gained bi-partisan support. But it targets the Opt-Out movement, one of the great grassroots phenomena. Here’s what’s going on.For decades, education policy-making has been increasingly centralized. Legislatures, local boards of education, and parents have been marginalized. In 2002, NCLB made things worse. Building on prior...

An estimated 8,000 Chinese students studying in America were expelled last year for cheating or for extremely poor academic performance, a survey by a company catering to Chinese students has found.The report was put together by WholeRen Education, which served the Chinese market, and was originally written in Chinese. It was translated by The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog, which noticed the big expulsion figure. Of the approximately 8,000 expulsions, more than 80 percent were due to poor academic performance or cheating.According to the International Institute of Education, there were 274,439 Chinese students attending U.S. universities in the...

Percentage of African-Americans in U.S. Police Departments Remains Flat Since 2007 But police hiring of other minorities has increased, report shows By Ben Kesling and Cameron McWhirter May 14, 2015 2:43 p.m. ET 28 COMMENTS The percentage of African-Americans in U.S. police departments has remained flat since before the recession, even as police hiring of other minorities has increased, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey released Thursday. A lack of black officers, especially in communities with large African-American populations, has been cited frequently in the wake of police-involved deaths of black residents that sparked riots in cities from...

None from first-ever group of female soldiers training to be Army Rangers advance through first round: officials BY Rachelle Blidner NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, May 9, 2015, 5:24 PM The first-ever female soldiers allowed to train to be Army Rangers did not make it through the first round of the course, officials said Friday. Eight women and 101 men who made it through the first tests of the 20-day Crawl Phase will have to try again to pass the last few at one of the toughest soldier training schools, officials said.

"Don't know much about history" -- Sam Cooke It's an old joke, but one that is a commentary on our times. A pollster asks: "What do you think about the level of ignorance and apathy in the country?" The person replies: "I don't know and I don't care." Each week, Jesse Watters of Fox News interviews mostly young people about politics, government, current events and history. He claims their displays of ignorance are not edited. The worst part is that the interviewees don't seem to care that they know little about their government and country. In a recent episode, interviewees...

A jury has reached guilty verdicts in 11 of 12 defendants in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter read verdicts for 26 counts Wednesday afternoon. Only one person, Dessa Curb, was found not-guilty on all counts. The decision comes 7 years after the first investigation by the Atlanta Journal Constitution. A grand jury indicted 35 educators in March 2013. Twenty-one took plea deals, and another defendant, former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall, died.

VANCOUVER – Spurned by U.S. regulators, Amazon.com has turned to the one country where flying delivery robots are still welcome: Canada. On Monday, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed that the online retail giant is testing its latest prototypes for package-carrying drones at a top-secret site in British Columbia. “We are rapidly experimenting and iterating on Amazon Prime Air … including outdoors at a rural test site in Canada,” wrote Amazon spokesperson Kristen Kish in an email to the National Post. --- Located a mere 600 metres from the U.S. border, the Canadian testing grounds fulfill a lingering threat by Amazon...

As Americans, we tend to be pretty full of ourselves, and this is especially true of our young people. But do we really have reason for such pride? According to a shocking new report from the Educational Testing Service, Americans between the ages of 20 and 34 are way behind young adults in other industrialized nations when it comes to literacy, mathematics and technological proficiency. Even though more Americans than ever are going to college, we continue to fall farther and farther behind intellectually. So what does this say about us? Sadly, the truth is that Americans are stupid. Our...

Sixty-one years ago on an island in the South Pacific, scientists and military officers, fishermen and Marshall Islands natives observed first-hand what Armageddon would be like. And it almost killed them all. The Atomic Energy Commission code-named the nuclear test Castle Bravo. The March 1, 1954 experiment was the first thermonuclear explosion based on practical technology that would lead to a deliverable H-bomb for the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command—part of the Operation Castle series of tests needed to manufacture the high-yield weapons. Bravo was the worst radiological disaster in American atomic testing history—but the test provided information that led...

Ahead of the controversial Common Core exams being administered across the country, a judge ruled Tuesday that the state of Missouri’s membership with a testing company aligned with the Common Core State Standards is illegal, the Associated Press reported. Missouri conducts its Common Core math and English exams in grades three through eight under by the Smarter Balanced Consortium of 16 states, out of more than 40, who have adopted the standards. Cole County, Missouri Circuit Judge Daniel Green said the state’s membership with the testing company is “illegal interstate compact not authorized by the U.S. Congress.” snip Two private...

Document ISGP-2003-00300134 contains Top Secret And Personal letters that carry Saddam orders to do radiation and biological testing on the Presidential sites that were attacked by the US in December 1998. Beginning of translation of the first top secret and personal memo In the Name of God the Most Merciful The Most Compassionate Top Secret And Personal The Republic of Iraq The Presidential Secretariat Number: 537304/1 18/12/1998 ORDER Mr. President The Leader (God Protects Him) Order: Form committees from the Ministry of Health and the Military Industrialization Commission and The Atomic Energy Organization and The Special Security Service with its...

Microsoft is enjoying a considerable effort on the part of testers for Windows 10, who are reporting a considerable number of bugs and helping push the new operating system along quickly.Gabe Aul, engineering general manager for the Operating Systems Group at Microsoft, made his December blog update on Windows all about fixes and improvements, and there are a lot. He said that more 1.5 million registered Windows Insiders are banging away at Windows 10, about 450,000 of whom are considered "highly active." This is much higher than any previous public beta for Windows.Microsoft has been receiving feedback from the Windows...

Here’s a cheeky way to do math. Kim Kardashian’s naked butt broke the internet — but now it’s helping to fix students’ understanding of basic geometry. Catalyst, a test prep company, is using the ultimate semi-circle in its latest pop-culture-inspired questions to get kids primed for the SAT. (See questions below). Catalyst’s interest in Kardashian’s image from the cover of Paper magazine is not just sexploitation. It’s downright Platonic. “Kim Kardashian’s backside is almost perfectly circular,” company founder Jared Friedland tells the Daily News. “As soon as we saw that, it occurred to me that we could teach three types...

Hey, West: Not everyone in Africa has Ebola. In fact, most Africans are scared you'll give it to them Rwanda is not cool with the fact that the U.S. and Spain have Ebola. Not cool at all. The African nation about 2,600 miles east of Liberia hasn’t had a reported case of Ebola yet. Perhaps that spotless record is why its government announced Tuesday that it will screen all Americans and Spaniards trying to enter the nation. That’s right, some Africans are saying you’re too much of an infection risk to enter their country. Now American and Spanish visitors will...

Amarillo, TX - Scammers are now taking advantage of people's fear of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and are using the disease to make a profit. While nearly 2,000 people have been infected with the Ebola virus in West Africa, the United States has yet to see any confirmed cases of the disease. However, that isn't stopping some scammers from trying to make a quick buck at a time when the fatal disease is making headlines. Products claiming to either treat or prevent Ebola are popping up online. The FDA said they have received numerous consumer complaints of...