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Newspaper investigation digs up evidence of schools cheating on standardized tests Associated Press HOUSTON (AP) — A newspaper investigation has found evidence that a Houston elementary school celebrated for its high test scores obtained at least some of its success from cheating. "You're expected to cheat there," said Donna Garner, a former teacher at Wesley Elementary who said her fellow teachers instructed her on how to give students answers while administering tests. "There's no way those scores are real." The Dallas Morning News investigation also found evidence of cheating at two other schools affiliated with Wesley. Wesley, which has been...

THE ACADEMIC CONNECTION Correction Appended Last December, medical school researchers went to a professional meeting in Puerto Rico with a sense of urgency. Federal drug regulators were reviewing unpublished data from their studies on the use of antidepressants in children and adolescents to see if the drugs increased suicide risks. The group included many of the researchers whose published positive findings had helped persuade doctors to prescribe antidepressants like Paxil, Zoloft and Prozac to young patients. Now, faced with growing safety questions, the researchers had been trying for months to gather all the test data about those and similar drugs...

WASHINGTON - A religious liberties lawsuit brought by a Satan worshipper, a Wiccan witch, a white supremacist, and an adherent of an ancient Viking religion is drawing the impassioned support of major national religious groups as it approaches a hearing before the Supreme Court. The case is potentially the most important religious liberties case on this year's docket, impacting how far a state can go to accommodate the religious practices of its citizens and whether Congress can require states to be more accommodating. The case was filed by a group of Ohio inmates - Jon Cutter, J. Lee Hampton, John...

Link post: access the thread and get your Merry Christmas (Island) greeting using the link below -- and post any discussion and commentary there, of course. Geology Picture of the Week, December 19-25, 2004: Merry Christmas (Island)

The reason it's named Christmas Island is as one would expect: it was discovered on Christmas Day 1643 by Captain William Mynors. Click for double size: And since this is Christmas Island, the posting would not be complete without a couple of pictures of its most famous annual event:

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 15 - Once a week in the shadow of City Hall, a leaf blower blasts air into tubes, lifting up a big bright yellow tent. A line of the homeless, addicts, the mentally disabled and people who say they are "in transition" wait, seemingly oblivious to the cold. They shout to one another good-naturedly. A passer-by might think that someone is offering a free trip to a climate where flamingos preen. In fact, the tent is part of a demonstration project by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that takes rapid H.I.V. testing to city streets....

The Red Rooster III was 90 miles out of San Diego on an afternoon in July when it came across a fisherman's dream, a school of albacore tuna. Suddenly, the charter boat's skipper, John Grabowski, saw a rod flying in the air as a passenger, a 72-year-old man, seized up with a heart attack. Mr. Grabowski ran to get the portable defibrillator kept on board. Shocked with the device, the man appeared to revive, but more shocks were needed. They never came. The device signaled that it was out of power and failed to work again. A replacement battery did...

"The devil made me do it." That age-old excuse for sin, a way to deny personal responsibility for one"s actions, is no longer fashionable. As I wrote in a Creation magazine editorial "Evolution made me do it!" in June 2000, nowadays, whether it"s homosexuality, infidelity or whatever, it"s become, "My genes made me do it." And, because the blind forces of evolution are supposed to be responsible for shaping our genes, that rapidly translates as, "Evolution made me do it". Thus the title of the abovementioned editorial, which pointed to a Time magazine cover story that proclaimed "Infidelity? It"s in...

With his condition deteriorating from Parkinson's disease last year, Steve Kaufman gave up making improvements to his home in Algonquin, Ill. "I couldn't even hold a nail stable," he recalled. Earlier this year, after taking an experimental drug in a clinical trial, Mr. Kaufman built new kitchen cabinets and an outdoor deck. He was so steady he could walk across a narrow piece of lumber like an Olympic gymnast on the balance beam. The drug, however, is no longer available to Mr. Kaufman or other Parkinson's patients in clinical trials. In June, its developer, Amgen, announced that the drug, which...

For years, people like Thomas Sowell have argued that affirmative action regularly places Black students into schools for which they are not educationally qualified, that in so doing it dooms them to less challenging courses and failure. In debates about affirmative action , the performance of Black students on SAT tests is rarely mentioned. It should be. It is not only supportive of his arguments but the most damning evidence of the inadequacy of the urban school systems from which most of these students come. According to the College Board, 1,877 African American students nationwide scored higher than 1300 out...

Our competitive American nature makes it difficult to be out of first place in the world for long. But that’s where we have been in education and we’re doing something about it legislatively. One of the hallmarks of the new national “No Child Left Behind” legislation, written to improve education, is the measurement of student academic achievement. To fulfill this new mandate every State developed rigorous achievement standards and enlisted professional testing companies to prepare subject matter test questions. These tests purport to measure current status and learning growth that validates the States’ standards. Every student at specific grade levels...

What if doctors had a new way to diagnose heart disease that took only seconds and provided pictures so clear it showed every clogged artery, so detailed that it was like holding a living heart in your hand? In fact, that new way exists and is coming into use in scattered areas of the country, and there is wide agreement that it will revolutionize cardiology. The scans can largely replace diagnostic angiograms, the expensive, onerous way of looking for blockages in arteries, and can make diagnosis so easy that doctors would not hesitate to use them. They are expected to...

I am being hassled by my prof. about the evils of standardized testing. I am wondering if you can point me to anything about rebuttals to common liberal talking points on standardized testing. Also I would be interested in details on the NEA's position on NCLB (aka ESEA reauthorization) when it was up for passage in Congress in (I think) 2001.

Viagra, which treats a common but decidedly nonfatal male malady, might soon have a new role treating a rare but life-threatening disease that strikes mainly women. Doctors said yesterday that sildenafil citrate, the ingredient in Pfizer's impotence pill, had proven effective in a clinical trial as a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension - extremely high pressure in the artery carrying blood to the lungs. "It is a very promising new therapy for the treatment of a very severe disease," said H. Ardeschir Ghofrani, an assistant professor at the University of Giessen in Germany, who presented the results at the annual...

I am a 15 -year-old student at Fox Chapel Area High School, and I am writing in regard to the bout of standardized testing that is currently pervading our educational systems. I must admit, there are some benefits to such an exercise, but, in the reality of our world, intelligence cannot be objectively measured. In fact, the very nature of our educational system is a dire reflection of its ideal state; instead of instructing students about ideas that actually have value in this world, teachers are told to edify for the test and to make students needlessly memorize a plethora...

For a prime example of medical screening that has proliferated beyond reason, consider the alarming case of full-body computed tomography scans to detect cancer, cardiovascular disease and other conditions. Narrowly targeted C.T. scans aimed at particular organs are undeniably valuable when used by doctors to pin down a diagnosis in sick patients. But full-body scans to screen healthy individuals for hidden disease have never been shown to be effective, and now there is evidence that the scans may be harmful. A new study finds that the scans impart radiation doses comparable to those received by atomic-bomb survivors in Hiroshima and...

Like members of two different religions, doctors and patients may disparage each other's rituals, but they still worship the same god. In medicine these days, that would be the god of the laboratory, a creature with red-stoppered tubes for fingers and cathode-ray eyes, in whose capacious lap rests the infrastructure of modern health care. Doctors complain that lab tests hypnotize patients to the exclusion of everything else. They want P.S.A., C.E.A., C.R.P. and cholesterol levels checked on a monthly basis. They demand brain scans, lung scans, body scans and bone scans, but when it comes to duller projects, like quitting...

Iran said yesterday that it had restarted the building of uranium enrichment centrifuges which the United States says are part of a bid to develop an atomic bomb. American officials claim that Iran intends to enrich weapons-grade uranium, but Tehran insists it only wants to develop its ability to produce electricity. 'We have started building centrifuges,' said Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi in a press conference. Iran's move goes back on a pledge last year to suspend all its uranium enrichment activities, secured by Britain, France and Germany. The European strategy was criticised in the US as being too soft...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Six years ago, Sister Mary Andrew Matesich was 59, the president of Ohio Dominican University, chairwoman of the Ohio Ethics Commission and a member of a half-dozen other public service and educational groups. She loved her work, her school, her students, her life. But she had reached a crossroad. Breast cancer, first treated when she was 54, had come back and begun to spread. The doctor's words are still clear in her mind: "Treatable but not curable." Another round of standard therapy might help, he said, but not for long. She wanted more time - time enough,...

When Karen Coveler and her husband began trying to have a child, she told her obstetrician that she wanted to take all the DNA tests she could to determine whether she was at risk of passing on a genetic disease to her child. Based on her Ashkenazi Jewish background, Ms. Coveler was offered 10 tests, all of which were negative, and went on to have a normal pregnancy. It was not until her son, Benjamin, was born that she discovered he was deaf. And it was not until a few weeks later that she learned a simple blood test could...