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When Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a liberal Democrat, decided to sue the federal government over testing provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act, he probably wasn't expecting flak from his political left. But that's exactly what he's received since filing the lawsuit last week. As first reported in the Hartford Courant, two national civil rights leaders, William Taylor and John Brittain, fired a letter to Mr. Blumenthal calling the lawsuit "ill-advised" and disputing his claim that the federal law is "an unfunded mandate." Messrs. Taylor and Brittain run civil rights organizations based in Washington but are veterans of...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - State education officials painted a brighter picture about the percentage of students passing the high school exit exam because they ignored dropouts, according to a study released Tuesday by the University of California, Los Angeles. The study is the latest salvo in the long-standing fight over the state's exit exam, which tests students on their ability to master basic math and English. The mandatory, multiple-choice exam is in line with targets for state accountability and the new federal requirements under the No Child Left Behind law. California high schoolers have been taking the test since...

Behind the rhetoric lies a contempt in some quarters for the work of public educators BY SUSAN OHANIAN George Packer, a New Yorker staff writer, points to the danger of clarity, observing that seemingly simple and tough-minded words blow out as much smoke as the jargon of the Pentagon of decades past. Nowhere is this smoke thicker and trickier than in the lingo the corporate-politico-media squad uses when talking about public schools. At first glance, their talk seems plain and to the point: failing schools, caring about education and education as war. In contrast, education progressives befuddle the public with...

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AFPN) -- Combining two aircraft missions into one is not an easy feat, but that is exactly what engineers and pilots from here and Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., are testing. In the process, they have also combined operational and developmental into one testing effort. Five F-16 Fighting Falcons and aircrews from the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Eglin deployed here July 22 to 29 and joined two 416th Flight Test Squadron F-16s to focus primarily on operationally testing the M4.2-plus core avionics suite upgrade to the F-16. Lessons learned from both types of...

Most doctors in a recent survey said that annual physical examinations were effective in detecting illness in apparently healthy patients, even though there is little scientific evidence to support the exams. The report found that physicians were largely unaware that current federal government guidelines did not recommend annual exams for healthy adults without symptoms. The study also revealed that in performing annual physicals many physicians routinely ordered screening tests that had not been proved useful for patients with no symptoms. "The initial idea was, if we bring someone in once a year and do extensive testing, we'd identify disease," said...

Japan's wartime gas plant found in N. Chinawww.chinaview.cn 2005-07-03 07:39:53 HOHHOT, July 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinese experts have discovered new evidence of the Japanese wartime atrocity in China -- a toxic gas experiment plant in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The plant, known to the locals as "Bayanhan", is located on the grassland of the Ewenki Autonomous Banner in Hulun Buir city, said Xu Zhanjiang, a researcher on the history of Japanese biological war with the Harbin Municipal Academy of Social Sciences in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. "The site covers more than 110 square kilometers, extending nine kilometers from...

WASHINGTON- The government's effort to develop a new vaccine against anthrax has raised red flags among critics over plans to eventually test an experimental version on children.Robert Bock, a spokesman for the Nat'l. Inst. of Child Health and Human Development, said the new anthrax vaccine would not be tested on 100 first-and-second-graders until it is first tested safely on adults. That is under way now, he said."If that study is successful, there will probably be a protocol to test the anthrax vaccine in children," Bock said.While federal rules govern how children can be used in medical research, Barbara Loe...

Although the Agriculture Department confirmed Friday that a cow that died last year was infected with mad cow disease, a test the agency conducted seven months ago indicated that the animal had the disease. The result was never publicly disclosed. The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow. Indeed, the lengthy delay occurred despite the intense national interest in the disease and the...

Substantial changes in the nation's mad cow testing system were ordered yesterday after British tests on a cow slaughtered in November confirmed that it had the disease even though the American "gold standard" test said it did not. "The protocol we developed just a few years ago to conduct the tests might not be the best option today," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in making the announcement. "Science is ever evolving." At an afternoon news conference in Washington, Mr. Johanns described serious errors in the testing in the United States on the animal, the second one found with mad cow...

New York moved to the forefront of the national standards movement in education during the 1990's when the State Board of Regents raised standards and required rigorous new tests for public school students. The policy is beginning to yield impressive results, especially in inner-city areas. But a bill in the State Legislature could strangle reforms by allowing some schools to evade rigorous state tests in favor of subjective evaluations that would make it impossible to judge student progress. The bill, which has passed the Senate and is pending in the Assembly, would extend a temporary waiver that has allowed some...

SAN FRANCISCO ---- Ten school districts statewide and three nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit against the state Wednesday for allegedly testing non-English-speaking students in English and then labeling them and their schools as "failing" under the state's implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind law. The lawsuit, filed in federal Superior Court in San Francisco, demands that the state test its 1.6 million non-English-speaking students in a "language and form" they understand, as mandated in the federal education reform law. The lawsuit is asking the state to change the way it tests students who do not yet understand English,...

When the drug industry came under fire last summer for failing to disclose poor results from studies of antidepressants, major drug makers promised to provide more information about their research on new medicines. But nearly a year later, crucial facts about many clinical trials remain hidden, scientists independent of the companies say. Within the drug industry, companies are sharply divided about how much information to reveal, both about new studies and completed studies for drugs already being sold. The split is unusual in the industry, where companies generally take similar stands on regulatory issues. Eli Lilly and some other companies...

FRISCO – There is a Mikey Roberts in every elementary school class. He talks a lot, he can't sit still and he's pushy – the one most likely to get in trouble. His teachers say students like Mikey are often misunderstood. Mikey also is a people-oriented person with a domineering personality. Said another way, he's a natural leader. That's what a personality test said about the first-grader at Smith Elementary School in Frisco. He and 370 classmates are part of a rare pilot program designed to help teachers manage their students. ...."This helps explain the unexplainable. It tells you why...

EPA Testing 150 Lower Manhattan Buildings May 11, 2005 11:53 am US/Eastern (1010 WINS) (NEW YORK) Dust samples from 150 New York buildings in lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn are to be gathered by the Environmental Protection Agency to find out how much indoor contamination might remain from the collapse of the World Trade Center. EPA officials say the samples will determine what should be cleaned and whether to launch a broader cleanup effort. The EPA says samples will be analyzed for lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, asbestos and manmade vitreous fibers. Residents and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn...

After the failures of numerous drug candidates over two decades, an experimental treatment has been shown to protect the brain from some of the damage caused by strokes, drug industry executives and doctors said yesterday. The drug, called Cerovive, reduced disability from stroke in a late-stage clinical trial involving 1,700 people, according to the product's developers, AstraZeneca and Renovis. The companies are conducting a second late-stage, or Phase 3, trial. They say if the results, due the first half of next year, are positive, they will apply late next year for federal approval. Shares of Renovis, a biotechnology company in...

In its latest major accomplishment as an industrial power, North Korea has dug a really big hole. Usually such a hole would be filled with the bodies of starved peasants or of schoolchildren convicted of being distantly related to someone caught listening to the Bee Gees. But in this case, the hole is only metaphorically filled with such bodies, as it is thought to actually contain the infrastructure for a test detonation of one of the atomic bombs on which North Korean God-King Kim Jong-Il has spent his people's stolen resources -- while allowing as many as 1,000,000 people to...

COLUMBIA, Missouri -- Student essays always seem to be riddled with the same sorts of flaws. So sociology professor Ed Brent decided to hand the work off -- to a computer. Students in Brent's Introduction to Sociology course at the University of Missouri-Columbia now submit drafts through the SAGrader software he designed. It counts the number of points he wanted his students to include and analyzes how well concepts are explained. And within seconds, students have a score.

Signs of positive improvements in Kentucky schools are being widely reported. The number of Kentuckians with a high school diploma is up 10 percent over the past decade; more of the commonwealth’s students are taking the ACT college entrance test, with scores are up over last year; and students’ scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), a widely used standardized test, have slightly improved. The general consensus among the education establishment and the media is that recent reports illustrate a slow, steady progress for educational attainment in the state, but that much work remains to be done. For...

AMBRIDGE, Mass. IN March, Les Perelman attended a national college writing conference and sat in on a panel on the new SAT writing test. Dr. Perelman is one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did doctoral work on testing and develops writing assessments for entering M.I.T. freshmen. He fears that the new 25-minute SAT essay test that started in March - and will be given for the second time on Saturday - is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits. Advertisement "It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the...

Genetic testing reveals awkward truth about Xinjiang’s famous mummiesM (AFP) 19 April 2005 URUMQI, China - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades. “It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it...