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Former President Ford was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., on Tuesday for "testing and evaluation," his office said in a statement. The statement gave no further details on why the 93-year-old former chief executive went to the clinic. "No further releases or updates are anticipated prior to early next week," said the statement issued from his office in Beaver Creek, Colo. Ford also has a home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. No other information was released by the clinic. "I can verify that the statement is correct and I have no other additional information," said John Murphy, the...

Ordered by the federal government to improve its testing of students who speak limited English, New York State said yesterday that all children enrolled in school in the United States for at least a year would be required to take the state’s regular English Language Arts exam. The test is given annually in the third through eighth grades. State officials said the decision would require about 90,000 children who speak limited English to take the regular exam in January. Students will continue to take the state’s math, social studies and science tests in a variety of foreign languages, officials said....

The trial of a new drug in a London hospital that nearly killed six men three months ago and left them in intensive care for weeks has prompted numerous reports and recommendations that will change the way drugs are tested. But the six men, who were all young and healthy just months ago, now suffer from serious medical problems, and they have been unable to get any of the drug companies involved in the trial to cover their medical expenses, or provide compensation — other than a one-time payment of under $20,000 apiece. In recent weeks, lab tests and medical...

The Agriculture Department said yesterday that it would scale back testing for mad cow disease by about 90 percent, saying the number of infected animals was far too low to justify the current level of surveillance. “It’s time that our surveillance efforts reflect what we now know is a very, very low level of B.S.E. in the United States,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said as he announced the new testing program for the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. After the disease was found in a Canadian-born dairy cow in Washington in December 2003, the department tested more than 759,000 animals over...

Flight Lessons ON June 11, 1957, the Atlas, America's first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, took its inaugural flight from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It lasted 24 seconds. The missile roared off the launching pad and soared to about 10,000 feet before its engines failed. Tumbling out of control, the rocket fell through its own trail of fire before the safety officer on the ground sent a radio signal that told the wayward rocket to blow itself up. The rocket's designers, though disappointed, learned a lot. It was clear that, despite the pummeling the Atlas took as it careered out of control,...

Crouching down to take a closer look, Rossi inspects the dropping left by the large sea duck and then carefully dabs at the greenish mound with a swab before breaking off the tip into a plastic vial. "He laid a fresh one there. We really want the freshest stuff," said Rossi, Alaska district supervisor for the USDA's wildlife services. The swab of eider dropping is one of 50,000 such field samples from wild birds that federal and local agencies aim to collect in America this year and test for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu. Officials also want another...

Colleges across the country are reporting a drop in SAT scores this year. I've been tutoring students in New York City for the SAT since 1989, and I have watched the numbers rise and fall. This year, though, the scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800). Colleges and parents are wondering: Is there something wrong with the new test? Or are our children not being taught what they should know? Before 1994, the verbal section of the SAT was about...

Calif. Supreme Court reinstates exit exam By DAVID KRAVETS, Associated Press Writer 25 minutes ago The California Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated the state's high school exit exam as a graduation requirement, but it was not immediately clear whether the decision means tens of thousands of high school seniors who failed the test won't graduate this year. The high court ordered a state appeals court to hold hearings in the case. This year's class was the first in which passing the test of 10th grade English and eighth grade math and algebra was required for graduation. A group of students...

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2006 – More than 5,000 U.S. and Canadian servicemembers are working with authorities in five U.S. states and two Canadian provinces to test their response capabilities to crises ranging from a major hurricane to a terrorist attack to a pandemic flu outbreak. Ardent Sentry 2006, a two-week U.S. Northern Command exercise, kicked off May 8 to test military support to federal, provincial, state and local authorities while continuing to support the Defense Department's homeland defense mission, according to Air Force Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, a NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command spokesman. The Canadian part of...

“Teaching to the test” is a common complaint of public school teachers whose students have an increasingly difficult time passing such examinations with the passage of every school year. “Teach to the test, please,” Richard Ferguson of the ACT advises, “because the skills we are measuring are the skills that are needed.” Ferguson spoke at a conference at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel here in which the ACT released its new report, which is entitled “Ready to Succeed: All Students Prepared for College and Work.” The ACT that Ferguson heads administers one of the two most widely-used college entrance exams in...

ATLANTA (AP) - Testing for the AIDS virus could become part of routine physical exams for adults and teens if doctors follow new U.S. guidelines expected to be issued by this summer. Federal health officials say they'd like HIV testing to be as common as a cholesterol check. The guidelines for voluntary testing would apply to every American ages 13 to 64, according to the proposed plan by the U.S. Centers for Disease control and Prevention. One-quarter of the 1 million Americans with the AIDS virus don't know they are infected, and that group is most responsible for HIV's spread,...

It’s Prom season, when many parents worry about drinking and driving. But one school is taking a proactive approach to keep its students safe. Elkhart Central High School recently started giving random alcohol breath tests to prom-goers. Roughly, 10-20% of the students will be given the tests, for prom next week, as they drive up to the event. The school says in two years that they have done it, no students have tested positive. “I feel that kids need to be aware that this is going on, so that there’s no drunk driving on prom night,” senior Sarah Fischer told...

WASHINGTON - Congressional leaders and a former Bush Cabinet member said Tuesday that schools should stop excluding large numbers of minority students' test scores when they report progress under the No Child Left Behind law. The Associated Press reported Monday that schools have gotten federal permission to deliberately not count the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report academic progress by race as required by the law. The scores excluded were overwhelmingly from minorities, the AP found. Some leaders said Congress may need to intervene. The Education Department and others owe the public an explanation, said the...

Test Scores in County Lag Behind State's Poorer Areas Black students in Fairfax County are consistently scoring lower on state standardized tests than African American children in Richmond, Norfolk and other comparatively poor Virginia districts, surprising Fairfax educators and forcing one of the nation's wealthiest school systems to acknowledge shortcomings that have been masked by its overall success. Even within Fairfax schools, black elementary school students are outperformed on reading and math tests by whites and some other students, including Hispanics, poor children and immigrants learning English. The statewide disparity occurs among all age groups except the middle-school grades, but...

Educators who oppose standardized testing and vouchers claim to have the best interests of students at heart but it is a claim worth examining. “The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has promoted high-stakes testing for school accountability,” Monty Neill of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing writes. “Its claim was that without ‘accountability,’ the public will abandon public education, and that the use of standards and tests would lead to educational improvement.” “This was never a good argument, though it appeared to address the justifiable anger directed by racial minorities and low-income communities against second-class educational opportunities.” Fair...

Resumption of tests absurd I shake my head in stunned disbelief that the U.S. is so determined to test every limit of absurdity and insanity with the resumption of above-ground testing at the Nevada Test Site on June 2. Is there nothing that the U.S. military considers grotesque any more? Is humanity so numbed by the incessant spread of death and destruction that nothing is considered outrageous any more? Surely, if the United States is so morally and spiritually bankrupt, then we have nothing to care for or to value or to hold dear. We are so far into...

Principal Joseph Carruth was riding down the slow, paneled elevator at Camden's district office, ready to cave in to pressure from a superior who he says had just given him a tutorial on how to cheat on state tests. "My head is spinning," Carruth recounted to The Inquirer of his feelings that day in January 2005. "I can't believe it." Still green on the job at Camden's Dr. Charles E. Brimm Medical Arts High, Carruth needed medical benefits for his ill daughter. He did not have tenure. He was tempted to take whatever steps necessary to keep his job. "I...

TALLAHASSEE · Critics of Florida's high-stakes FCAT exam are lashing out at the state for hiring thousands of $10-an-hour temporary workers to score tests that are so critical in determining school grades and student promotions.

FORT GORDON, Ga. (Army News Service, Feb. 21, 2006) -- Engineers conducting show-and-tell with a 20-ton robot on the last day of two weeks of trials on Fort Gordon were cautiously optimistic. Karl Murphy, a software engineer from Robotic Research, said there was a new principle of “Murphy’s Law” at work on the test field Feb. 10. "One of my professors reminded us that we have 'sight-ons' present whenever an experiment is being viewed,” Murphy said. “The more 'sight-ons' you have, the greater is the potential for something to go wrong." Tongue in cheek, he continued explaining that sight-on fields...

A higher education commission named by the Bush administration is examining whether standardized testing should be expanded into universities and colleges to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality. Charles Miller, a business executive who is the commission's chairman, wrote in a memorandum recently to the 18 other members that he saw a developing consensus over the need for more accountability in higher education. "What is clearly lacking is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats," Mr. Miller wrote, adding that student learning was a main component that should be measured. Mr....