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“Homeschooling is the sleeping giant of the American education system,” is the opening line of a recent article by Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews. He’s right. He’s also right when he says, “All surveys of home-schooled students so far indicate they have higher achievement rates on average than regular students,” and when he dismisses the claim that homeschoolers might not be properly socialized by saying, “Homeschoolers go outside often and get just as big a dose of pain and joy and ignorance and wisdom as regular school kids.” Where Mathews goes wrong is his support for a recommendation by...

This year's Harry & Louise looks pretty effective.

A gathering at an Atlanta elementary school last summer planted the seeds for a cheating scandal. Fifth-graders from five public schools had attended summer classes together at Deerwood Academy in southwestern Atlanta. Then they all had retaken the standardized test each had failed in the spring: the math portion of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT. Officials from the five schools came to Deerwood to collect answer sheets from their respective students and send them off for automated grading. But state investigators say the test papers from one group of students apparently took a detour. When the results came back,...

Locker Room Bell Curve by: Deborah Lambert, April 27, 2009 A recent study by a Swarthmore College economist showed that students may perform worse on exams if they “think about their jock identities before they take the test.” Researcher Thomas Dee asked athletes about their sports activities before they answered a series of Graduate Record exam questions. Results showed that the “pre-test reminders of their athletic identities hurt the athletes’ test performance by up to nine percentage points,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Stereotype threat is apparently a hot topic in some circles, which “suggests that anxiety can...

I've been having digestive problems and am going in for an abdominal CAT scan tomorrow morning. Please pray for me. Thanks and God Bless!

THE Melbourne Catholic Church has embraced a Vatican recommendation to test potential priests for sexual orientation. Under the guidelines, potential priests who "appear" to be gay must be banned. The head of the Vatican committee that made the recommendations has made it clear celibate gays should also be banned because homosexuality is ‘‘a type of deviation’’. Archdiocese of Melbourne spokesman James O’Farrell confirmed Carlton’s Corpus Christi Catholic seminary had started adhering to the guidelines, but refused to comment further.

The Los Angeles teachers union and the city's school district are battling over a district practice that, a Times' analysis suggests, contributes to higher scores on state tests. The practice is "periodic assessments," a bureaucratic name for exams administered by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The goal is to give teachers insight into what students need to learn while there remains time in the current school year to adjust instruction.The union Tuesday directed teachers to refuse to give them to students on the grounds that the tests are costly and counterproductive. But there could be a downside. The...

CAIRO (AFP) – Arabs were hopeful on Wednesday that President Barack Obama will amend US policy on the Middle East, while Israel expects little change in the wake of its deadly assault on Gaza. Egypt, a close Washington ally with ties both to Israel and Palestinians, urged Obama to place the Palestinian cause at the top of his agenda as the Islamist Hamas faction said it will judge Obama by his acts. "We will judge him by his policies and actions on the ground and how he will learn lessons from the mistakes of the previous administrations, especially that of...

No Loophole Left Behind by: Bethany Stotts, October 09, 2008 Just as the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act was passed under bipartisan leadership, so too criticisms of its flawed structure span the gambit of political persuasions. As previously documented, opposition to the NCLB provisions on annual yearly progress (AYP) and school sanctions have raised significant ire from some conservative policy analysts such as Michael J. Petrilli and CATO’s Neal McClusky, as well as representatives from the progressive National Education Association (NEA). Daniel Koretz, Harvard Professor of Education and author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, recently...

For the second consecutive year, SAT scores for the most recent high school graduating class remained at the lowest level in nearly a decade, according to results released Tuesday. But the College Board, which owns the exam, attributes the lower averages of late to a more positive development: a broader array of students are taking the test, from more first-generation college students to a record number of students — nearly one in seven — whose family income qualifies them to take the test for free.

President Bush has often spoken about education reform as a civil rights issue. So we're not entirely surprised to see civil rights groups now defending the No Child Left Behind law against attempts to gut its most effective provisions. Last month, Representative Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, introduced the NCLB Recess Until Reauthorization Act, which would essentially suspend the law's accountability provisions but not the funding. Under Mr. Graves's bill, schools would no longer have to file progress reports that expose achievement gaps between kids of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. Since NCLB passed in 2002, minority parents in...

Students are performing better on state reading and math tests since enactment of the landmark No Child Left Behind law six years ago, according to an independent study [by the District-based Center on Education Policy] released yesterday.[snip]Because standards vary from state to state, some analysts have questioned the reliability of state tests as a gauge of academic performance. The study, which included data from 50 states, found that achievement on state reading and math exams has improved in most of them. The trend is largely mirrored on national exams, the study found, although the gains tend to be smaller. One...

His experience reflects a challenge felt in classrooms nationwide. Six years after the No Child Left Behind law was enacted, the lowest-performing students continue to improve while children in the top tier have hit a plateau, according to a report due out Wednesday. The findings renew concerns about how schools challenge their brightest students at a time when federal law, backed by sanctions and financial consequences, forces many districts to focus time and money on students at the bottom rung of the academic ladder.

The city of New Haven, Connecticut, went to great lengths to devise a firefighter test that would not have "disparate impact" on minority applicants, but when the results of the 2003 test-taking came in, applying the city's "Rule of Three" which required selection from among the highest scorers, "no blacks and at most two Hispanics would have been eligible for promotion to captain and no blacks or Hispanics would have been eligible to make lieutenant". So the city civil service board vacated the results, frankly acknowledging that it was in search of better minority hiring numbers. White applicants sued and...

For Massachusetts’ worst public schools, failure is not an option. Literally. The Department of Education is considering a request to drop the label “underperforming” for failing schools in places like Randolph, Lawrence and Holyoke. Instead Massachusetts would declare these schools “Commonwealth Priority” institutions. For those institutions that truly excel at incompetence, currently known as “Chronically Underperforming,” the new title would be “Priority One” schools. You can just imagine the delight in the hallways of Lawrence High. “Our school’s a ‘Commonwealth Priority!’ I wish I could spell that.” “Don’t worry, they’re going to grade our spelling tests on the ‘Commonwealth Curve’...

Subject: Devotional "Genuine Faith" Date: Feb 19, 2008 9:53 AM 1 Peter 1:7 "So that the genuineness of your faith, which is much more precious than gold which perishes though it is tested by fire - nevertheless might be found unto praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." The Psalmist tells us that the Word is "more to be desired than gold, even much fine gold" and that "he loves the commandments above gold, above fine gold." It is common knowledge that gold is tested by fire in order to bring about the genuine evidence of...

RALEIGH - A state commission agreed today on a draft report saying “there is too much time spent on testing” and that several exams should be eliminated or no longer counted in the state’s testing program. The Blue Ribbon Commission on Testing and Accounting agreed to recommend to the state Board of Education that the fourth-, seventh- and 10th-grade writing tests and the eighth-grade computer skills tests be eliminated. The commission also agreed that the number of end-of-course exams used to measure how high schools are doing in the state testing program be cut from 10 to five. They no...

     Could a strange substance found by an Ark-La-Tex man be part of secret government testing program?  That's the question at the heart of a phenomenon called "Chemtrails."  In a KSLA News 12 investigation, Reporter Jeff Ferrell shows us the results of testing we had done about what's in our skies.     "It seemed like some mornings it was just criss-crossing the whole sky.  It was just like a giant checkerboard," described Bill Nichols.  He snapped several photos of the strange clouds from his home in Stamps, in southwest Arkansas.  Nichols said these unusual clouds begin as normal contrails from a jet engine.  But...

"[Rowan's] been on this planet for 18 months, and he's loaded with a chemical I've never heard of," Holland, 37, said. "He had two to three times the level of flame retardants in his body that's been known to cause thyroid dysfunction in lab rats." The technology to test for these flame retardants -- known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) -- and other industrial chemicals is less than 10 years old. Environmentalists call it "body burden" testing, an allusion to the chemical "burden," or legacy of toxins, running through our bloodstream. Scientists refer to this testing as "biomonitoring." Most Americans...

TUCSON, Ariz. – Defense contractor Boeing Co. has told the government it believes it has solved most of the problems that have delayed use of the first section of a high-tech “virtual fence” along the nation's borders for months. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, however, said they'll wait until acceptance testing now set for late October is done before passing judgment. The 28-mile section of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona is the first of thousands of miles planned on the nation's southern and northern borders. Boeing personnel who briefed federal officials “sounded real optimistic” about the...