Entries for August 2009

More minority students from this year's high school graduating class sat for the SAT exam than ever before, officials from the nonprofit College Board, which owns the test, said Tuesday. Minorities comprised 40 percent of all SAT takers. The College Board also reported that the national average score dropped 2 points from the previous year and that average scores varied widely by race and family income.

Hispanics represented the fastest-growing group of minority test takers, accounting for almost 14 percent of those who took it, up from less than 8 percent 10 years ago. Hispanics' average score was 152 points lower than the average total score of 1,509. Students who identified themselves as Asian, Asian-American, or Pacific Islander posted a 13-point gain on the test. On the other hand, students who identified themselves as Puerto Rican posted a 9-point drop in average scores. Students from families earning more than $200,000 a year posted, on average, a 26-point gain.

In an effort to qualify the state's public schools for more than $4 billion in competitive federal funding, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling on legislators to adopt sweeping education reforms that would dramatically reshape California's K-12 schools, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Several other states, including Illinois and Indiana, have changed their laws and policies to comply with guidelines set by the federal education department to receive the "Race to the Top" grants, but Schwarzenegger's proposal "goes way above and beyond what other states are doing," Baron Rodriguez of the education research group Data Quality Center told the Times.

Schwarzenegger's reforms include:

In an effort to push cities to fix failing schools and highlight the Obama administration's programs to reform public education, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and civil rights leader Al Sharpton will join Education Secretary Arne Duncan on a tour of cities later this year.

The trio will visit Philadelphia on September 29, New Orleans on November 3, and Baltimore on November 13. More stops, including a rural site, will be added as the tour progresses. In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Duncan said the cities were chosen both for logistical reasons and for what they can show about school reform.

Science standards today tend to cover evolution more extensively than they did a decade ago, but "certain types of creationist language are also becoming more common in state standards," says a review of the standards of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, published online last week.

Conducted by the National Center for Science Education, the study graded the treatment of evolution in each state's standards on an A-to-F scale, and revealed 40 states received satisfactory marks. Published this month in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach, the review was intended to update a similar evaluation of science standards conducted by the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000, which gave satisfactory grades to only 31 states.

This fall, the District of Columbia will begin offering tests for sexually transmitted diseases to all of its public high school students, expanding a pilot program that uncovered a significant amount of infected teenagers, the Washington Post reports.

What D.C. school officials are doing is nothing new—school systems in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Baltimore, among others, either perform screenings for STDs or are preparing pilot programs—but the testing program is a vital step in the city's effort to arrest its growing AIDS rate, which is the highest in the nation. AIDS activists are particularly concerned about STDs because they increase the risk of contracting HIV.

As part of an effort to provide a safe learning environment for students who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning their sexual orientation, a new school for them plans to launch in January 2010. It will be entirely online.

Billed as the first virtual school of its kind, the GLBTQ Online High School's website asks prospective students to "Imagine a school where you can be you. Where your friends share similar experiences and similar questions." It is the brainchild of David Glick, a 25-year education veteran who has helped develop K through 12 online learning programs throughout the country and beyond.

Public schools in California can give achievement tests and high school exit exams in English to all students, even the nearly 1.6 million with limited English-speaking proficiency, a state appeals court ruled last week.

The case dates to 2005, when nine California districts that enroll large proportions of English language learners, or ELLs, filed a lawsuit in conjunction with three bilingual-education groups against the state Board of Education (SBE) because of the testing methods the board set for the state. The conflict was sparked by the federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002, which contains a provision stating that limited English-speaking students "shall be assessed in a valid and reliable manner" for purposes of federal accountability. Because the California tests, which were established by the SBE, were given in English to all students, the plaintiffs argued that the exams violated NCLB's requirements.