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High Schools Improve Graduation Rates
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2011 Comment (1)The number of high schools that graduated fewer than 60 percent of their students dropped from 2008 to 2009, according to a new study.
The number of so-called "dropout factories," which once made up more than 10 percent of all public high schools, dropped from 1,746 in 2008 to 1,634 in 2009, a 6.4 percent decline. It's an 18.5 percent decline from a high water mark of 2,007 in 2002, according to the "Building a Grad Nation" report. The report was released by America's Promise Alliance, an organization established by former Secretary of State Colin Powell that focuses on improving children's lives.
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D.C. Schools Head Asks Inspector General to Review Test Results
Tweet Share on Facebook March 30, 2011 CommentWe've got an update to today's earlier post. Washington D.C.'s Acting Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has asked the D.C. inspector general to investigate erasures which occured on standardized tests at many D.C. schools between 2008 and 2010.
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Testing Anomalies Found in Many States
Tweet Share on Facebook March 30, 2011 Comment (2)USA Today ran a lengthy investigative piece Monday detailing instances of higher-than normal erasures of answers on standardized tests at 103 of Washington, D.C.'s public schools, including many of the city's high schools.
Acting D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson told the paper that "a high erasure rate alone is not evidence of impropriety." Test scores generally went up at schools where the numbers of erasures were higher than normal, and most of the erasures were wrong-to-right corrections.
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Cheaters Likely to Overestimate Intelligence
Tweet Share on Facebook March 29, 2011 CommentCheaters may be lying to themselves more than they realize, according to a new study by researchers at Duke University and Harvard University.
In four experiments, researchers allowed two groups of students to take a math IQ test, with one group given the answers. Both groups were then asked to predict their scores on a second test. The group of "cheaters" predicted they would score higher on the second test than the control group.
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Start Looking Now for Summer Jobs
Tweet Share on Facebook March 28, 2011 Comment (1)If you're in high school and want to find summer work, start looking now.
Depending on who you ask, the summer job market is either improving or getting worse for teens ages 16-19. Last summer, only 960,000 jobs were added for teens in May, June, and July—the worst the market's been since 1949, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's just slightly more than half of the 1.74 million jobs created for teenagers in 2005, the high-water mark of the decade.
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New Media Guidelines, Math Requirements, Vouchers
Tweet Share on Facebook March 25, 2011 CommentVirginia Sets New Electronic Communication Guidelines for Teachers and Students
Virginia's school board unanimously approved a set of guidelines outlining appropriate electronic communication between teachers and students. The measure is much less restrictive than a draft prepared in November that would have recommended local school boards to bar teachers from communicating with students through texts, social networking, or online gaming.
