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Russian Team Wins National Geographic Bee
Tweet Share on Facebook July 29, 2011 CommentA team of 16-year-olds from Russia won the National Geographic World Championship geography bee Wednesday at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
The Russians beat out teams from Canada and Chinese Taipei in the finals. The United States' team finished in fourth place and failed to qualify for the finals after competing in a hands-on orienteering contest, which tested their navigational skills using a map and compass at the San Francisco Zoo Monday. Teams from 17 countries compete in the biannual contest, and the first, second, and third place finishers receive medals in an Olympics-style ceremony.
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Improving Student Teaching
Tweet Share on Facebook July 27, 2011 CommentLast week, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released a study reporting that many of the nearly 200,000 new teaching candidates each year were paired with ineffective mentors during their student teaching experience.
Student teaching is usually the last requirement for a prospective teacher. Many schools require students to spend their last semester gaining real-world experience teaching in a school; an established teacher will serve as a student teacher's mentor.
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Game Design Engages Students in STEM
Tweet Share on Facebook July 25, 2011 Comment (1)Computer science teacher Michael Penta has trouble pulling his students away from their computers for an outdoor break during his weeklong game programming summer workshop at the University of Massachusetts—Lowell.
"I have a rule—Monday through Thursday, they have to go outside," he says. "But Friday, a majority of them are so focused on finishing their game that they stay in to work on it."
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Corporations Pledge $100 Million After White House Meeting
Tweet Share on Facebook July 22, 2011 CommentPresident Obama met with a group of business executives at the White House earlier this week to discuss ways to ensure a competitive workforce in the future. After the meeting, the executives committed more than $100 million from their companies to support educational programs.
Two major initiatives make up the bulk of new money pledged. America's Promise Alliance, a coalition of more than 400 corporations led by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, committed to raise $50 million to reduce the nation's dropout rate by improving some of the lowest-performing K-12 schools. Bank of America pledged to donate $50 million over the next three years to organizations working to close the achievement gap between ethnicities.
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High School Seniors' Geography Scores Don't Improve
Tweet Share on Facebook July 20, 2011 Comment (1)High school seniors' scores on a national geography assessment showed no improvement between 2001 and 2010, and scores have declined from 1994 levels, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests students from both public and private schools in a variety of subjects in order to gauge national trends in achievement levels. Subject tests are given to students in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades; the last time the geography test was given was in 2001.
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Maryland to Require Environmental Literacy for Graduation
Tweet Share on Facebook July 18, 2011 Comment (2)On June 21, Maryland became the first state to require high school students to learn about the environment in order to graduate. Now, U.S. senators are trying to get a similar measure passed nationally.
The bill has the support of more than 1,900 organizations, including businesses, nonprofits, and environmental groups. The No Child Left Inside Coalition says environmental education "promotes higher order thinking skills" and is correlated with higher test scores.
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Close Achievement Gap by Discussing Race, Expert Says
Tweet Share on Facebook July 15, 2011 Comment (15)In a country where white students vastly outperform black and Hispanic students on national standardized tests, one education innovator says the performance gap can be eliminated on a school-by-school basis by having honest discussions with teachers about race.
"We like to create proxies for conversations around race," says Glenn Singleton, president and CEO of Pacific Educational Group, a consulting firm based in San Francisco that's dedicated to addressing racial education disparities. "We talk about poverty, not recognizing that poor white kids outperform poor black and brown kids."
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Interim Chief Begins Cleaning up Atlanta Public Schools
Tweet Share on Facebook July 13, 2011 Comment (3)Three year-round elementary schools in the Atlanta Public School system opened this morning, including two implicated in one of the largest cheating scandals in K-12 public education.
Boyd Elementary and Hutchinson Elementary both hired new principals earlier this week after their former principals were removed. Interim schools chief Erroll Davis Jr. has started cleaning up a district in which 178 teachers and principals were found to be cheating on standardized tests according to an investigative report by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal. Last week, the Atlanta school board gave Davis a yearlong term to help the district navigate through the scandal.
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Ex-Gang Members Help Students Escape Violent Groups
Tweet Share on Facebook July 13, 2011 Comment (3)After record-low gang activity during the early 2000s, gang prevalence and activity have spiked nationally over the past several years, according to a report released in May by the National Gang Center, a government organization.
Gangs were active in 34.5 percent of police jurisdictions polled, and the center estimates that there are 731,000 gang members in 28,100 gangs. In 2001, only 23.9 percent of jurisdictions reported gang activity.
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Carnegie Launches Open-Source STEM Network
Tweet Share on Facebook July 11, 2011 Comment (1)When President Obama promised 100,000 new science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers over the next 10 years during his State of the Union address in January, it may have seemed like an unrealistic goal. However, officials at several nonprofits, businesses, and universities saw it as a call to action.
Dozens of organizations, led by the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation of New York, have banded together to form 100kin10, a coalition that hopes to increase the number of qualified teachers, retain top performing teachers, and build a movement to improve STEM education in the U.S., which has fallen to the middle of the pack globally.
