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Is Teach for America Costing Experienced Teachers Their Jobs?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 31, 2009 Comment (27)Teach for America, the alternative route to certification that places some of the brightest college graduates in the nation's neediest schools, has grown steadily in recent years, despite the recession and state budget crises. But it's starting to get some flak from critics, who say it's forcing more experienced teachers out of their jobs, USA Today reports.
No studies have been done that substantiate the alleged trend, but the argument voiced by some critics is that the program's growth—about 7,300 young people are expected to teach under its banner in 2009-10, up from 6,200 for the 2008-09 school year—comes at the expense of veteran teachers who are losing their jobs to make room for the recruits.
In Boston, TFA corps members replaced 20 pink-slipped teachers, Boston Teachers Union President Richard Stutman told USA Today. "These are people who have been trained, who are experienced, and who have good evaluations, and are being replaced by brand-new employees," he said.
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The Race Is on for School Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook July 30, 2009 Comment (8)President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently held a conference with some of the country's leading education stakeholders and decision makers to announce a new federally subsidized school grant competition for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They called it Race to the Top. The thinking is that the promise of more than $4.3 billion in federal aid—and the threat of withholding it—will inspire (or force) the education establishment to adopt such reforms as growing and supporting charter schools and performance pay for teachers. The question is how many states and districts will be eager to make reform decisions that would have long-term effects on their schools in order to get funding that might quickly be exhausted.
The Race to the Top money comes from the economic stimulus law, which, along with the fiscal year 2009 budget, will provide more than $5.6 billion in additional grants over the coming months through federal programs that support the Obama administration's school reform priorities.
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Surprising News About the Achievement Gap
Tweet Share on Facebook July 24, 2009 Comment (17)Owing to a legacy of slavery and segregation, the gap in academic achievement levels between white and black students historically has been the widest in the Southern states, but a new study released last week by the Department of Education shows that black students' learning gains are improving more in the South than in some Northern states.
According to the data, which analyzed the reading and math scores of black and white students on the series of federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), black students have made important gains in several Southern states over the past 20 years, while black achievement in some Northern states has improved more slowly than white achievement or even declined, the New York Times reports. The widest black-white achievement gaps are no longer seen in Southern states such as Kentucky, Alabama, or Mississippi, but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.
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New Leadership for Black Colleges
Tweet Share on Facebook July 21, 2009 Comment (9)Though he has been on the job only two days, the new man in charge of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities says altering the tone of the national conversation about black colleges is one of his top priorities, Inside Higher Ed reports.
John Silvanus Wilson, a former administrator at George Washington University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that "black colleges will never be as strong as they can be unless that narrative changes. . . . We need to shift from how to survive to how to thrive."
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Obama's Plan for Community Colleges
Tweet Share on Facebook July 20, 2009 Comment (13)In the days since President Obama announced plans to invest an unprecedented $12 billion in the nation's community colleges, he has received praise for training the national spotlight on institutions he says are too frequently "treated like the ugly stepchild of the higher-education system." But the shimmer of that spotlight already has started to fade, and critics are raising questions about whether the president's goal to rebuild the economy by helping 5 million more Americans graduate from two-year schools is feasible, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
About 75 percent of the money the president hopes to spend on community colleges will go toward creating grant programs for schools and states to test promising programs, ones that improve student learning, student completion rates, and schools' abilities to track their students' academic progress.
Experts say the $2.5 billion Obama hopes to spend revitalizing community colleges' infrastructure is vital for those schools' success in the future. Between the academic years that ended in 2002 and 2006, 2.3 million new students enrolled in community college courses, the largest number of new students since the 1960s. During the same period, two thirds of all state community colleges reported deferred maintenance needs, according to a 2007 survey by the University of Alabama's Education Policy Center.
Obama's proposal constitutes the first major, federally funded community college construction project since the 1960s, when the government doled out $1 billion each year between 1965 and 1970, says Stephen Katsinas, the policy center's director. "It's probably not enough; it's probably nowhere near enough," he says of the $2.5 billion infrastructure proposal. "But this is the first administration since Lyndon Johnson to see the need."
Questions have also been raised about the efficacy of Obama's plans to spend $500 million expanding students' access to online education. The administration hopes various federal agencies will collaborate to create new online courses, which will be "freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department's distributed-learning network." However, it's unclear how students would gain access to the courses, how they would earn credit for completing a course, and whether the free courses would be competitive alternatives to the many online community college courses already offered.
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College Health Plans Don't Always Cover Student Athletes
Tweet Share on Facebook July 17, 2009 Comment (7)Many injured college athletes are being saddled with thousands of dollars in unexpected medical bills because the details of NCAA regulations requiring universities to insure their athletes are unclear, the New York Times reports.
Four years ago, the NCAA began enforcing a regulation that all collegiate student athletes needed insurance before they began competing. Some institutions meet these requirements by covering nearly 100 percent of an injured student athlete's medical expenses, but other schools claim almost no responsibility to pay such bills if a student has private insurance, according a review by the Times of public documents from a cross section of universities and interviews with current and former athletes, trainers, administrators, and NCAA officials.
"I thought I would be covered," says Erin Knauer, a Colgate University student who piled up $80,000 in medical bills after injuring her back and legs while training for the school's crew team. Because of the way her condition was diagnosed, insurance will cover only about one third of Knauer's bill.
Many student athletes have medical insurance through their parents, but often these plans exclude coverage of injuries sustained during participation in varsity sports and injuries that require out-of-state treatment. Some colleges purchase secondary policies to fill the gaps left by students' family plans, but even these plans have disclaimers that could leave students uncovered in some situations.
Those familiar with the lack of mandated, comprehensive coverage for collegiate athletes are calling for change, but it's unlikely the NCAA will alter its policies anytime soon because the cost of mandating coverage for all athletes would be extremely high. Some of the largest universities with the biggest, winningest, and best-known athletic teams provide comprehensive coverage for their athletes, but students playing sports at many other schools are not as lucky.
Former Ohio University football player Jason Whitehead injured himself so badly during a workout in 2001 that he was temporarily paralyzed and had be airlifted to a nearby hospital, according to the Times article. Whitehead took the bills from his career-ending surgery that were not covered by his father's insurance to the Ohio University trainers, but the school refused to pay. Whitehead, now 28, found out six years after his surgery that he still had a few thousand dollars in unpaid medical bills while reviewing paperwork to buy his first car.
"The coach says, 'You're on full scholarship. If you ever get hurt, we'll make sure to take care of you,' " he says. "There's a lot of us out there that get used."
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For Grad School Hopefuls, a Test of Personality
Tweet Share on Facebook July 14, 2009 Comment (6)Graduate school applicants have long stressed out over the strength of their test scores, college transcripts, and letters of recommendation. Now another less scholastic element might be added to that mix: their personalities.
Based on a decade of research, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has started offering a Web-based test called the personal potential index, which lets students ask recommenders to rank them in six different areas—knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity—on a scale of "below average" to "truly exceptional." Students can then electronically send the evaluation reports to their choice of graduate schools, paying $20 per report after the first four.
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Congress Investigates Radio Programming on School Buses
Tweet Share on Facebook July 13, 2009 Comment (6)Congress has ordered a Federal Communications Commission review of BusRadio—a radio programming system that is heard each day on 10,000 school buses in 24 states—because of questions about the age-appropriateness of its music and the effects of its advertisements on students and bus drivers, the Denver Post reports.
Reaching more than 1 million students everyday, BusRadio sends music, contests, public service announcements, and commercials over the Internet to school district servers, which then forward the programming to buses using wireless transmitters. (Click here to learn more about the company, which calls itself the "first and only radio show delivered exclusively to school buses nationwide.")
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Colleges Hire Their Students for Summer Jobs
Tweet Share on Facebook July 8, 2009 CommentPlanting flowers, painting walls, and fixing broken furniture are often tasks reserved for a college's maintenance crew, but this summer some schools are paying their students to take care of that work, USA T oday reports.
Schools like St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the College of Wooster in Ohio are hiring students to do manual labor. The money these students earn should help them afford the ever rising costs of their higher education, the colleges hope. St. John's created 80 new full-time student jobs, while Wooster hired 200 students this summer, about three times the number of employees it typically brings on during the summer months.
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School's Out for Summer, Literally
Tweet Share on Facebook July 6, 2009 Comment (2)The summer months can be a time for the best students to discover new interests and for struggling students to suffer through remedial classes. But because states are in the midst of a crippling recession, many such programs are being cut, and low-income students might be feeling it the hardest, the New York Times reports.
