Ed News

by Laurie Rogers
Curiosity, questions and a tape recorder: That’s what I had in January 2007 when I met with the superintendent and the curriculum director of Spokane Public Schools. I thought I’d write an article about why my daughter's 4th-grade class wasn't working. I brought my recorder because I’m a former journalist, and that’s what journalists do.

Shaheen Buneri
SWAT DISTRICT, Pakistan -- The Swat valley, a picturesque region in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, was once a tourist destination. Two years ago, however, it became a Taliban haven when Maulana Fazlullah, a hardline cleric turned militant Taliban commander, launched a vicious campaign against the education of girls.

We, the members of Reading First Federal Advisory Committee, recommend caution in interpreting results from the Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report. Although the Impact Study has technical strengths, it has fundamental flaws that severely limit its utility for informing policy decisions. In this document we present the reasons for our reservations about the study and our recommendations for further action.

On June 23, 2008, members of the Reading First Advisory Committee met to discuss the findings summarized in the Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report, a study commissioned by the Institute for Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. At this meeting, we identified three key concerns associated with the results outlined in the interim report and committed to develop a brief response that identified the major limitations of the study and its findings. The enclosed document, Response to the Reading First Impact Study Interim Report, is our official response to the interim report.

By acting to defend Russian citizens against a terrorist-type attack by the George Soros and British intelligence-owned government of Georgia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has delivered a decisive defeat to the British Empire, Lyndon LaRouche declared on Aug. 12. Any capitulation by Russia to the criminal aggression by the Soros puppet government of Mikheil Saakashvili would have been tragic for civilization.

Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Tupelo, Ms.
You see them at the grocery, or in a discount store.
It's a big family by today's standards - "just like stair steps," as the old folks say. Freshly scrubbed boys with neatly trimmed hair and girls with braids, in clean but unfashionable clothes follow mom through the store as she fills her no-frills shopping list.

by RiShawn Biddle
As a cinematic enterprise, Slam isn’t exactly Metropolitan or She’s Gotta Have it. But the film, directed by underground rapper Saul Williams, offers some of the most gripping lessons for young people — especially young black men such as the main character (played by Williams himself) — about the consequences of dropping out from high school.

Recently, I wrote about the Reading First Impact Study in this space. That struck a nerve and received much attention and generated many questions. Given that, here I will answer some of these inquiries. Feel free to send more along and I’ll see what I can do. Hope this helps readers to better understand this study; various political statements recently have suggested that many politicians, at least, don't get it.

I just talked with a rep today at Riverside Publishing about the "check-off" boxes in the Iowa Test of Basic Skills that allow schools/districts to opt out of reporting certain parts of the test:

Providing a world-class education for all kids may no longer be possible without outside financial help, says Stan Levenson, Fundraising Consultant to the Public Schools in his latest article appearing in the July 2008 issue of the American School Board Journal. In this article, Levenson recommends that school districts consider a large-scale fundraising effort coordinated and articulated across district lines.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, which calls itself the nation's oldest and largest Hispanic organization, is not buying into the U.S. Department of Education's rationale for merging the administration of Title III and Title l of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Two members of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, Harvard University’s Wilfried Schmid and the University of Arkansas’ Sandra Stotsky, discuss the panel’s findings, presented in March, which said that math education in the U.S. is broken and schools should focus on teaching fundamental skills.

by Nicholas Carr
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »

In late June both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees approved separate versions of the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which funds federal education programs. Both the House and Senate committee bills would zero out funding for the Reading First program, which funds scientifically-based reading programs in grades K-3. If the bill passes in its current form, Congress will have cut funding for PK-3 literacy by $1 billion over two years. And that’s something early education advocates, regardless of their views on Reading First per se, should be up in arms about.