joanneilee

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How high schools hide dropouts

How high schools hide dropouts

Orlando’s Olympia High boasts a 90 percent graduation rate — not counting students who go to an alternative school where few graduate.

High schools are inflating graduation rates and test scores by steering low achievers to alternative schools, reports ProPublica and USA Today. When they drop out, nobody’s accountable.

Heather Vogell and Hannah Fresques focus on Orlando, Florida, where district…

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Kid-friendly 'Martian' teaches science

Kid-friendly ‘Martian’ teaches science

David Beck uses The Martian to teach science at Oak Middle School in Los Alamitos, Calif. Photo: Carlos Gonzalez /New York Times

An astronaut is stranded on Mars, nobody knows he’s alive and rescue is four years away, far longer than his food supply will hold out. “Gosh darn it!” he says.

Science teachers are using a profanity-free classroom edition of The Martianto teach physics, astronomy and…

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Test

this is just a test

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Onion: Top civic activity is oppressing others "The vast majority of civic engagement in the U.S. centers around oppressing other people," reports The Onion…

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'New Civics' or left-wing activism? 

‘New Civics’ or left-wing activism? 

What colleges call “the New Civics” is really “progressive political activism,” charges a National Association of Scholars report, Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics.

“Service learning,” rebranded as “civic engagement,” teaches that “a good citizen is a radical activist,” charges David Randall, the report’s author. It’s pushing academic learning aside.

He discusses the New…

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Comment, please

My site has been acting up lately. My comments crashed for no reason I can figure out, so I’m trying a new system. Please leave a comment on this post (or any other) — if you can. I need to see if it works for people who don’t have admin powers.

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Libertarian builds low-cost private schools

Libertarian builds low-cost private schools

A wealthy libertarian is creating low-cost private schools in North Carolina, reports Reason.

After starting a popular charter school called Franklin Academy, Bob Luddy decided that families need an “exit” from the public system.

His Thales Academy network charges $5,300 for elementary school, and $6,000 for junior high and high school.

The schools don’t serve students with severe learning…

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DeVos, Darth and DeVil

DeVos, Darth and DeVil

News coverage about Betsy DeVos has been lousy, writes Alexander Russo in The Grade, now on the Kappan site.

Instead of giving readers a full, helpful understanding of the nominee and her background, national outlets including Politico, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and (especially) the New York Timeshave cherry-picked storylines that put DeVos in a negative light and written about DeVos’s…

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Moving on up From the Equality of Opportunity Project. With less ambitious criteria -- colleges where most bottom-fifth students reached the upper three-fifths in earnings -- the list of upward-mobility colleges starts with New Jersey Institute of Technology, Pace and Cal State, Bakersfield. Xavier of Louisiana, a traditionally black college, ranks sixth.

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Most students aren't paying down their loans

Most students aren’t paying down their loans

Three years after college, less than half of former college students are paying down their student loans. Only 46 percent of borrowers “pay even a dollar towards their principal loan balance three years after leaving school,” write Kim Dancy and Ben Barrett of New America.

After fixing an error in its repayment rate calculations, the U.S. Education Department reports much lower repayment rates.

Ye…

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'Free college' plan: Who benefits?

‘Free college’ plan: Who benefits?

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “free college” plan won’t help low-income and working-class students, writes Mikhail Zinshteyn.

The Cuomo plan is “completely a handout to the middle class,” says Matt Chingos, an Urban Institute scholar.

Students from families with incomes up to $125,000 would benefit. Those whose families earn $40,000 or less would not. They already receive enough federal and state…

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College 'degree premium' goes flat

College ‘degree premium’ goes flat

Is a college degree the new high school diploma? asks Jeffrey Selingo in the Washington Post.

The “degree premium” — the earnings gap between high school and college graduates — grew rapidly in the 1980s, slowed in ’90s and has plateaued since 2000, according to a new study by Robert G. Valletta of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Technology investments in the ’80s and ’90s increased…

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Work, study, dream -- and stay poor

Work, study, dream — and stay poor

Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ

“School is what makes the American Dream possible,” writes WBEZ reporter Linda Lutton in The View From Room 205. That’s what desperately poor kids are told. But is it true?

On the first day of school, September 2014, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, then head of Chicago Public Schools, told Penn Elementary students they could achieve anything.…

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School improvement flop: $7 billion = 0

School improvement flop: $7 billion = 0

After seven years and $7 billion in School Improvement Grants, low-performing schools showed no improvement, concluded a federal analysis. The final evaluation found “no evidence that SIG had significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment” compared to similar low-performing schools that didn’t receive grants.

To receive up to $2 million per year…

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Common Core: Threat or menace?

Common Core: Threat or menace?

“Six years after Common Core’s debut,” its critics “have produced enough books to collapse a sturdy bookshelf,” writes Fordham’s Robert Pondiscio. However, most “traffic in fear mongering and paranoid conspiracy theories about corporate greed.”

For example, teacher/activist Kris Nielsen, author of Children of the Core (great title!), believes the “Common Core network” is trying to “dismantle…

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Parents protest 'I love Sharia' worksheet

Parents protest ‘I love Sharia’ worksheet

Soon to be a man’s second wife, Ahlima feels “very fortunate” to live under Sharia law in Saudi Arabia, she writes. “I understand that some foreigners see our dress as a way of keeping women from being equal, but … I find Western women’s clothing to be horribly immodest.”

The fictional 20-year-old appears on a worksheet given to seventh graders in southern Indiana. Parents are upset, reports the