Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Education”
Banning cellphones in schools reaps the same benefits as extending the school year by five days, according to a study co-authored by an economist at The University of Texas at Austin. “New technologies are typically thought of as improving productivity, however this is not always the case,” said Richard Murphy, an assistant professor of economics. “When technology is multipurpose, such …
A second-grade teacher in Smithville, Ohio, was fired from his job in December because he wrote on his Facebook page that he was against dairy farming. According to local affiliate Fox8, Keith Allison is a vegan and animal rights advocate who often openly posts his views regarding those issues to his Facebook page. In August, Allison took pictures of a local …
“The waste of taxpayer money—none of us can feel good about,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education just last month. Yet, he is calling for a 48% increase in the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) quarter-billion-dollar-a-year ($253.2 million) program designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools—an initiative repeatedly criticized by the …
Education reform policies that penalize struggling schools for poor standardized test scores may hinder — not improve — students’ college readiness, if a school’s instructional focus becomes improving its test scores, suggests a new study that explored efforts to promote a college-going culture at one Texas high school. Published recently in The High School Journal, the case study reveals the unintended …
As the nation observes the May 17 anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that ended racial segregation in public schools, a new study has found that desegregated schooling is tied to better performance for certain cognitive abilities in older African American Adults. This research is published in an article titled “Education Desegregation and Cognitive Change in African American Older Adults,” …
The federal government has spent more than $3.3 billion over the past two decades creating and fueling the charter school industry, according to a new financial analysis and reporters’ guide by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). (The new guide can be downloaded below.) Despite the huge sums spent so far, the federal government maintains no comprehensive list of the charter schools …
Throughout the Bush years, funding for programs that refused to teach contraception in lieu of telling kids to wait until marriage–known as abstinence-only programs–ballooned [3], putting a lot of schools in a situation where the only real access to sex education funding they had was federal abstinence-only money. The programs were wildly unsuccessful [4] at their supposed goals of reducing STI and teen pregnancy …
Accepting and soliciting bribes. Diverting public funds for personal profit. Lying about the number of students. These are just a few examples of the fraud and malfeasance committed by charter school officials—cheating communities out of millions dollars that were supposed to go to education, a new report finds. The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and …
The movement to boycott standardized testing has caught the media totally by surprise. The mostly parent-led effort started with Facebook pages and neighborhood meetings has grown into a firestorm of resistance. As the Associated Press reported this week, “This ‘opt-out’ movement remains scattered but is growing fast.” The article points to New York – where perhaps as many as 200,000 students recently sat out …
If it’s springtime, it must be standardized testing time in schools across the country. It’s also when the debate over whether students are inundated with too many tests becomes hot. Experts say testing is up. Parents who want their children to skip the tests say their ranks are growing. Lawmakers say they’re hearing a loud message about too much unnecessary …
