Thursday, March 25, 2010

Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Education- Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Reading scores stagnating despite NCLB

 D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee (TWP).
















Parents spending time with kids: Good and bad news

My guest is Debra Viadero, an associate editor of Education Week and author of a blog called Inside School Research. 

By Debra Viadero
Earlier this week, education writer Joanne Jacobs alerted us to a studydocumenting a trend that signals both good and bad news for education.
Here’s the good news: Parents are spending more time with their children. The bad part is that the increase is twice as great for college-educated parents as it is for less-educated parents.
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Judging high schools by students' college success

[This is my Local Living section column for March 25, 2010.]
Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast loves numbers like most human beings love steak, and he shares what he loves. He dumps on me stacks of graphs and flow charts. They follow a familiar theme, the rise of student achievement in his district. But sometimes he surprises me.
Among the pieces of paper he unloaded during a recent visit was a blue, green, orange and yellow bar graph titled “MCPS Graduates Who Earned a 4-Year College Degree, 2001-2004.”
Huh? High schools usually don’t have that information. They can only guess how their students do in college. “Where’d you get that, Jerry?” I asked.
“National Student Clearinghouse,” he said.
I knew what that was. I knew what the clearinghouse was trying to do. But I didn’t know it had gotten that far.
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DCPS enrollment holds steady

Bucking a decades-long trend of annual losses, D.C. public schools are holding essentially steady in the latest enrollment figures, showing less than a 1-percent decline from 2009.
Audited enrollment data released Wednesday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) show DCPS with 44,467 students, a decline of 214 from last year's 44,681. Meanwhile, the city's public charter school sector continued its steady growth, with an increase of 7.8 percent, to 27,617 from 25,614.
The full report is available here on the OSSE Web site.
DCPS lost 5 percent of enrollment in 2007, 8 percent in 2008 and another 8 percent in 2009. In a statement, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said public schools could see the first increase since 1971 in the next school year.
The figures are based on school counts taken in October, audited for residency and other factors. As is typically the case, the raw October counts were somewhat higher. DCPS reported 45,772 students in that 

Coffee with Dartmouth President Kim

Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim visited the Post's editorial offices Wednesday.
He was here to discuss health care reform -- more specifically, the leadership role he believes universities should play in actually reforming health care, as in delivering it at higher quality, at lower cost, with fewer mistakes.
It's an area called health care delivery science, and Kim believes it will be a vitally important field, say, 20 or 30 years from now. At present, it's a neglected discipline. Dartmouth is starting a degree program in health care delivery, and he hopes the nation one day gets behind the endeavor in the same spirit with which it tackled AIDS and cancer research.
dartmouthkim.jpg
"We think this is the new field," he said.
Kim, a physician and humanitarian of international stature, became Dartmouth president last July. His previous employers include Harvard Medical School and the World Health Organization. He was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2006.
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