Rhabdomyoma? On to the finals...
Lanson Tang, 14, of Potomac, Md., among last 10 in national spelling bee.
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In Arizona, a school mural controversy
Associated Press
In Arizona, an elementary school principal is said to have ordered that the faces of some children depicted in a giant mural be lightened after receiving complaints about the ethnicity of the kids.
The Arizona Republic reports that Jeff Lane, the principal at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, said he sent artists out only to fix shading.
But R.E. Wall, the leader of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Projects, said he was ordered to lighten the skin tone on the "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley and was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation.
How brain drains will save the world
In this era of rising college expectations -- more applications, more students and more university places than ever -- we Americans remain very insular. We think nothing can be better than Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or some other moldy brick institution high on the U.S. News list. A few adventurous U.S. students are enrolling in Canadian and British schools, but nobody talks about that in the high school cafeteria or the PTA.
Our self-regard is, in some ways, justified. On most international ratings, one of the topics of Ben Wildavsky's intriguing new book "The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World," U.S. colleges still dominate the top 10. But Wildavsky reveals that that will probably change. Students in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America are beginning to speak as knowledgeably about France's Ecole Polytechnique, the Indian Institutes of Technology and Britain's University of Leicester as they do about Columbia and Caltech. Many foreign universities are catching up with ours.
In our comfortable spot at the top of the world's higher ed pyramid, we are ignoring one of the most powerful trends of the 21st century -- a
Trolling the charters for 'master educators'
While some charter school officials are concerned that the lucrative new teachers contract will trigger an exodus of talent, DCPS is recruiting aggressively right now from its charter neighbors. That includes enlisting instructors to serve as so-called "master educators" to evaluate public school teachers under the new IMPACT system. DCPS plans to expand its corps of about three dozen master educators with 10 new hires.
Here's a recent pitch from program coordinator Kathy Choi to a teacher at KIPP DC: AIM Academy:
From: Choi, Kathy (DCPS-OOC) [Kathy.Choi@dc.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:23 PM
To:XXXXX
Subject: Interest in the DCPS Master Educator Position
Dear XXXXX,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Kathy Choi, and I am one of the Program Coordinators for the Master Educator Program here
Matthew Zisi, 13, of Fredericksburg, celebrates Thursday on spelling a word correctly in the third round of the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington (AP)