Image via onlinedegrees.org
by the New York Times illustrates just how much faster sprinter Usain Bolt is than Olympic medalists of yore. The video’s key takeaway is that the crème de la crème of athletes have over the years pushed themselves to consistently higher standards. Whereas breaking 10 seconds used to seem nearly impossible, it is now all but a requirement of medaling in the 100m sprint. While the Olympics has a comprehensive drug testing program to keep its athletes from abusing performance-enhancing substances as they pursue better athleticism, America’s high schools lack the ability to place similar checks on student academic performance. Students are improving their grades just like sprinters are improving their times; but in schools, cheating among the best and the brightest in order to attain those high grades has become a pervasive problem and in some cases the norm.
Take, for example, the prestigious
Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, N.Y., where 71 students were
caught cheating on New York’s Regents exam (and those were only the ones whose involvement was proven). These “cheaters” are unlikely to be found participating in immoral activities on the regular, yet each of them justified cheating by weighing it against the consequences of a less-than-stellar score on the high-stakes Regents
by Kris Amundson
Meetings at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) help state policymakers with both big picture issues (how will the Affordable Care Act affect your budget) to specific details. Education Sector’s Kris Amundson was at their annual summit this week in Chicago. Here are three important numbers she brought back from the conference.
On state budgets: 6. That’s the number of states that report they feel “optimistic” about their state’s economic outlook for Fiscal 2013. A total of 33 states foresee a “stable” economic outlook, and 11 states say they are concerned. Six is also the number of states that are members of what NCSL calls the “Billionaires’
