Education News Roundup
"No states
meet teacher-quality goal set in federal law"
Boston Globe (Associated Press), May 13, 2006
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/05/13/no_states_meet_teacher_quality_goal_set_in_federal_law
The Department of Education reports that not a single state will meet the federal deadline for putting a "highly qualified" teacher in every core class. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law requires teachers in all core classes to meet their state's qualification requirements by the end of this school year.
While 29 states have made considerable progress toward meeting that deadline, the department said, 9 states, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, are facing the loss of federal funds because of a perceived lack of effort; 12 states have not yet been rated.
"At some point there was, I suspect, a little bit of a notion that 'This too shall pass,'" said Henry Johnson, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. "Well, the day of reckoning is here, and it's not going to pass."
The states facing sanctions are Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Washington.
All states must now submit a new plan of action.
"Why do girls
lose interest in math and science?"
CNN, May 16, 2006
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/16/math.science.girls.ap/index.html
Washington, D.C.—Low
participation in math and science activities by girls is keeping them from achieving
their full potential and weakening the nation's ability to compete, Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings said May 15.
"We need definitive insights into what goes wrong, when, and why,"
Spellings said. She asked her department's Institute of Education Sciences to
review existing research and determine why girls are not as well represented
in the sciences as boys.
Schools have put more emphasis on math in the past five years because of the
No Child Left Behind law, which requires testing and yearly progress in the
subject.
"This is all about global competitiveness," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.,
said at conference sponsored by the Education Department and the National Science
Foundation. "We cannot do what we need to do to create high-skill, high-wage
jobs for our country if we write off the prospects of half our population."
"A textbook
case of failure; Politically driven adoption system yields shallow, misleading
materials"
MSNBC May 17, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12705167
At its core, the economic surge in India and China comes down to brains. The
industries driving the region’s challenge to American leadership—communications,
information technology, biotech and the like—can’t thrive without
a steady supply of highly educated, intellectually flexible workers.
This is where the United States is falling behind. “Most U.S. high school
students don’t take advanced science; they opt out, with only one-quarter
enrolling in physics, one-half in chemistry,” the National Science Foundation
found. The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st
Century concluded that U.S. students were “devastatingly far” from
leading the world in science and math.
As younger, inexperienced teachers are thrown into classrooms to meet new federal
standards, as much as 90% of the burden of instruction rests on textbooks, said
Frank Wang, a former textbook publisher who left the field to teach mathematics
at the University of Oklahoma.
And yet, few if any textbooks are ever subjected to independent field testing
of whether they actually help students learn.
For further information on education news this week, read the NSTA Reports Online Exclusive at http://www.nsta.org/main/news/stories/nsta_story.php?news_story_ID=52070.