The Education Blog

USA Today reports:

Minority enrollment in suburban school districts has exploded since the early 1990s, and Hispanic students account for most of that growth, a report released Tuesday finds.

But the data show that while districts outside urban and rural areas have seen remarkable gains in black, Hispanic and Asian students from 1993 to 2007, schools within some of those districts have grown more segregated.

“In spite of the rapid demographic changes at the level of the school district, when you actually look at the schools kids attend, there still might be issues of racial and ethnic balance,” says Richard Fry, a senior research associate for the Pew Hispanic Center and author of the report.

The Pew Center report can be downloaded here.

From the AP (via the Dallas Morning News):

Tensions over how evolution is taught simmered Wednesday as the [Texas] State Board of Education started the final stretch of the process of adopting new classroom science curriculum standards.

Activists took advantage of the last opportunity to testify on the proposed standards, which would drop a 20-year-old rule that requires both “strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories be taught. Critics say the requirement is used to undermine the theory of evolution in favor of religious teachings.

Wired has also covered this story.

CNN reports:

But based on data from 2006, the researchers found that even though teachers in the United States were contracted to teach an average of 1,080 hours during the school year, they actually worked less than teachers in Japan and Germany, when working time was defined to include work-related activities in addition to classroom teaching.

The Group of Eight, or G-8, includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Longer school days and school years are part of President Obama’s strategy to improve the United States’ education system.

The NY Times reports:

In the last decade, record numbers of immigrants, both legal and illegal, have fueled the greatest growth in public schools since the baby boom. The influx has strained many districts’ budgets and resources and put classrooms on the front lines of America’s battles over whether and how to assimilate the newcomers and their children.

Inside schools, which are required to enroll students regardless of their immigration status and are prohibited from even asking about it, the debate has turned to how best to educate them.

From Newsweek:

Rural schools… are being threatened as the economy forces deep cuts to education. Districts nationwide are preparing to shut down many campuses, and small, isolated schools are vulnerable because they serve fewer students and cost more per pupil to operate than larger schools.

“All over this country, the pressure is on to close rural schools,” said Marty Strange, policy director of the nonprofit Rural School and Community Trust in Arlington, Va. “They are a target in these hard economic times.”

Sexting – the phenomenon of sending sexually explicit photos via cell phone – has received much media coverage in the last few weeks because this behavior, disturbingly, seems to be something of a pasttime among some adolescents. A round-up of some of the articles I’ve enountered:

From USA Today:

A growing number of teens are ending up in serious trouble for sending racy photos with their cellphones.

Police have investigated more than two dozen teens in at least six states this year for sending nude images of themselves in cellphone text messages, which can bring a charge of distributing child pornography. Authorities typically are notified by parents or schools about so-called “sexting.”

This week in Spotsylvania, Va., two boys, ages 15 and 18, were charged with solicitation and possession of child porn with intent to distribute after an investigation found they sought nude pictures from three juveniles — one in elementary school.

“It’s absolutely becoming a bigger problem,” says Michelle Collins of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Of the 2,100 children the center has identified as victims of online porn, she says, one-fourth initially sent the images themselves.

From the AP, via MSNBC:

Two students in Spotsylvania County [Virginia] have been charged with child pornography after police found nude images of juveniles on their cell phones.     The so-called “sexting” incident was uncovered by a school resource officer at Spotsylvania High School. According to a court filing, the investigation concluded that the two teenage suspects had solicited the images from three juveniles, including elementary and middle school students.     The two accused students were charged Tuesday with possession of child pornography with intent to distribute and electronic solicitation.

From the Tampa Tribune:

It’s like texting, but with racy pictures.

Mostly it’s happening among teenagers, which technically makes it a child pornography crime. 

Nonetheless, it’s catching on across the nation:

• An Ohio teenager sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend and when they broke up, he sent them to other high school girls, who harassed Jesse Logan. The ordeal sent her into a spiraling depression. In July, 2008, Logan hanged herself in her bedroom. She was 18.
• A 19-year-old Polk County man was accused of sending naked pictures of himself on his cell phone to a 14-year-old girl’s cell phone. Ronald Eugene Steward made his first appearance before a Polk judge this week and was ordered held under $105,000 bail.
• Over the weekend, Pinellas County middle school teacher Christy Lynn Martin, 32, was arrested on allegations she sent naked pictures of herself to the cell phone of a 14-year-old boy, an eighth-grader at Azalea Middle School, where she worked. She was released this week after posting $20,000 bail.

From the Seattle Times:

After his former girlfriend taunted him, Phillip Alpert remembered the nude photos she e-mailed to him while they were dating.

He took revenge with an electronic blast — e-mailing the photos of the 16-year-old girl to more than 70 people, including her parents, grandparents and teachers.

Three days later, Alpert, then 18, was charged with transmitting child pornography. Alpert today is serving five years of probation for the crime, and he is registered as a sex offender — a label he must carry at least until he is 43.

“I didn’t know how bad of a decision it was,” Alpert, now 19, said recently at his MetroWest apartment. “I don’t think it’s fair.”

Education Week reports:

The phrase “21st-century skills” is everywhere in education policy discussions these days, from faculty lounges to the highest echelons of the U.S. education system.

Broadly speaking, it refers to a push for schools to teach ­­­critical-thinking, analytical, and technology skills, in addition to the “soft skills” of creativity, collaboration, and communication that some experts argue will be in high demand as the world increasingly shifts to a global, entrepreneurial, and service-based workplace…

[A] group of researchers, historians, and policymakers from across the political spectrum are raising a red flag about the [21st-century skills] agenda as embodied by the Tucson, Ariz.-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills, or P21, the leading advocacy group for 21st-century skills.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills Web site is here.

MSNBC reports:

Nine-year-old Daniel Valdez…  his mother and five brothers, ages 1 to 17, live in a garage without heat or running water in a modest, low-lying neighborhood that sits between celebrity-owned mansions in the hills and the Pacific Ocean. Each morning, they arise at 6:30, get dressed and then leave quietly; they return only after dark — a routine born out of the fear that detection could mean the loss of even this humble dwelling.

Daniel and his brothers have been sleeping in the garage for more than a year — members of what school officials and youth advocates say is a rapidly growing legion of homeless youth.

The AP (via USA Today) reports:

The nation’s governors and other policymakers have advocated a deeply flawed European test to judge American students, a private study has found.

The National Governors Association and other groups have been pushing states to compare their kids’ performance to that of students around the world. The idea is to help the U.S. gain on better-performing countries by borrowing their best ideas.

To compare American schoolchildren, the governors have urged states to use tests including the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which is given to high school students in 57 countries. But the Brookings Institution, in a report released Tuesday, said the PISA test is too flawed.

The PISA test goes beyond learning to measure values and beliefs, the report found. For example, PISA asks students whether they favor laws that protect the habitats of endangered species. And it asks if children favor electricity from renewable sources and regulating factory emissions.

“These are political judgments,” said Tom Loveless, the study’s author. “For me as a citizen, before I would agree or disagree with any of them, I’d need to know more about them.”

The report is available for download from the Brookings Institution Web site here.