NewsTrust - Education Reform - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

Florida Public Charter School Linked To Scientology

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - Feb. 29 (News Report) - The school's Christmas party, for example, was held at a Scientology church in Tampa. The students were given Scientology books and DVDs, shown a play written by Hubbard and photographed with Santa Claus in front of a Scientology cross. Teachers were also required to attend training sessions at Scientology's flagship resort to be educated in Smart Way, a program designed by Scientologists, and were told they had no choice but to implement study tech in their curriculum. From the Times:

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The "Shock Doctrine" Comes to Your Neighborhood Classroom

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By David Sirota - Sep. 06 (News Analysis) - "Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.

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Failed Education Reform in Chile Prompts Hunger Strikes, Protests by Thousands of Students

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Aug. 04 (News Report) - They are demanding an end to privatized education in Chile, which has left generations of students deep in debt.

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Matt Damon Defends Teachers Against 'Sh***y' Reason.tv

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Aug. 02 (News Report) - Following his keynote address, the actor took offense to a Reason.tv reporter who contended that, as opposed to the environment faced by teachers in a tenure system, the lack of job security in acting functions as an incentive for hard work.

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Teaching Empathy to the ‘Me’ Generation

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By Eric Leake - Jul. 18 (Special Report) - A Midwestern university experiments in teaching empathy not merely through classroom curriculum, but by having students live the lives of the working poor. The six participating students and their community partners are introduced in turn. Diana Crandall, a first-year psychology major in a smart black jacket and tie, talks about the children she worked with through the Children’s Hunger Alliance. “I know that I can’t walk away from this and be the same person I was before.”

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Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Remake Teacher Training Programs - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Education Week - By Alyson Klein - Jun. 22 (News Report) - Teacher training programs would be held accountable for producing educators who demonstrate the ability to boost student achievement before they even graduate, under a bill introduced today by a powerful, bipartisan trio of senators.

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$17M 'Grow Your Own Teachers' Program Yields Just 43 Educators

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Education Week - By Hannah Hess - Jun. 17 (News Report) - Illinois has invested more than $17 million to recruit parents, classroom aides and other school employees from low-income communities for a teacher certification program aimed at replenishing the supply of teachers in some of its most hard-to-staff schools. But after five years, the push to harvest homegrown educators has yielded only 43 teachers.

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For-Profit Colleges Spend Much Less On Educating Students Than Public Universities

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Chris Kirkham - May. 25 (News Report) - For-profit colleges devote less than a third of what public universities spend on educating students, even though the for-profit institutions charge nearly twice as much as their public counterparts for tuition, according to new federal government data released Thursday.

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The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working With the Religious Right to Kill Public Education

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Rachel Tabachnick - May. 10 (Investigative Report) - By now you've surely heard of the Kochs. Meanwhile, the powerful, wealthy DeVos family has remained largely under the radar, while leading a stealth assault on America's schools.

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Back to school for the billionaires

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

iWatch News - By Rita Beamish - May. 04 (Special Report) - Microsoft chairman Gates, computer magnate Michael Dell, investor Eli Broad, and the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame have collectively poured some $4.4 billion into school reform in the last decade through their private foundations.

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Educators Push Back Against Obama's 'Business Model' For School Reforms

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Karen Lewis, Lois Weiner, Juan Gonzalez - Sep. 03 (News Report) - It’s back-to-school season. As millions of children around the country begin a new school year, the Obama administration is aggressively moving forward on a number of education initiatives, from expanding charter schools to implementing new national academic standards.

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Obama Defends Sweeping Education Reforms in Face of Criticism From Minority and Teachers Groups

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez, Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson - Jul. 30 (News Analysis) - President Obama took on critics of his administration's sweeping education reform plan on Thursday in a nearly hour-long speech at the National Urban League's 100th anniversary convention. His address came on the heels of news that New York public school students are not performing nearly as well as prior state tests had revealed. We speak with Diane Ravitch, the former assistant secretary of education under George HW Bush and Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters.

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Schooling Arne Duncan

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

socialistworker.org - By Jesse Hagopian - Jul. 20 (News Report) - every major initiative that Arne Duncan is currently advocating on a national level has been shown by non-partisan research institutions to be ineffective at best.

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Charter school cooks the books

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

socialistworker.org - Jul. 15 (News Report) - A Chicago Sun-Times article last week heralded the success of the school's 100 percent college-bound rate for its first class of graduating seniors. If it were true, the achievement would have been a very impressive feat.

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The education renaissance of Katrina, ed. Dark Ages of DC

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Hot Air - By Ed Morrissey - Jul. 08 (News Analysis) - If we could start over from scratch in building our public education system, how would we do it? In New Orleans, that question was far from academic in 2005 after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. ... Sixty percent of New Orleans students currently attend charter schools, test scores are up, and talented and passionate educators from around the country are flocking to New Orleans to be a part of the education revolution. It’s too early to tell if the New Orleans experiment in school choice will succeed over the long term, but for the first time in decades people are optimistic about the future of New Orleans schools.

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Restoring Our Schools

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Linda Darling-Hammond - May. 31 (Special Report) - Far from being first in the world in math and science, the United States ranked thirty-fifth out of the top forty countries in math—right between Azerbaijan and Croatia—when the most recent Programme in International Student Assessment tests were given in 2006. In science, the United States ranked twenty-ninth out of forty, sandwiched between Latvia and Lithuania. These rankings and scores had dropped from 2000, when the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced. While the United States performs closer to international averages in reading, its scores also dropped on the international reading tests during the NCLB era.

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Latina professor jeered, threatened for speaking against immigration laws

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Raw Story - By Stephen C. Webster - May. 25 (News Report) - Professor Sandra Soto, welcome to civil rights notoriety. Last week, Arizona University's professor of Latina studies took the stage to address 2010 graduates of the school's Social and Behavioral Sciences program. Naturally, her words were timely and touched upon the state's recently passed immigration laws that allow police to question and detain anyone who they suspect [...]

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The Virtual University

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

American Prospect - By Anya Kamenetz - Apr. 21 (Special Report) - The higher-education system has a lot in common with another great challenge our country is confronting: health care. Colleges, like hospitals, have little incentive to conserve resources or compete on price. They can actually gain prestige by raising tuition. They shift costs to students to make up for gaps in state funding and then hand out grant money to the applicants they want the most, not the ones who need the most help. Community colleges dedicated to serving the poorest get a fraction of the public money that goes to flagship state universities.

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Crist Vetoes Key GOP-Backed Education Bill -- Will An Indy Senate Bid Follow?

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Talking Points Memo - By Eric Kleefeld - Apr. 16 (News Report) - Gov. Charlie Crist (R-FL), who has been trailing badly in his Republican primary for Senate, has just vetoed a signature Republican-backed education bill in Florida -- a sign that he could potentially break with his party and run for the Senate as an independent.

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More Erie School District students than ever rely on free meals

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Erie Times-News - By Gerry Weiss - Apr. 15 (Special Report) - The line of children, some as young as age 7, starts to form outside McKinley Elementary School at dawn. It is cold, windy and raining, and more than an hour until the first class begins. But the line only grows, snaking around the brick building to a door that leads to McKinley's gymnasium, which also doubles as its cafeteria. Most of the students had walked to school. Some were accompanied by a parent or siblings. Some traveled alone. They walked through tough, impoverished neighborhoods, past numerous abandoned, boarded-up houses. These are children who live on some of the poorest streets in one of the poorest cities in Pennsylvania.

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Ravitch describes her change of heart

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

schoolboardnews.nsba.org - Apr. 10 (Not sure) - What’s made Ravitch’s latest work such a draw is that it details the negative effects of testing, the No Child Left Behind law, and the free-market effect on public schools brought on by reforms that were hailed by prominent experts—herself included—over the past two decades, despite the skepticism and frustrations of real-life educators. “This is a book that flies in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom,” she said. “I’ve advocated for things that I’m now telling you are not working.”

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Critics say administration’s blueprint is too similar to NCLB

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

eschoolnews.com - By Laura Devaney - Mar. 30 (News Analysis) - As the Obama administration seeks support for its plan to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), many education policy analysts worry that the new blueprint’s guidelines are too reminiscent of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)—most notably by continuing to place too much focus on high-stakes testing.

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A Look at Arne Duncan's VIP List of Requests at Chicago Schools and the Effects of his Expansion of Charter Schools in Chicago

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Azam Ahmed, Pauline Lipman, Jitu Brown - Mar. 26 (Special Report) - When President Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, was the head of Chicago’s Public Schools, his office kept a list of powerful, well-connected people who asked for help getting certain children into the city’s best public schools. The list—long kept confidential—was disclosed this week by the Chicago Tribune. We speak with the Chicago Tribune reporter who broke the story and with two Chicago organizers about Duncan and his aggressive plan to expand charter schools.

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Critics: Obama’s ed policies no better than Bush’s | eSchoolNews.com

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

eschoolnews.com - Mar. 12 (Other) -

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House GOP Rejects Law Banning Child Abuse

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By James Ridgeway, Jean Casella - Mar. 05 (News) - James Ridgeway points out that GOP House members voted against a law to prevent extreme child abuse in schools. Pretty amazing.

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