Articles filed under Education

USA Today
WASHINGTON — Almost every fourth-grader in Mississippi knows how to read. In Massachusetts, only half do.

So what's Mississippi doing that Massachusetts, the state with the most college graduates, isn't? Setting expectations too low, critics say.

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The Nation
Over the past six years George W. Bush's faith-based Administration and a conservative Republican Congress transformed the small-time abstinence-only business into a billion-dollar industry.

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AlterNet
Last month's resignation of Wade Horn, former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and point man for conservative social policy, came just as support was crumbling and mistrust mounting for a costly and, many would argue, unsuccessful initiative -- abstinence education.

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Salon
May 28, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings sounded like a reformer when she testified on Capitol Hill earlier this month over recent revelations of waste, fraud and bribery in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry.

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New York Times
The United States Department of Education has been rightfully drawn (but not yet quartered) in Congress for failing to prevent the kickbacks, payoffs and self-dealing recently uncovered in the student loan business. Now it turns out that the department also mismanaged the federal Reading First initiative, the cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to improve reading instruction in exchange for federal education dollars.

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New York Times
“It’s not our fault.” That’s what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings seemed to say while testifying before Congress last week about her department’s failure to halt the payoffs, kickbacks and general looting of the public treasury by a lending company that collected nearly $300 million in undeserved subsidies.

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New York Times
Republicans in Congress have generally defended corporate welfare for companies involved in the student loan business: lenders that collect billions of dollars in federal subsidies in return for issuing government-backed loans that represent no real risk to the companies themselves. But support for these wasteful subsidies is waning in both parties, thanks to recent revelations showing just how corrupt and costly the program has become.

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Washington Post
Frank G. Kauffman was teaching a course in social work at Missouri State University in 2005 when he gave an assignment that sparked a lawsuit and nearly destroyed his academic career.

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Washington Post
The House dealt a blow to President Bush's chief early-childhood initiative yesterday, voting to end the standardized testing of 4-year-olds, which was at the heart of his efforts to refocus Head Start.

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New York Times
Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases — as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress — looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

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New York Times
State attorneys general around the country are stepping up their scrutiny of college lending practices in the absence of federal enforcement action, following a pattern that experts say has prevailed in some other major consumer investigations in recent years.

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Boston Globe
THE DEEPENING college loan scandal is a classic case of what can happen when government uses private companies as middlemen to carry out public goals. Lately, investigations by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, US Senator Edward Kennedy, and others have revealed a number of problems:

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USA Today
Federal advisors mismanaged President Bush's $1 billion-a-year reading program and profited from close ties to the Bush administration, according to testimony released Thursday — in one case repeatedly rejecting one state's funding proposal until state officials dumped a successful reading test and bought one written by a top Bush advisor.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Five years after President Bush got a Republican-led Congress to pass a landmark law that forces schools to give students more tests, his party is leading a revolt.

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Guardian
It's been a central plank of George Bush's social policy: to stop teenagers having sex. More than $1bn of federal money has been spent on promoting abstinence since 1998 - posters printed, television adverts broadcast and entire education programmes devised for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys.

The trouble is, new research suggests that it hasn't worked. At all.

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New York Times
In a fierce contest to control the student loan market, the nation’s banks and lenders have for years waged a successful campaign to limit a federal program that was intended to make borrowing less costly by having the government provide loans directly to students.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex a few years later as those who did not, according to a long-awaited study mandated by Congress.

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Los Angeles Times
AFTER 15 YEARS of reporting on the student-loan industry, I didn't think much could surprise me. But even I was shocked last week when I discovered Securities and Exchange Commission documents revealing that financial aid directors at three prominent universities — as well as a senior official at the U.S. Education Department — each had significant personal investments in a private student-loan company.

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Los Angeles Times
In an emerging revolt against abstinence-only sex education, states are turning down millions of dollars in federal grants, unwilling to accept White House dictates that the money be used for classes focused almost exclusively on teaching chastity.

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Washington Post
The government contractor that set up a billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program for the Education Department and failed, according to the department's inspector general, to keep it free of conflicts of interest is one of the companies now evaluating the program.

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Washington Post
The last thing President Bush needs is another fight with his political base. But that is what he has found as he presses Congress to renew the No Child Left Behind Act, his signature education program passed by a bipartisan majority in the first months of his first term.

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Washington Post
More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate -- including the House's second-ranking Republican -- will introduce legislation today that could severely undercut President Bush's signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.

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The New Standard
Mar. 6 – This year, Jevon Cochran’s English class has been "postponed." Instead of the usual mix of reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary lessons and discussion, Cochran, a junior at Lewis Cass Technical High School in Detroit, said he and his classmates are now drilling for the ACT exam. They must take the national scholastic test as part of Michigan’s effort to evaluate students and schools under federal standards passed in 2001. That, he said, has meant a change in the classroom atmosphere.

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Tom Paine
President George Bush traveled to New Orleans last week. Coincidentally, I was there at the same time. But like a tourist who just visits the French Quarter for Mardi Gras, the president missed the full story by only stopping in on one of the new, well-resourced charter schools in the city.

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Washington Post
MUCH OF the national debate on improving schools is focused on the No Child Left Behind Act. Absent from the limelight is an equally significant federal program with a proven track record of results. Head Start, America's early childhood development program, not only should be reauthorized but also strengthened and expanded.

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Huffington Post
There's new evidence that the Bush Administration's "abstinence only" approach to sex education is not proving effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies or the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Many Americans wonder why the White House promotes just say no programs when they don't work. The answer is simple and disturbing: George Bush is a dogmatic ultra-conservative; he believes that the maxim, "just say no," solves a variety of social problems ranging from pre-marital sex to terrorism.

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CBS News
Anti-evolution science standards for Kansas' public schools were doomed by a shift of power on the State Board of Education after last year's elections.

The new board, with a 6-4 majority of Democrats and moderate Republicans in control, scheduled a debate for 4 p.m. Tuesday on a new set of proposed science standards, the fifth set of guidelines in only eight years. Parties on both sides anticipated the board would dump the standards adopted in November 2005.

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Christian Science Monitor
BROOKLYN, N.Y. - The Supreme Court is considering two school desegregation cases that will probably result in limits on the use of race as a criterion for admission to public elementary and high schools.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration is supporting the plaintiffs' arguments that the use of such racial criteria is unconstitutional. It was no doubt delighted to hear Justice Anthony Kennedy say during oral arguments that "characterizing each student by reason of the color of his or her skin should only be, if ever allowed, allowed as a last resort."

But Bush officials are being inconsistent. They don't apply that standard to their own public education policies. It's time they embraced the premise of their own student testing rules – race matters – and support efforts to promote access and diversity in schools.

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Truthdig
Recently I was asked to join three others in a radio interview concerning the pros and cons of the No Child Left Behind debate. The others were temperate, balanced and guarded in their judgments.

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WSWS
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill January 17 proposing a halving of interest rates on federally subsidized student loans. Part of the Democrats’ vaunted “first 100 hours,” HR5 is supposed to represent the fulfillment of a campaign promise to rein in spiraling education costs and debt burden.

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New American Media
President George W. Bush is asking Congress to re-enact the No Child Left Behind Act even though the act has failed to significantly boost the performance of under-achieving students.

Calling the NCLB a "good law" during the State of the Union address, the president ignored the criticisms of those in the educational trenches.

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Washington Post
FEDERAL WAY, Wash., Jan. 24 -- Frosty E. Hardiman is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary.

"Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced.

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San Francisco Chronicle
FOR YEARS, critics of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law have feared that it would be used as a Trojan horse to discredit public schools and to promote the use of vouchers to pay for private school tuition.

This week, the administration has shown its true colors.

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Washington Post
The Bush administration yesterday unveiled an education plan that would allow poor students at chronically failing public schools to use federal vouchers to attend private and religious schools, angering Democrats who vowed to fight the measure.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — House Democrats on Friday unveiled a bill that would cut interest rates on federally subsidized loans to college students by half over the next five years.

They said they would finance the $6 billion measure by increasing costs that lenders pay to the government and reducing the largest lenders’ government-guaranteed profits.

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Huffington Post
On January 8, No Child Left Behind turned five. A lot of people hope it won't live to be six, including some people who not only supported the law, but actively worked to put it in place.

For instance, the National Council of Churches backed the law initially but in a December, 2006 letter to Ted Kennedy concluded that "the law has undermined education for our nation's most vulnerable children..." The Council asked him to work towards "remedying the many injustices that have arisen during the first five years of the implementation of NCLB."

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — Democratic Congressional leaders on Monday called President Bush’s signature education law too punitive in its sanctions on public schools and pledged to increase educational spending, signaling the stance they will take this year in negotiations over the law’s renewal.

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USA Today
The walls are speaking these days at Stanton Elementary School in Philadelphia, and they're talking about test scores.
Post-It notes with children's names tell the story of how, in just five years, a federal law with a funny name has changed school for everyone. "We spend most of our days talking about or looking at data," principal Barbara Adderley says.

Test scores run her week.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
It is a fine thing indeed, to awaken each morning knowing that Democrats will soon control Congress and put the brakes on some of Bush's worst violations of constitutional law and human decency. But we cannot grow complacent - the hardest work is yet to come. The changed Congress still represents the same old country. Politicians get elected the same way they always have - by telling the public what they want to hear. Changing what the public wants to hear is the real trick, and in this respect, the Democrats are every bit as much an enemy of a free society as the Republicans.

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San Francisco Chronicle
At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former Vice President Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

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Huffington Post
For the record, my first anti-No Child Left Behind (NCLB) article was commissioned by Newsday in late 2000 and published January 28, 2001. At the time, NCLB was a no-name plan, the administration not yet having ripped off the slogan of the Children's Defense Fund. But even then I saw not a great civil rights act as some, but yet another Orwellian double-speak program like Clear Skies, Clean Waters, and Healthy Forests--a program to accomplish the opposite of its avowed intent.

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San Francisco Chronicle
ASKED TO name the most celebrated U.S. Supreme Court decision in the nation's history, most Americans would likely place the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation ruling at or near the top of their list.

In his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to the Brown decision as "simple, eloquent and unequivocal."

But in a sign of how dangerously contorted the legal arguments over race and diversity have become, the Supreme Court may be on the verge of decreeing that even school districts it once ordered to achieve racial balance might no longer be allowed to use racial criteria to do so.

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Christian Science Monitor
Adults often complain about mixed signals they get from teens, but what about the messages teens get? Here's one with major life implications: Go to college, but graduate with a load of debt. Oh yeah, like that makes getting a degree look real attractive.

The economic health of America's information-driven society depends on how well it educates its young people. So it can't afford to shrug off the mounting student-debt problem with a mere "whatever."

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New York Times
More than 50 years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, the nation still has not abolished de facto segregation in public schools. But thanks to good will and enormous effort, some communities have made progress. Today the Supreme Court hears arguments in a pair of cases that could undo much of that work.

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Los Angeles Times
MY WIFE spent a few years teaching in a mostly low-income elementary school. The main thing I remember her telling me was that parental involvement was a near-perfect predictor of her students' performance. The kids with active parents did well, and the kids with disengaged parents did poorly.

The great bugaboo of education reform has always been the role of parents. But if a child's family determines his educational future, then there's not much point in trying to perfect the school environment. Or so it would seem.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --Most no-sex-before-marriage programs escape the type of scientific scrutiny required to show if they work, a government watchdog said Thursday in a report on the federally funded abstinence education efforts.

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USA Today
With college costs surging, Democratic leaders in the House have made reducing those costs one of their top priorities. On the agenda:

• A cut in student loan interest rates.

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Washington Post
Universities are the bulwark of democratic societies -- places where individuals with diverse viewpoints come together to learn and to produce new knowledge for addressing social concerns, free of ideological interference. But these centers of freedom are under attack from people who want to inject partisan politics into our classrooms.

Led by activist David Horowitz, some conservatives are pushing for the adoption of an "Academic Bill of Rights" (ABOR) across America. The bill takes the form of student resolutions or legislative proposals claiming to protect the academic freedom of college students from ideological indoctrination by professors.

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Washington Post
LAUDERHILL, Fla. -- School exams may be detested by students everywhere, but in this state at the forefront of the testing and accountability movement in the United States, the backlash against them has become far broader, and politically potent.

The role of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT, has become central to the race to succeed Gov. Jeb Bush (R), with polls showing a growing discontent over the exams, which he has championed and which are used to determine many aspects of the school system, including teacher pay, budgets and who flunks third grade.

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CNN
(CNN) -- College students across the country are gearing up for November's elections by storming dorms, hosting a "Second Amendment Day," and, in some cases, drinking liberally.

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Business Week
Across the country, some teachers complain that President George W. Bush's makeover of public education promotes "teaching to the test." The President's younger brother Neil takes a different tack: He's selling to the test. The No Child Left Behind Act compels schools to prove students' mastery of certain facts by means of standardized exams. Pressure to perform has energized the $1.9 billion-a-year instructional software industry.

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Washington Post
In dire circumstances -- a battlefield, a devastating natural disaster or an overcrowded emergency room -- we accept the rationing of scarce resources as a necessary if regrettable choice. We triage. We divide patients into three groups: the safe cases, those suitable for treatment and the hopeless. And we ration resources in an effort to do the most good for the largest number.

But there are areas of life where we have rejected the idea of triage. Public education, an institution charged with disbursing equality of opportunity for all children, is certainly one of them. In our loftiest moments, we see public education as one place where we dispense with the blunt, utilitarian logic of triage and seek equal treatment for all. But try as we might, deep inequalities persist and belie our rhetoric.

It's ironic that the No Child Left Behind Act, intended to right the injustices suffered by poor and minority children, has in fact caused more rationing of education.

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Washington Post
I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: "How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don't even accept evolution?"

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Huffington Post
The same folks who brought you Katrina Relief--Bush administration hacks and Republican party loyalists--now want their K-Street cronies to regulate the entire U.S. college and university system. These appointees and apparatchiks are proposing lock-step federal regulation and oversight over all colleges and universities--and tracking every single student's lifelong educational record--in order, they say, to better help consumers.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its review of how Reading First, a billion-dollar program each year, that it says has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

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Los Angeles Times
WITH SEPTEMBER upon us, it's time to reflect on that perennially popular back-to-school activity, Bash the Professors.

According to David Horowitz's book, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," American universities are dominated by "a shocking and perverse culture of academics who are poisoning the minds of today's college students with … hatred of America … and support for America's terrorist enemies." His crusade against "radical academics" is not, alas, a lonely one.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
The war on the Miami-Dade Public Schools in general and on Superintendent Dr. Rudolph F. Crew in particular has several threads. The man pulling the strings though is Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

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MSNBC
WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Wednesday the No Child Left Behind Act is close to perfect and needs little change as its first major update draws near.

“I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory soap: It’s 99.9 percent pure or something,” Spellings told reporters. “There’s not much needed in the way of change.”

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New York Times
A federal study showing that fourth graders in charter schools score worse in reading and math than their public school counterparts should cause some soul-searching in Congress. Too many lawmakers seem to believe that the only thing wrong with American education is the public school system, and that converting lagging schools to charter schools would cause them to magically improve.

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New York Times
Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

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New York Times
Voters in Kansas ensured this month that noncreationist moderates will once again have a majority (6 to 4) on the state school board, keeping new standards inspired by intelligent design from taking effect.

This is a victory for public education and sends a message nationwide about the public’s ability to see through efforts by groups like the Discovery Institute to misrepresent science in the schools. But for those of us who are interested in improving science education, any celebration should be muted.

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Washington Post
FOR THE SECOND time in less than a year, voters have turned out of office policymakers who insisted on teaching kids bad science. Last year, the people of Dover, Pa., got rid of a group of school board members who injected the theory of "intelligent design" into high school biology. Last week, Republican primary voters in Kansas ousted the conservative majority on the state Board of Education, which had adopted science standards embracing intelligent design and casting doubt on Darwinian evolution.

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One Thousand Reasons
Forget the exploits of John Brown and Carrie Nation. Their violent efforts for virtuous causes are but distant memories in the Land of Oz. Here in contemporary Kansas, many socially conservative uber-patriots fastidiously and “peacefully” adhere to an American sociopolitical system which is becoming increasingly hostile to science, peace, human rights, the environment, and minorities. Yes, the “American Way” has become rife with many of the truly vulgar and destructive aspects of humanity.

Since 1998, pro-Evolutionary forces have been grappling with anti-Evolutionary forces for control of the Kansas State School Board. In the recent election, power changed hands for the fourth time in eight years as Darwinists reclaimed a 6-4 advantage on the board. It is virtually a foregone conclusion that the board will again re-write the science standards to restore Evolution to its proper stature. Thankfully, reason will again prevail in science classes from Overland Park to Dodge City.

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Washington Post
The seesaw battle over state science standards in Kansas seems to have tipped back a bit in the direction of sanity. In Tuesday’s primary elections, moderates who subscribe to the theory of evolution won just enough races to guarantee them a slight majority on the school board after November’s general election. That should make it possible for them to overturn the benighted science standards pushed through by conservatives on the board last year in an effort to undercut the theory of evolution.

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Boston Globe
TOPEKA, Kan. --Kansas Board of Education members who approved new classroom standards that call evolution into question faced a counterattack at the polls Tuesday from Darwin's defenders.

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AlterNet
In April, the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (MISH) made headlines after the federal government announced that the group would receive a $200,000 grant to establish a sexual health curriculum for medical students. Sexual health experts affiliated with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were taken aback.

Why the outrage? Despite what its legitimate-sounding name might suggest, MISH is really nothing more than a thinly veiled ideological interest group that manipulates science to advance its mission.

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New York Times
The national education reform effort has long suffered from magical thinking about what it takes to improve children’s chances of learning. Instead of homing in on teacher training and high standards, things that distinguish effective schools from poor ones, many reformers have embraced the view that the public schools are irreparably broken and that students of all kinds need to be given vouchers to attend private or religious schools at public expense.

This belief, though widespread, has not held up to careful scrutiny.

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Black America Web
Any other administration would have made a big deal of it: A fresh, “meticulous” study by the U.S. Education Department has found that, in reading and math, public school students are performing as well or better than private school students.

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Boston Globe
ORLANDO, Fla. --An overwhelming majority of delegates from the nation's largest education union approved a plan Monday to aggressively lobby Congress for reform of the No Child Left Behind Act.

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Independent
The world's scientific community united yesterday to launch one of the strongest attacks yet on creationism, warning that the origins of life were being "concealed, denied or confused".

The national science academies of 67 countries warned parents and teachers to ensure that they did not undermine the teaching of evolution or allow children to be taught that the world was created in six days.

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Indy Media
Students are protesting in countries all around the globe to demand free education for everyone. IMC Athens reports that 320 academic departments (75% of all departments) are occupied by students in Greece. Certain clauses in the Greek Constitution (stating, among others, that education has to be public and free for all and that no police forces are allowed to enter university grounds) have made the enforcement of a neo-liberal agenda to the country's higher education institutions particularly difficult. However, the Conservative government is now attempting to push forward crucial changes in the functioning and role of the country's Higher Education institutions. A so-called "committee of experts", appointed by the government itself, has released a list of proposed changes.

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Telegraph
University academics are holding demonstrations to demand better pay after union leaders rejected the latest offer and warned that strikes could follow.

The AUT and Natfhe unions, representing academics and lecturers in universities and colleges, officially merged today to form the new University and College Union (UCU), with about 115,000 members.

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Huffington Post
True or false:

1. Iraq's reconstruction -- as promised before the U.S. invasion -- has been paid for with Iraq's oil reserves...

2. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent mushroom-cloud threat to the U.S.A...

3. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was greeted by cheering Iraqis...

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CounterPunch
Al Lord is thinking about building his own private golf course. Not bad for an ex-corporate socialist. The former CEO of Sallie Mae is worth about a quarter of a billion dollars, running a company that Uncle Sam virtually guarantees against any losses while it makes enormous profits in the college student loan business.

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CounterPunch
One of the Christian Right's most cherished ideological victories since the 1990s has been the dominance of federally funded "abstinence only until marriage" programs now taught to millions of teenagers across the country.

New evidence, however, suggests that these same programs have contributed to soaring rates of unplanned pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births and, yes, abortions among women who are young or poor.

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Village Voice
Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and I once shared a mutual obsession. "How," he asked me, "can we get the words of the Bill of Rights off the pages and into the very lives of American students?"

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Lew Rockwell
Before the U.S. House of Representatives, March 29, 2006

Mr. Speaker, anyone needing proof that federal funding leads to federal control should examine HR 609, the "College Access and Opportunity Act." HR 609 imposes several new federal mandates on colleges, and extends numerous existing mandates. HR 609 proves the prophetic soundness of warnings that federal higher education programs would lead to federal control of higher education.

Opponents of increased federalization of higher education should be especially concerned about HR 609's "Academic Bill of Rights." This provision takes a step toward complete federal control of college curricula, grading, and teaching practices. While the provision is worded as a "sense of Congress," the clear intent is to intimidate college administrators into ensuring professors' lectures and lesson plans meet with federal approval.

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Yahoo News
WASHINGTON - Teachers are far more pessimistic than parents about getting every student to succeed in reading and math as boldly promised by the No Child Left Behind Act. That's left a huge expectations gap between the two main sets of adults in children's lives.

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AlterNet
On January 26, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it would continue to fund Community-Based Abstinence Education programs, further restricting the sexuality education of America's young people.

Like past years' decisions to continue funding for abstinence-only education, this recent announcement, which introduces a new set of guidelines, emerges not from logic or evidence, but from extreme right-wing ideology.

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Seattle PI
The support that greeted the federal No Child Left Behind Act almost four years ago is eroding exponentially. Even before Hurricane Katrina pummeled the nation, a backlash against the law had erupted from a number of sectors on a variety of issues.

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Guardian
University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?

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Washington Post
Imagine that your high school student comes home with a report card that has only two subjects on it: math and reading. Your first worry might be that your child has dropped her other classes. But no, she assures you, she hasn't.

You call the school and find out that since your daughter's scores in math and reading are below the standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act, she is being taught only these two subjects until her scores improve.

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Washington Post
More than a quarter of U.S. schools are failing under terms of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, according to preliminary state-by-state statistics reported to the U.S. Department of Education.

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New York Times
SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

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New York Times
Facing threats of litigation and pressure from Washington, colleges and universities nationwide are opening to white students hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships, scholarships and other programs previously created for minorities.

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Washington Post
DENVER, March 10 -- A high school teacher who was placed on leave after comparing President Bush's State of the Union address to speeches by Adolf Hitler has been reinstated, his attorney and school officials said Friday.

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ArtVoice
One of the biggest problems confronting higher education is the fact that most students entering colleges and universities lack basic social science skills and knowledge. In a recent survey of college students in Buffalo, for example, almost half did not know who George Pataki is. Eighty percent had no idea, correct or incorrect, as to what communism is. Nearly the same number of students couldn’t define capitalism. For whatever reason, social science education in America has collapsed at the high school level. For a democracy that relies on an informed electorate, such ignorance is toxic.

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Washington Post
The New York Times reported last month that a national commission appointed by the Bush administration is considering the use of standardized tests to discover how much college students learn. Campus newspapers across the country have commented extensively on the story.

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New York Times
In a defeat for critics of Darwin, the Utah House of Representatives on Monday voted down a bill intended to challenge the theory of evolution in high school science classes.

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Guardian
US scientists have for the first time enlisted the help of teachers in their battle against campaigners who want the theory of intelligent design to be taught in schools.
More than 300 teachers were invited to attend this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in St Louis, Missouri, yesterday, and many revealed their concerns.

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The Nation
President Bush can't seem to tell people enough times, in enough ways, about his self-proclaimed determination to "leave no child behind." The most recent occurrence came, predictably, during his State of the Union address, when he offered this bit of faux-wisdom, "If we ensure that America's children succeed in life, they will ensure that America succeeds in the world."

He then promptly cut Department of Education funding by $2.1 billion and shortchanged No Child Left Behind by $15.4 Billion.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — Although President Bush called in the State of the Union address for a major new commitment to improving math and science instruction, his budget for the coming year would cut the Education Department's discretionary budget to $54.41 billion from $55.92 billion in the current fiscal year.

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San Francisco Chronicle
As Congress reconvenes, one of its first orders of business will be to vote on a budget plan that will make it even harder for families to pay for college. The plan takes $12.7 billion out of federal student financial aid, the largest cuts in history. As a result, students and parents who borrow money to pay for college will be forced to pay unwarranted and, in some cases, higher interest rates on their student loans. That's bad news for the typical student borrower, who is already saddled with an average $17,500 in debt, and for parents who are coping with rising tuition costs.

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Boston Globe
OUR COMMANDER-in-certitude went Monday to Kansas State University. The publicized reason was to defend ultra-secret domestic spying. For much of his speech and question-and-answer period, President Bush served juicy red meat in a red state where he slammed John Kerry in the 2004 election, 62 to 37 percent. He said:

''This enemy cannot beat us. They cannot defeat us militarily. There's no chance."

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Guardian
It is the sort of invitation any poverty-stricken student would find hard to resist. "Do you have a professor who just can't stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? If you help ... expose the professor, we'll pay you for your work."

For full notes, a tape recording and a copy of all teaching materials, students at the University of California Los Angeles are being offered $100 (£57) - the tape recorder is provided free of charge - by an alumni group.

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New York Times
ROME, Jan. 18 - The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as "correct" the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

"If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another," Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano.

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Village Voice
The Department of Education's Office of Federal Student Aid opened in 1998, a time of "reinventing government," as President Clinton often reminded the nation.
"The intent of Congress in creating our office was to get politics out of the agency and focus on improving service for students," says one former FSA insider, who agreed to talk only on condition of anonymity. But during his tenure, he would see just the opposite— a program that might have saved taxpayers billions was instead buried by the Bush administration.

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Guardian
The surprise is that it has taken so long to get here. Last week a high school in Lebec, a small town in the Tehachapi mountains, some 70 miles north of Los Angeles, began a course called Philosophy of Design. The course curriculum was approved by a three-to-two vote at a secretive-sounding meeting of the school board held on New Year's Day.

The course teacher, Sharon Lemburg, is a special education teacher with a degree in physical education and the social sciences. Philosophy does not feature on her resume, but her marriage to a minister of the Assembly of God church does. The Assembly of God is a Christian fundamentalist, pro-creationist church, and Lebec, home to 1,300 souls, has become the latest frontline in the debate over intelligent design.

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Boston Globe
WHEN I BECAME president of Lesley University 20 years ago, I was attracted to the college because of its mission and beliefs that individuals can and should make a difference. After all, I am a product of the 1960s, and we believed that we had an opportunity, in fact a responsibility, to make the world a better place.

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San Francisco Chronicle
The Society for Adolescent Medicine sounded the alarm once again this month about the problems with government-funded abstinence-only programs in a comprehensive report. Not surprisingly, the findings aren't good.

A little more than a year ago, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Los Angeles, sounded this alarm in a study that found "false, misleading or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials.

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New York Times
In a ruling expected to reverberate through legal battles over school choice in many states, the Florida Supreme Court today struck down a voucher program for students attending failing schools, saying the state constitution bars Florida from using taxpayer money to finance a private alternative to the public system.

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Washington Post
This past fall new national data were released on the academic achievement of our nation's young people. In some ways the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card, were consistent with other recent performance indicators: There is some progress in math and almost none in reading, and more progress in elementary schools than in middle schools (where reading levels actually have declined since 2003).

This modest progress is disappointing.

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San Francisco Chronicle
FACED WITH BILLS for the Iraq war and the Katrina rebuild, Congress is doing exactly the wrong thing. It's cutting both the budget and taxes at the same time. No reforms, no new money -- just cuts and tax breaks.

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New York Times
When the school board in Muscatine, Iowa, sits down next year for its twice-a-decade evaluation of the district's science curriculum, the matter of whether to teach intelligent design as a challenge to evolution is expected to come up for discussion.

Board members disagree about whether they will be swayed by a sweeping court decision on intelligent design released on Tuesday in Pennsylvania. A federal judge there ruled intelligent design "a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory" that must not be taught in a public school science class.

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New York Times
ODESSA, Tex., Dec. 21 -Trustees of the Ector County Independent School District here decided, 4 to 2, on Tuesday night that high school students would use a course published by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools for studying the Bible in history and literature.

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New York Times
By now, the Christian conservatives who once dominated the school board in Dover, Pa., ought to rue their recklessness in forcing biology classes to hear about "intelligent design" as an alternative to the theory of evolution. Not only were they voted off the school board by an exasperated public last November, but this week a federal district judge declared their handiwork unconstitutional and told the school district to abandon a policy of such "breathtaking inanity."

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Washington Post
The opinion written by Judge John E. Jones III in the Dover evolution trial is a two-in-one document that offers both philosophical and practical arguments against "intelligent design" likely to be useful to far more than a school board in a small Pennsylvania town.

Jones gives a clear definition of science, and recounts how this vaunted mode of inquiry has evolved over the centuries. He describes how scientists go about the task of supporting or challenging ideas about the world of the senses -- all that can be observed and measured. And he reaches the unwavering conclusion that intelligent design is a religious idea, not a scientific one.

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Slate
In his 139-page ruling on the Dover, Pennsylvania, "intelligent design" case, federal district Judge John E. Jones sets out to kill ID's scientific pretensions once and for all. "After a six-week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area," he writes. Jones proceeds to tear ID limb from limb "in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial" on the same question.

Scientifically, Jones settles the issue. Culturally, he fails.

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BBC
A US court decision to ban the teaching of "intelligent design" has been hailed by anti-creationism campaigners.

A federal judge ruled in favour of 11 parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, who argued that Darwinian evolution must be taught as fact in biology lessons.

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Washington Post
School boards across the country are facing pressure to teach "intelligent design" in science classes, but what would such courses look like? Thankfully, we need not tax our imaginations. All we have to do is look inside some 19th-century textbooks.

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New York Times
New Orleans

THE higher education financing system in this country, like the health care system, is broken. In both cases, costs spiral out of control while millions of people, especially the poor, are not served. And in both cases, a few corporations are making hefty profits.

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Boston Globe
ALAN TEMES, an assistant professor of health and physical education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was getting good reviews on the job until his politics became an issue. Temes, who opposes the war in Iraq, began posting updates of the body count of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians on a bulletin board near his office. Last April, department chair Elaine Blair e-mailed Temes advising him to stop posting the notices. Then, Temes claims in a lawsuit, she warned him that continued antiwar protests would hurt his chances of getting tenure. Later, he was denied tenure, despite apparently meeting the qualifications for it.

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Boston Globe
QUESTIONS FROM the justices this week made it clear that the Supreme Court will side with military recruiters by forcing universities to forfeit federal aid if they restrict recruiting because of the Pentagon's policies on gays. The court evidently believes that, while universities might have a First Amendment right not to comply with an arm of government that violates the universities' policies against discrimination, Congress also has a right to retaliate by denying the colleges billions of dollars in federal support.

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Boston Globe
WE ARE at the point where any study that shows how low-income schools can reach the heights of academic performance is also an indictment of how the nation has no commitment to lifting all schools.

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AlterNet
Congratulations, parents of the Class of 2009! As you read this, your child is settling into the routines of college life: ill-timed early morning lectures, inevitable all-night cram sessions, and the search for parties on a now fairly familiar campus.

While the pleasures of college life remain the same, the economic security that a degree used to guarantee has disappeared. This fall, the Class of 2009 joins the ranks of an emerging debtor class composed of educated young adults.

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The Nation
There's a crisis in this country in higher education--and the House GOP's reckless fiscal policies are making it worse. To pay for the rebuilding costs associated with Hurricane Katrina, House Republicans just last week passed $50 billion in budget cuts, eviscerating student loan programs, Medicaid and food stamps while simultaneously seeking to enact a five-year $57 billion tax break for millionaires and corporations. ("The beauty of taking the cuts out of Medicaid and student loan programs...is that it doesn't reduce the flow of funds to the Republican campaign committees by a single dime," Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson observed.)

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Washington Post
IF YOU LIVE BY politics, you can die by politics, too. That's the lesson of the school board vote on Tuesday in Dover, Pa. All eight of the board's Republican incumbents were defeated. And all of the defeated incumbents had supported a policy -- the first in the country -- requiring the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution in ninth-grade biology classes. The board had been sued by a group of parents who argued that intelligent-design theory is a thinly veiled cover for creationism and that it is therefore unconstitutional to force teachers to teach it in public school classrooms. A federal judge is still pondering the case, but in the meantime eight Democrats campaigning against the intelligent-design policy have thrown out the school board.

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Washington Post
SALT LAKE CITY -- If you seek a window into conservatism's current consternations, look into Utah. The nation's reddest state -- last year, and in six of the past eight presidential elections, Utah was the most Republican state -- is rebelling against President Bush's No Child Left Behind law.

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New York Times
Voters in Dover, Pa., came to their senses this week and tossed out almost the entire school board, which had tried to discredit the theory of evolution and steer students toward the theory of "intelligent design" - the idea that life forms are so complex that a higher being must have made them. Let's hope the voters in Kansas follow suit next year by ejecting several benighted members of the State Board of Education, which has just approved new science standards that open the way for supernatural explanations of natural phenomena.

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Kansas City Star
In the beginning, when voters created the Kansas Board of Education to oversee schools, those intelligent designers couldn’t have imagined it would go forth and multiply all this controversy.

The board could close the latest chapter of the evolution debate Tuesday when it is set to vote on science curriculum standards that change the definition of science and cast doubt on the theory of evolution. It’s possible another administrative delay could postpone the vote, but the approval is seen as inevitable.

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Washington Post
IT'S COMPLICATED, byzantine and -- let's face it -- not the world's most fascinating subject. Even so, it's hard to understand why the federal student loan program attracts so little outside scrutiny. The Senate is likely to vote today on a budget reconciliation measure in which the largest source of "savings" by far comes from the student loan program. The authors of that measure, which the House will tackle next week, say that money comes from cuts in subsidies to lenders. Read the fine print, though, and it seems that, in fact, the "savings" come from increased revenue. And that revenue comes from students, who will be paying higher interest rates to generate it.

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Scotsman
IN A landmark court case that effectively pits Charles Darwin against God, a judge is set to decide whether American school pupils can be told that life on Earth may be the result of "intelligent design".

The federal trial, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which began in September and is due to conclude this week, will determine the future direction of the nation's high school biology curriculum and intensify debate over whether all life evolved from a common origin, or was created by an unspecified supreme being.

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Mary Shaw
Ahhhhh, autumn! This is the season of cool weather, colorful leaves, Oktoberfest beers, and striking teachers.

Each fall, teachers' unions here in the Philly area and all around the country find themselves negotiating their contacts and, all too often, going on strike.

And, each fall, I find myself wondering why teachers are paid so little that they have to go on strike over nickels and dimes.

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The Arms Merchant
As the political climate changed, Creationists evolved into Intelligent Designers, hoping to lessen the legal and cultural objections to their insistence that the Christian Bible must be taken literally (at least the parts of it they agree with). But a new name can’t hide their true intent, and it can’t hide their head-in-the-sand approach to how humans came to walk the earth. Foremost of their claims is that evolution cannot explain such complexities as the human eye; because IDers don’t understand the principles of evolution, they deny its existence, an approach that conveniently meshes with their literal reading of certain parts of the Bible. If man was made in the Christian god’s image, then it seems unlikely that such a god’s image would even remotely resemble the single-celled organisms scientists believe were the first sign of life on earth.

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New York Times
Two leading science organizations have denied the Kansas Board of Education permission to use their copyrighted materials as part of the state's proposed new science standards because of the standards' critical approach to evolution.

The rebuke from the two groups, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association, comes less than two weeks before the board's expected adoption of the controversial new standards, which will serve as a template for statewide tests and thus have great influence on what is taught.

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New York Times
CHICAGO, Oct. 27 - Two leading science organizations have denied the Kansas board of education permission to use their copyrighted materials in the state's proposed new science standards because of the standards' critical approach to evolution.

The National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association said the much-disputed new standards "will put the students of Kansas at a competitive disadvantage as they take their place in the world."

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New York Times
The Bush administration responded characteristically this week when it put a positive gloss on national math and reading scores that were actually dismal - and bad news for the school reform effort. Faced with charges that his signature reform, the No Child Left Behind Act, was failing, the president played up the minor positive results. He should have seized the moment to acknowledge the bad news and explain what it would take to make things right.

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Washington Post
DOES CONGRESS really want to save money? Are Republican leaders really committed to balancing the budget? Judging by recent actions of both the House and Senate education committees, the answer is no. As higher-education legislation wends its way through Congress, both committees may be deliberately losing opportunities to make student loans cost taxpayers less and benefit students more.

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The Arms Merchant
Proponents of Intelligent Design are clamoring for their religious theory to be taught in our high school biology classes. This makes no sense, as Intelligent Design (ID) denounces science as a way of learning the truth and instead argues that faith provides the only acceptable path. Well, ID is not science, so it makes no more sense to teach it in biology class than it does to teach literature in PE class. Still. it should be taught in our high schools, not in biology class, and not to promote it, but to show it up for its intellectual laziness.

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CS Monitor
In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that forbade teaching evolution in public schools unless creationism were also taught. The court found creationism to be a religious belief. But evolution's challengers have since adapted their cause to the new legal climate, just like Darwin's famed finches that formed special beaks to survive on the Galapagos Islands.

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Washington Post
Despite a new federal educational testing law championed by the Bush administration, scores among fourth and eighth graders failed to show any improvements in reading, and showed only slow gains in math nationally during the past two years, according to a study released today.

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Guardian
The University of California at Berkeley is being sued for running a website for school teachers called Understanding Evolution.

Anti-evolutionists claim that the site breaches the American constitution on the separation of church and state because it links to religious organisations which believe faith can be reconciled with Darwin's theory of evolution, reported the website Inside Higher Ed today.

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People's Daily
The largest US science society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), urged a Pennsylvania federal court Friday to prohibit an anti-evolution doctrine known as "intelligent design" in biology classrooms. The organization and the US National Center for Science Education issued a statement, supporting students' parents to sue the Dover school district, Pennsylvania, against its decision to include " intelligent design," which says life has a God-like creator, in the curriculum of ninth-grade biology classes.

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Washington Post
Under President Bush's plan to cover most of the cost of educating students displaced by Hurricane Katrina, parents could enroll their children in a private or religious school this year at federal expense, even if they had gone to public schools back home, administration officials said yesterday.

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Yahoo News
WASHINGTON - The United States is losing ground in education, as peers across the globe zoom by with bigger gains in student achievement and school graduations, a study shows.

Among adults age 25 to 34, the U.S. is ninth among industrialized nations in the share of its population that has at least a high school degree. In the same age group, the United States ranks seventh, with Belgium, in the share of people who hold a college degree.

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Boston Globe
AS COLLEGE students around the country return to campus this fall, thousands of their peers won't be joining them because of a federal law that strips financial aid from students with drug convictions.

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New York Times
First the bad news: Only about two-thirds of American teenagers (and just half of all black, Latino and Native American teens) graduate with a regular diploma four years after they enter high school.

Now the worse news: Of those who graduate, only about half read well enough to succeed in college.

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Washington Post
The debate over President Bush's landmark education program, No Child Left Behind, that has been raging across the country for more than a year has ended up where so many policy fights land these days -- in court.

The state of Connecticut sued Education Secretary Margaret Spellings last week, alleging that she had illegally imposed more than $50 million in unfunded costs on the state -- and many more millions on local communities -- with the testing requirements in NCLB. The lawsuit demands that she either relax the requirement for annual tests in the third through eighth grades or cough up the extra money the state says that they are costing.

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New York Times
Connecticut sued the federal government today, arguing that President Bush's education law forces the state to spend millions on new tests without providing sufficient aid or scientific evidence that testing every year rather than in alternate years, which has been Connecticut's practice, helps students. The suit called Education Secretary Margaret Spellings' enforcement "arbitrary and capricious."

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Washington Post
It took me a while to catch up with her, but I reached Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently just before she left town for vacation. I was pursuing her because of an extraordinary outpouring of e-mails and other messages from teachers and principals -- triggered, I'm afraid, by a column in June in which I'd questioned the educators' commitment to the goal of improving school performance.

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Washington Post
FOR MORE THAN 30 years, the conservative movement in America has been doing battle with the forces of relativism, the "do your own thing" philosophy that eschews objective truth and instead sees all beliefs and all personal choices as equally valid. Instead, philosophically minded American conservatives have argued that there is such a thing as objectivity and that some beliefs really are better, truer or more accurate than others. Given this history, it seems appropriate to ask: Is President Bush really a conservative?

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American Conservative
George W. Bush may go down in history as a war president, but like his father he also envisions himself as an education president. Conservative columnist George Will, pointing out that under Bush the Department of Education’s budget has grown faster than defense expenditures, recently wrote, “Had 9/11 not happened, Bush’s administration might be defined primarily by its education policy, particularly the No Child Left Behind law.” And as state educators increasingly revolt, the Republican Party’s education policy ceases to be defined primarily by its commitment to local control.

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CounterPunch
McCarthy-style witch hunts are coming back, and the first place we'll be seeing them is at Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities.

Under the innocent-sounding name "Academic Bill of Rights," a gaggle of right-wing "culture warriors" in the Republican-led Pennsylvania House recently passed HR 177, a resolution authorizing them to invade public colleges and universities armed with subpoenas to grill faculty on curricula, reading lists, exams, homework assignments, grading and teaching styles, and to take testimony from students, allegedly to determine whether their professors are fair or "biased."

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New York Times
Stop the presses! Within just a few days we've had a scandal involving a world-class presidential guru bumped off the front pages by a prime-time presidential announcement of a nominee to the Supreme Court.

No one would argue that these aren't big stories. But an issue that is even more important to the long-term future of the U.S. gets very short shrift from the media. In an era when a college education is virtually a prerequisite for maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, an extraordinary number of American teenagers continue to head toward adulthood without even a high school diploma.

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New York Times
The Republican Congressional leadership had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, but it has finally pledged to do the right thing and close an appalling loophole that permits lenders to skim billions from college loans, money that should be going directly to students. The loophole, which guarantees lenders a mammoth 9.5 percent return on loans for which the prevailing rate is 3.5 percent, is especially outrageous at a time when college aid is falling far short of the national need.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 8 - Margaret Spellings, the education secretary, suggested on Friday that the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires that public school children be tested in reading and math, could be expanded to include other subjects.

"I am a strong believer in this, 'what gets measured gets done' kind of notion," Ms. Spellings told members of the American Federation of Teachers at their summer meeting here.

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Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half a century of U.S. dominance in science and engineering may be slipping as America's share of graduates in these fields falls relative to Europe and developing nations such as China and India, a study released on Friday says.

The study, written by Richard Freeman at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, warned that changes in the global science and engineering job market may require a long period of adjustment for U.S. workers.

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Counterpunch
A version of the following interview with Robert Jensen, journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Heart of Whiteness and Citizens of the Empire, originally appeared in the June 2005 Issue, an independent progressive magazine published in Austin, TX.

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AlterNet
Back in January 2000, I was caught with a pipe containing marijuana residue. I pleaded guilty, paid my fine, and thought I'd be able to move on with my life so I didn't bother telling my mom. But when it came time to fill out my financial aid application together, we came across a question asking if I'd ever been convicted on a drug charge. I had to fess up.

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Counterpunch
I would like to explain why I think the war on evolution in the United States is one about which all progressives should be concerned.

Compared with the campaigns against abortion and homosexuality, the other two members of that trifecta of Godlessness, evolution may seem unimportant. The first two concern judgments about what is right and wrong, whereas with the latter it is only a matter of truth and falsehood. But it is precisely in debates about what is right and wrong that people should be taking up sides based on preference. When it comes to true-or-false questions, the traditional assumption has been that it does not matter what you prefer; all that matters is what the evidence imposes.

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Kansas City Star
TOPEKA — Teaching standards in Kansas should include strong criticism of evolution, a three-member panel of the state Board of Education formally recommended Thursday evening.

The panel, which recently led hearings on the matter, proposed changes that would alter the state’s teaching standards to include perceived flaws in the theory of evolution. The changes stop short of endorsing the idea of intelligent design, a belief that some aspects of the natural world can be explained only as the work of a creator.

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Guardian
Without affirmative action the number of African-American and Hispanic students going to elite US universities would plummet, and their places would be taken by Asian, not white, applicants, according to Princeton University researchers.

Although affirmative action to award places to black students has been whittled away by legal challenges, American universities are still entitled to take race into account as one factor alongside SAT test scores when making admissions decisions, a supreme court judgment involving the University of Michigan held last year.

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Tehran Times
The new war is a psyops war. Changing the way people think and cutting them off from their cultural roots are the objectives of this psychological operation.

“Who controls the past controls the future.” George Orwell’s astute observation from his book “1984” is even more relevant as a warning today than it was when it was written.

Revising school textbooks is one of the ways to change people’s understanding of the past.

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New York Times
The United States is rapidly abandoning a longstanding policy aimed at keeping college affordable for all Americans who qualify academically. Thanks to a steep decline in aid to poor and working-class students and lagging state support for the public college systems that grant more than two-thirds of the nation's degrees, record numbers of Americans are being priced out of higher education. This is an ominous trend, given that the diploma has become the minimum price of admission to the new economy.

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New York Times
No matter how she parses it, Roberta Proctor cannot make sense of her son's college bill. Her income and her assets have not changed. If anything, she says, her family's finances have deteriorated somewhat.

So, she wonders, how could she possibly owe an extra $6,000 for the coming school year, when tuition has not increased anywhere near that amount?

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CS Monitor
Concerned that public schools are becoming sites of liberal indoctrination, activists have generated a wave of efforts to limit what teachers may discuss and to bring more conservative views into the classroom.

After all, they say, if related campaigns can help rein in doctrinaire faculty on college campuses, why not in K-12 education as well?

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BBC
A CIA scheme to sponsor trainee spies secretly through US university courses has caused anger among UK academics.

The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program pays anthropology students, whose names are not disclosed, up to $50,000 (£27,500) a year.

They are expected to use the techniques of "fieldwork" to gather political and cultural details on other countries.

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AlterNet
The hours passed, and the chilling phrases kept on coming: "security police," "fear and tension," "significant personal sanctions," "enforcement of the Rule," "suppression of evidence," "conflict of conscience," "trampling on those who believe man is purposed."

The man on the stage might well have been talking about life in a totalitarian state, but John Calvert, a lawyer who directs the Intelligent Design Network of Shawnee Mission, Kan., was describing the state of science education in America.

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Tom Paine
Republicans are sending mixed messages on the importance of education. Over the past few weeks, the Republican Congress has rejected a number of President Bush’s education plans, while at the same time endorsing his proposed spending cuts.  With classic Washington finesse, these moves allow the Republican leadership to claim to care about education, while actually cutting programs and giving tax breaks to millionaires.

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New York Times
The latest struggle over the teaching of evolution in the public schools of Kansas provides striking evidence that evolution is occurring right before our eyes. Every time the critics of Darwinism lose a battle over reshaping the teaching of biology, they evolve into a new form, armed with arguments that sound progressively more benign, while remaining as dangerous as ever.

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Counterpunch
THE NO Child Left Behind Act is the Bush administration's deeply flawed legislation that claims to be the solution to the many problems of public education. Signed into law in January 2002, it won bipartisan support--most notably, from liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.

NCLB promised to close the achievement gap between middle-class suburban students and those at under-funded inner-city or rural schools. Bush and others spoke of accountability and equity, but the critics of NCLB saw through the rhetoric for what the law really is--an attempt to privatize education and transfer the responsibility and cost of educating our children from the federal government to individual and often impoverished school districts.

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Washington Post
NEARLY FIVE YEARS into the 21st century, the Kansas State Board of Education has begun an earnest discussion of whether schools in that state should teach science that was obsolete by the end of the 19th century. The board is holding hearings into proposed changes to its model science standards, changes intended to cast doubt on conventional evolutionary biology and inject into classrooms the notion of "intelligent design" -- the idea that the complexity of life can be explained only by some conscious creator's having designed it.

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Washington Post
HARTFORD, Conn. -- In the weeks since she announced she would resist Bush administration demands for additional standardized testing, Connecticut Education Commissioner Betty J. Sternberg has received dozens of generally laudatory messages from parents and teachers. "You go, girl," wrote one correspondent. "We have enough tests," e-mailed another. "Keep the faith!"

There is a mouse-that-roared quality to Connecticut's rebellion against the national No Child Left Behind Act. With just over a half-million students, the state school system is smaller than that of some big cities. But there is nothing small about the fight Connecticut officials have picked with the federal government, a dispute that combines states' rights, underfunded federal mandates and educational philosophy.

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Washington Post
The Montgomery County school superintendent called off the planned launch of a new sex education curriculum yesterday, hours after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against it.

Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said he was suspending the curriculum, which was to be taught at six schools beginning next week, for the rest of the school year. A statement released last night said that he had ordered a review of the materials for the curriculum before deciding the future of the program.

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New York Times
TOPEKA, Kan., May 5 - Six years after Kansas ignited a national debate over the teaching of evolution, the state is poised to push through new science standards this summer requiring that Darwin's theory be challenged in the classroom.
In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.'s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science's explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life's complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.

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CS Monitor
Nearly 30 years of teaching evolution in Kansas has taught Brad Williamson to expect resistance, but even this veteran of the trenches now has his work cut out for him when students raise their hands.

That's because critics of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection are equipping families with books, DVDs, and a list of "10 questions to ask your biology teacher."

The intent is to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of students as to the veracity of Darwin's theory of evolution.

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Kansas City Star
In Topeka they're getting ready to stage the 2005 revival of “Inherit the Wind,” also known as the Kansas Board of Education's hearings on evolution.

According to all the buildup, it will be quite a show — with or without the sandwiches.

You've heard about this, right?

It seems anti-evolution participants were counting on being fed during the festivities.

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Black America
A recent report from the U.S. Department of Education has found no ethical breaches in the hiring of conservative talking head Armstrong Williams, who was paid $241,000 to offer commentaries on the No Child Left Behind Act, the top education initiative of President George W. Bush.

The report, conducted by Education Department Inspector General John Higgins, should silence the critics who have been on a “witch hunt,” Williams told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

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New York Times
Opening a new front in the growing rebellion against President Bush's education law known as No Child Left Behind, the nation's largest teachers' union and eight school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont sued the Department of Education today, accusing it of violating a passage in the federal law that prohibits any requirement that states spend their own money to carry out its mandates.

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New York Times
SALT LAKE CITY, April 19 - In a stinging rebuke of President Bush's signature education law, the Republican-dominated Utah Legislature on Tuesday passed a bill that orders state officials to ignore provisions of the federal law that conflict with Utah's education goals or that require state financing.

The bill is the most explicit legislative challenge to the federal law by a state, and its passage marked the collapse of a 15-month lobbying effort against it by the Bush administration.

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CS Monitor
Three years after the passage of President Bush's controversial education reform known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the law is facing its most significant challenges yet - and they're coming in the courts, state legislatures, and local education departments.

Connecticut has announced it's suing the US Department of Education, claiming the law mandates changes without giving the funding to carry them out. The education commissioner in Texas unilaterally decided Washington's requirements were flawed, and she simply disregarded part of them - a kind of civil disobedience.

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New York Times
DANBURY, Conn., April 15 - In 2003, as Betty J. Sternberg was about to be named the first woman to run Connecticut's Department of Education, one local newspaper sized her up as an accomplished insider whose one drawback was her "limited experience in the political arena."

The last few months have provided an unexpected crash course on politics, as Dr. Sternberg has emerged as a national leader in the fight against provisions of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 law pushed by President Bush that requires students to take annual proficiency tests.

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New York Times
The academic growth that students experience in a given school year has apparently slowed since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the education law that was intended to achieve just the opposite, a new study has found.

In both reading and math, the study determined, test scores have gone up somewhat, as each class of students outdoes its predecessors. But within grades, students have made less academic progress during the school year than they did before No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002, the researchers said.

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Kansas City Star
It looks as if the coming hearings on the Kansas science standards will be a one-sided event.

Proponents of intelligent design have lined up 23 witnesses — including one from Italy and another from Turkey — to support their point of view.

But scientists who defend evolution apparently are boycotting the hearings, said Alexa Posny, assistant commissioner for the state Department of Education.

As of Thursday, the state's deadline, only one scientist had agreed to testify and his appearance had not been confirmed, she said.

“We have contacted scientists from all over the world,” Posny said. “There isn't anywhere else we can go.”

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Washington Post
I was one of those blissfully nerdy kids who fell in love with dinosaurs in the fourth grade and never outgrew it. In adulthood, people like me go to natural history museums, see Steven Spielberg movies and read the essays of the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. That is usually enough to keep us happy.

But a couple of weeks ago I saw a chance to take my amateurish grasp of the history of life a bit further. I persuaded the editor of The Post's editorial pages to publish an op-ed piece of mine called "Who's Afraid of Intelligent Design?"

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New York Times
Connecticut's attorney general said today that he was preparing to sue the federal government over President Bush's signature education-reform law, arguing that it forces Connecticut to administer new standardized tests at a cost of millions of dollars and that Washington refuses to pay for them.

Although a handful of local school districts, in Illinois, Texas and other states have filed legal challenges to the law, known as No Child Left Behind, Connecticut would be the first state to do so.

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New York Times
It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?

Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.

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New York Times
Propelled by the No Child Left Behind law, the federally financed tutoring industry has doubled in size in each of the last two years, with the potential to become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise, market analysts say.

Tutors are paid as much as $1,997 per child, and companies eager to get a piece of the lucrative business have offered parents computers and gift certificates as inducements to sign up, provided tutors that in some cases are still in high school and have made promises they cannot deliver.

This new brand of tutoring is offered to parents by private companies and other groups at no charge if their children attend a failing school. But it is virtually without regulation or oversight, causing concern among school districts, elected officials and some industry executives. Some in Congress are calling for regulations or quality standards to ensure that tutors are qualified and that the companies provide services that meet students' needs.

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Los Angeles Times
For years now, conservative economists have contended that sinking money into schools is pointless because test scores don't automatically rise when schools boost spending. True, spending and achievement don't always go hand in hand, but the conservative argument still doesn't make sense.

California spends only $7,000 per pupil, while New Jersey spends more than $10,000. But the economists who deny that money matters don't propose slashing New Jersey's standard to California's more miserly one. Nor do they propose cutting suburban spending, high in many states, to inner-city levels. Yet still they argue, illogically, against pumping more money into schools with less — an inconsistency that suggests their opposition to greater spending is based more on parsimony than on analysis.

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Capital Times
As the mother of fraternal twin boys, I frequently address the question, "Are they identical?" To those who know my 5-year-olds - with their distinct physical builds and unique temperaments - they look like brothers, but the similarity ends there. We have a propensity to want to create identical qualities where none exist.

The Bush administration promoted its public education reform policy to play on this peculiarity. What parent wouldn't want high standards and accountability for their children's school? Beyond the rhetoric, this reform, called the No Child Left Behind Act, is punishing our children.

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SF Chronicle
CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS face two confusing and often contradictory "accountability" systems.

One is the state's Academic Performance Index, which aims to improve student performance so that every school achieves at least an 800 score on the index. Each year schools need to make steady progress toward that goal before facing a range of sanctions.

The other is the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act, which also imposes a set of sanctions. The law, a centerpiece of President Bush's domestic agenda, sets an absolute bar that requires 100 percent of students in California to perform at a "proficient" level on the state's own tests by 2014.

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Commonweal
Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is an expression that has a profound resonance for Americans. We like to think of this country as a “land of opportunity,” where anyone can “get ahead” by dint of hard work.

The historical record does not always confirm the truth of those sentiments. Cooperation and communal effort, as much as individual achievement, have just as often been the engines of upward mobility. Prejudice and injustice have also destroyed the hopes of many. Still, whatever the methods employed or obstacles encountered, we as a people believe that economic and social advancement should depend on individual merit rather than inherited advantage or status.

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Washington Post
My favorite high school teacher, Al Ladendorff, conducted his American history class like an extended version of "Meet the Press." Nothing, not even the textbooks other teachers treated as Holy Writ, was safe from attack. I looked forward to that class every day.

My biology class, sadly, was another story. I slogged joylessly through all the phyla and the principles of Darwinism, memorizing as best as I could. It never occurred to me that this class could have been as interesting as history until I recently started to read about "intelligent design," the latest assault on the teaching of evolution in our schools. Many education experts and important scientists say we have to keep this religious-based nonsense out of the classroom. But is that really such a good idea?

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The Nation
The Yale student did not like what he heard. Sociologists derided religion and economists damned corporations. One professor pre-emptively rejected the suggestion that "workers on public relief be denied the franchise." "I propose, simply, to expose," wrote the young author in a booklong denunciation, one of "the most extraordinary incongruities of our time. Under the "protective label 'academic freedom,'" the institution that derives its "moral and financial support from Christian individualists then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists."

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New York Times
EVERYBODY who is anybody seems to have decided that the American high school is responsible for the failings of American students. The Bush administration, many governors and even Bill Gates have now called for radical reforms. Reflecting this growing consensus that the high school is, in Mr. Gates's words, an "obsolete" institution, the governors of 13 states have pledged an overhaul of the high school system, and more are expected to jump on the bandwagon of reform.

Let's slow down here. American education is famous for inspiring crusades, and the history of the 20th century is littered with the remains of of failed reform movements. This 21st century campaign will fall flat, too, unless the proponents are clear-headed about the nature of the problem and willing to rethink their proposed solutions.

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Washington Post
WICHITA – Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.

The proposals typically stop short of overturning evolution or introducing biblical accounts. Instead, they are calculated pleas to teach what advocates consider gaps in long-accepted Darwinian theory, with many relying on the idea of intelligent design, which posits the central role of a creator.

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Counterpunch
The secrecy surrounding the current use of university classrooms as covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies now threatens the fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines. A new test program that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university classrooms for now operates without detection or protest,. With time these students who cannot admit to their true intentions will inevitably pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now enrolled.

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SF Chronicle
Abstinence is a gnarled wart on the big toe of hot wet life. This much we know.

Or, rather, more specifically, those silly little abstinence programs wrought by the neocon Right and jammed uncomfortably into America's increasingly crumbling and confused public schools and all of which aim to force-feed teens bogus evidence that sex is deadly and icky and fraught and poisonous and should be avoided completely if not somehow surgically eradicated, and if you really must indulge in things prurient and sticky then please go home and whip out your Bible and be sure to avoid your dad's Hustler or the shower massager you little demonic heathen slut. Such programs are bogus and false and misleading and harmful and stupid and wrong. In a nutshell.

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Kansas City Star
TOPEKA — Kansas' evolution debate will play out in a 10-day, courtroom-style hearing this spring, with experts from both sides testifying before a school board panel.

On trial is the theory of evolution, and the verdict could go a long way in determining the science curriculum taught in state schools.

Evolution critics want school curriculum to include alternatives, or at least challenges, to the theory.

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New York Times
A bipartisan panel of state lawmakers that studied the effectiveness of President Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative assailed it today as a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform effort that had usurped state and local control of public schools.

While the report, based on hearings in several cities, praised the legislation's goal of ending the gap in scholastic achievement between white and minority students, most of its 77 pages was devoted to a detailed inventory and discussion of the initiative's flaws.

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CS Monitor
WASHINGTON – Christian fundamentalists often have been accused of wanting to alter the laws and institutions of the United States. Actually it is usually the other way around; most of the time they only try to prevent America's laws and institutions from being radically altered. One example is their battle to stem the banning of Christmas symbols and celebrations.

But there is one area where many Christian fundamentalists do indeed want to impose radical change: the teaching of Biblical creationism vs. evolution in public schools.

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SF Chronicle
YOU KNOW there is something amiss when a school district, which has higher academic test scores than all but 15 of the state's 1,056 school districts, is told that it is failing because it hasn't met all the bureaucratic requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation.

Compounding the absurdity is that if this school district doesn't continue to satisfy myriad requirements of the law by the 2006-2007 school year, then it could be abolished under a little-noticed section of the controversial legislation that is pitting state educators against federal regulators.

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Intervention
The Guinness Book of Records has no entries related to virginity. I’d like to propose one: Tallest Stack of Virginity Pledge Cards. According to True Love Waits, a faith-centered chastity campaign, they stacked 340,000 virginity pledge cards “from the floor to the roof of the Georgia Dome—and beyond.”

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New York Times
In the most specific challenge by any state to President Bush's signature education law, the Utah House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill yesterday requiring state officials to give higher priority to local educational goals than to those of the federal law, and to spend as little state money as possible to comply with it.

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New York Times
I'm sorry to report a sex scandal in the heart of the Bush administration. Worse, it doesn't involve private behavior, but public conduct.

You see, for all the carnage in President Bush's budget, one program is being showered with additional cash - almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It's "abstinence only" sex education, and the best research suggests that it will cost far more lives than the Clinton administration's much more notorious sex scandal.

Mr. Bush means well. But "abstinence only" is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There's a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins - it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS.

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American Prospect
During the second presidential debate last year, George W. Bush ventured that “the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act when you think about it.” Democrats mocked President Bush, but education has always been critical for a president who asks voters to “sense my heart.” It is the only major issue on which he reached across the political aisle -- all the way to Senator Ted Kennedy -- to forge a broad consensus for reform. That’s why it’s sad now to see Bush eviscerating that consensus and empowering reform’s critics. Monday’s budget is the latest bad sign.

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Tom Paine
Just when you thought you had heard the last of Bush's budget slashing, The Institute for America's Future releases a report detailing the cuts and funding freezes to education.  The report shows that Bush fails to adequately fund essential early education and after-school programs, eliminates the Even Start literacy program, freezes work-study funding for college and kills funding for 48 education programs.  Outraged, IAF President Robert Borosage says, "If the president has his way, the poorest children will bear the largest burden – suffering cuts to education, nutrition and health care, and the bill of increased debt which they will be forced to pay throughout their lives."

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Guardian
Conservative America is extending the politics of fear - into the bedroom. On the eve of a film about Fifties sex pioneer Alfred Kinsey, the new movement's message of sexual abstinence is gaining ground - and enemies.

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New York Times
Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Ala., recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.

"She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she'd get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it," he recalled. "She told me other teachers were doing the same thing."

Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, stories like the one Dr. Frandsen tells are more common.

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New York Times
Critics of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution become more wily with each passing year. Creationists who believe that God made the world and everything in it pretty much as described in the Bible were frustrated when their efforts to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools or inject the teaching of creationism were judged unconstitutional by the courts. But over the past decade or more a new generation of critics has emerged with a softer, more roundabout approach that they hope can pass constitutional muster.

One line of attack - on display in Cobb County, Ga., in recent weeks - is to discredit evolution as little more than a theory that is open to question. Another strategy - now playing out in Dover, Pa. - is to make students aware of an alternative theory called "intelligent design," which infers the existence of an intelligent agent without any specific reference to God. These new approaches may seem harmless to a casual observer, but they still constitute an improper effort by religious advocates to impose their own slant on the teaching of evolution.

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Washington Post
TO GET SEN. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to remove a "hold" on her confirmation vote, Margaret Spellings, the newly appointed education secretary, had to promise to investigate her new department's contracts with public relations firms. We are glad that Mr. Lautenberg pushed Mrs. Spellings to acknowledge that there might be something amiss in the department's recent decision to pay Armstrong Williams, a television pundit, to promote the president's education policy. But the silence from the Education Department's current leadership remains disturbing.

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Washington Post
IT WAS SOMEWHAT disconcerting to hear President Bush propose, as he did on Wednesday, to extend to high schools the No Child Left Behind Act's testing and accountability requirements for elementary and middle schools. True, there's plenty wrong with the nation's high schools. According to Achieve Inc., an organization that has looked closely at achievement standards in high schools, more than half of high school graduates need remedial help in college; most employers say high school graduates lack basic skills; and most high school exit exams don't measure those skills anyway. Far too few high school students take the algebra, geometry and English courses they need to get by in adulthood. More accountability and higher standards clearly are in order.

What was disconcerting was the impression a listener might have gotten that the nation can move on to high schools because the first stage of No Child Left Behind reforms is more or less complete.

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Guardian
The battle over attempts to introduce a version of creationism into the curriculum of American schools has become focused on a small town in Pennsylvania.

Biology teachers at a high school in Dover have rejected the instructions of local officials to read a statement in class today questioning the theory of evolution.

They had been ordered by the town's elected school board to preface their usual class on evolution with a statement, saying "Darwin's Theory is a theory ... not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence."

As an alternative, the statement mentions "intelligent design", an updated form of creationism which argues that life on earth is too complex to have developed at random.

The teachers asked to opt out of making the statement, and it will be read instead by a school administrator before a biology class early next week.

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New York Times
Washington — IT is clear the top leadership at the Department of Education is the gang that can't flack straight. How else to explain the department's decision to pay the commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act in his work and to his colleagues? Ultimately, this is a second-tier scandal, but it takes a place among a series of bad decisions that risk scuttling the most ambitious effort in a generation to improve education for poor and minority youngsters.

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SF Chronicle
THE REVELATION that the Bush administration paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the "No Child Left Behind" program is disturbing on several counts.

No journalist worthy of the title should ever engage in such a deal. The sleaziness is not diminished by Williams' explanation that Bush's education policy was "something I believe in." He did not even bother to disclose the financial arrangement. It became public only after USA Today discovered it through a Freedom of Information Act request.

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Pacific News
There can be no defense of syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams' disgraceful grab of public money from the Education Department to tout President Bush's No Child Left Behind law while posing as an objective journalist. But focusing on one man's ethics disaster misses the larger and more important story of the Bush administration's pattern of placing propaganda in U.S. news media.

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New York Times
The fine print in President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act is slowly dawning on the parents of high school students across the country as the war in Iraq drags on: military recruiters can blitz youngsters with uninvited phone calls to their homes and on-campus pitches replete with video war games. This is all possible under a little noted part of the law that requires schools to provide the names, addresses (campus addresses, too) and phone numbers of students or risk losing federal aid. The law provides an option to block the hard-sell recruitment - but only if parents demand in writing that the school deny this information to the military.

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Washington Post
In the past five months, three major reports have been released showing that charter schools performed more poorly than public schools on the same tests. The most recent of them, issued this month by the Education Department, presented a re-analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress comparing outcomes for charter and public school students on these national exams. It echoed the NAEP findings released in August by the American Federation of Teachers. Yet another report, released reluctantly by the Education Department this fall, looked at state exam data in five states and came to the same conclusion.

What are we to make of this?

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Counterpunch
I've been giving a lot of thought lately to a conversation I overheard at Starbucks in Nashville last winter. I was distracted from my work on that cold and rainy night by two young men who sat down in upholstered chairs next to my table. One was talking and the other was listening, in what appeared to be an informal college orientation.

"The only trouble with Lipscomb {a conservative Christian college
nearby] is that old man Lipscomb made a rule that the college couldn't have a football team, so that's a bummer. But it's a great school, and you're gonna love it.

"Now you do have to be careful about one thing," he said more quietly,
coming closer and speaking in hushed tones, "My professor told me that you have to be careful not to get too much education, because you could lose your foundation, your core values."

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Washington Post
DOVER, Pa. -- "God or Darwin?"

Lark Myers, a blond, 45-year-old gift shop owner, frames the question and answers it. "I definitely would prefer to believe that God created me than that I'm 50th cousin to a silverback ape," she said. "What's wrong with wanting our children to hear about all the holes in the theory of evolution?"

Charles Darwin, squeeze over. The school board in this small town in central Pennsylvania has voted to make the theory of evolution share a seat with another theory: God probably designed us.

If it survives a legal test, this school district of about 2,800 students could become the first in the nation to require that high school science teachers at least mention the "intelligent design" theory. This theory holds that human biology and evolution are so complex as to require the creative hand of an intelligent force.

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New York Times
College students in virtually every state will be required to shoulder more of the cost of their education under new federal rules that govern most of the nation's financial aid.

Because of the changes, which take effect next fall and are expected to save the government $300 million in the 2005-6 academic year, at least 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell Grants, the nation's primary scholarship for those of low income, according to two analyses of the new rules.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - A federal Education Department analysis of test scores from 2003 shows that children in charter schools generally did not perform as well on exams as those in regular public schools. The analysis, released Wednesday, largely confirms an earlier report on the same statistics by the American Federation of Teachers.

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SF Chronicle
MOST PARENTS would prefer their kids avoid sex until marriage. That's the premise that underlies the Bush administration's support for school programs that teach abstinence.

But what if parents knew these programs were flawed and the facts amiss? One critic of the abstinence approach, Rep. Henry Waxman, a Los Angeles Democrat, ordered up a report on the curricula of 13 federally sponsored programs.

It turns out there were notable mistakes in 11. Some examples: The AIDS virus can be spread by sweat and tears (it can't); condoms fail 31 percent of the time ( a federal study says 3 percent); and abortion can lead to suicide (there's no proven link).

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Washington Post
BOSTON -- I like the old maxim that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. How else to explain the intramural conflicts that erupt over such searing campus issues as tenure and parking?

But now it seems there's an extramural furor over politics itself.

Conservatives have long regarded universities as the last spider holes of liberalism. They regard professors as lefty holdouts who spend their days indoctrinating the younger generation on the virtues of Che Guevara.

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Guardian
The Bush administration is funding sexual health projects that teach children that HIV can be contracted through sweat and tears, touching genitals can result in pregnancy, and that a 43-day-old foetus is a thinking person.

A congressional analysis of more than a dozen federally funded "abstinence-only programmes" unveiled a litany of "false, misleading and distorted information" in teaching materials after reviewing curriculums designed to prevent teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

There are more than 100 abstinence programmes, involving several million children aged nine to 18, and running in 25 states since 1999. They are funded by the federal government to the tune of $170m (£88.5m), twice the amount when George Bush came to power.

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ACLU
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union today hailed the release of a comprehensive review of curriculums used in federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs, saying that it shows the government should not spend taxpayer dollars on programs that withhold vital life-saving information and mislead teenagers.

"Todays report offers concrete evidence that abstinence-only sex education curriculums are all too often based on ideology and religion rather than science," said Louise Melling, Director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. "Studies show that the overwhelming majority of parents want their children to get all the information they need to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including information about contraception, how to use condoms properly, and about abortion. The government needs to stop censoring life-saving information."

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New York Times
Cambridge, Mass. -- Last year, the number of foreign students at American colleges and universities fell for the first time since 1971. Recent reports show that total foreign student enrollment in our 2,700 colleges and universities dropped 2.4 percent, with a much sharper loss at large research institutions. Two-thirds of the 25 universities with the most foreign students reported major enrollment declines.

The costs to the American economy are significant. Educating foreign students is a $13 billion industry. Moreover, the United States does not produce enough home-grown doctoral students in science and engineering to meet our needs. The shortfall is partly made up by the many foreign students who stay here after earning their degrees.

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New York Times
Daunted by soaring costs, as many as a quarter of low-income students with grades and test scores that make them prime college material no longer even apply to college. This is bad news at a time when skilled jobs are moving abroad and a college diploma has become the minimum price of admission to the new economy. The Bush administration, however, has actually made this problem worse by cutting the federal Pell grant program, which was developed to encourage poor and working-class students to pursue higher education.

The cut could cause as many as 1.2 million low-income students to have their grants reduced - and as many as 100,000 could lose their grants altogether. That inevitably means that students will either drop out or take longer to finish their degrees.

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Boston Globe
THE OPTIMIST can faintly hope that Margaret Spellings does not join the ghost of Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman was Bush's choice in his first term to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Bush said Whitman "is a chief executive who understands the importance of a clean and healthy environment and will ensure that environmental regulations are based on sound science."

Bush asked Whitman to be caretaker of an agency probusiness Republicans wished to eviscerate. As she put a prochoice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control face on environmental policy, Vice President Dick Cheney's far more powerful secret energy task force champed at the drill bit. Sound science did not last even two months.

Despite a memo in which Whitman told Bush, "We need to appear engaged" on global warming, Bush reversed his campaign pledge to cap carbon dioxide emissions and rejected the Kyoto global warming treaty. In 2002, the EPA reported that human activities were responsible for global warming. Bush trashed the news with sarcasm, saying, "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy."

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - After four years as education secretary, bringing President Bush's signature law on education to classrooms across the nation, Rod Paige plans to leave the cabinet in the near future, administration officials said Friday.

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Good riddance. --ed.

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Boston Globe
HERE IT is, just days after the red states gave their presidential seal of approval to the man from Texas, and we've already been treated to another skirmish in the culture wars. The Texas Board of Education has given its educational seal of approval to what may soon be dubbed Red Sex Ed.

The big news is the state's successful demand that textbook publishers change the description of marriage between "two people" to marriage between "a man and a woman." They also ordered that marriage be defined as "a lifelong union between a husband and a wife."

Frankly, I found the "lifelong" description charming, considering that the Lone Star State has one of the highest divorce rates in the country. Massachusetts, by the way, has the lowest divorce rate in the country. We are so fond of marriage that we want everyone to do it.

But never mind all that. The real heart of the textbook controversy is whether Texas students should learn about contraception. And the answer is no.

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AlterNet
Mark Spring, an educator of ten years, helped organize the “Rally for Children Left Behind.” The 2004 election “is not just about defending the country, it’s about being the country,” he says, explaining one of the reasons why he and many other educators and concerned Ohio citizens held the rally at the Ohio Statehouse earlier this month. Above all, Spring says, they were motivated by the belief that public education – the backbone of democratic society – is being eroded by the No Child Left Behind Act.

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SF Chronicle
THE ABSURDITY of the rigid requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation became clear this week when 1,626 schools in California receiving federal funds to serve poor children were told they had failed to meet the requirements of the law for at least two years in a row and now face a range of penalties.

Under the terms of the 2-year-old federal law, every school must show "adequate yearly progress" based on as many as 41 different criteria. If a school doesn't measure up on a single criterium, then it gets placed on a growing watch list of schools targeted for state and federal intervention.

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Charleston Gazette
IN SOME parts of America, public money has been paid to private companies or nonprofits to run schools ? presumably better than public ones ? under special charters.

Such charter schools figure prominently in President Bush?s No Child Left Behind education law, which provides for replacement of public schools that do not measure up with sufficient attendance and test score increases every year.

But a recent New York Times report shows that charter schools have not delivered all that they have promised. On the contrary, the first comparison of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that charter school fourth-graders scored below their public school counterparts in reading and math. That goes for black kids and white kids, poor ones and wealthier ones.

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New York Times
The Bush administration's education program received a devastating setback this week when long-awaited federal data showed that children in charter schools were performing worse on math and reading tests than their counterparts in regular public schools. Among other things, the data casts doubt on a central provision of the No Child Left Behind Act that encourages the states to hand over failing schools to commercial companies and nonprofit community groups that want to run them as charter schools.

Such schools can circumvent some union rules and customary management methods while operating outside the influence of school boards and state authorities.

The new data is consistent with what states like Michigan and California have already learned about the pitfalls of the charter process. There have been individual success stories among the charter schools, but no one seems to have found the key to replicating them on a wider basis. And eliminating the much-criticized educational bureaucracy seems to have created at least as many problems as it has solved.

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New York Times
RAND RAPIDS, Mich. - At Madison Park Elementary, a high-poverty school whose students have failed to make enough progress year after year, the momentous consequences threatened in President Bush's landmark education law, No Child Left Behind, should come crashing down any month now.

At this stage of disrepair, after improvement plans and other "corrective actions" have failed to raise test scores enough, the law calls for a wholesale restructuring of Madison Park and similar public schools, the educational equivalent of a hostile takeover, with the possible elimination of principals and teachers and the installation of new management.

But Michigan has another idea.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.

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Common Dreams
A little-known provision of President Bush's education reform act turns every high school into a military recruiting station. Under the act, high schools are required to provide military recruiters with students' names, addresses and telephone numbers. You have to wonder what that could possibly have to do with improving the education of students. Can you kids spell "cannon fodder"?

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National Association of Elementary School Principals
The Unfunded Mandate of NCLB. [A] recent study by the New Hampshire School Administrators Association estimated that even with the funding increases, the federal government will give New Hampshire schools only about $80 for every student, while costing the state $575 a student to implement NCLB.

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Bob Chase, National Education Association
"Claims that inexperienced college grads can be as successful as formally trained teachers are insulting and demeaning to qualified members of the teaching profession. Instead of helping professionalize teaching, the Secretary's [Paige's] proposals demean it by promoting teaching as volunteer work."

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Education Week
Secretary Paige also insists on a strict interpretation of the law requiring teachers to have degrees in the subject they teach, an unrealistic requirement for many rural schools.

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No Child Left
How ironic that we have an Education Czar in Washington violating decades of state and local control of education just as we profess to introduce democracy to Iraq. The imposition of specific Washington approved phonics programs and reading programs under the guise of pseudo science is an ominous erosion of basic freedoms. Next they will be telling us what science and history to teach! Big Brother/Sister evidently knows best. NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
struggling against difficult challenges. .. NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
so that all children actually enter school ready to learn as the first President Bush promised long ago... NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
for performance and quality, whether actually private, charter or truly public. Be careful about simplistic notions of high stakes testing.... NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
from all racial and economic groups to close the gap between current staffing levels and what is desirable... NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
within public systems so parental choice is real... NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
in schools and avoid simplistic panaceas and platitudes imported from the world of business and medicine... NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
Forswear tightly scripted, robotic programs and the fast food approaches to school improvement... NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
The early focus of NCLB on labeling schools as failures when combined with parental choice provisions represents an assault on public education, allowing virtual elementary schools, faith-based tutoring and other untested charter alternatives to creep into public systems with public tax money. NoChildLeft.

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No Child Left
for several years before engaging in punishing labels and reckless choice provisions. Capacity building might mean providing hundreds of hours of training in effective reading strategies, for example. But it does not mean training everybody in a single highly scripted program endorsed by the administration for pseudo-scientific reasons... NoChildLeft.

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NY Times
Congressional Republicans are nervous about a G.O.P. poll that shows them losing ground over education. But how could voters not be disappointed by the Bush administration's mishandling of education policy generally, and especially its decision to withhold more than $6 billion from the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, the supposed centerpiece of the administration's domestic policy?

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Boston Globe
TESTING OF students can be an excellent diagnostic tool. But the Bush administration has gone too far by testing very young children enrolled in Head Start, the country's program for low-income preschoolers.

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NY Times
READING, Pa. -- A small but growing number of school systems around the country are beginning to resist the demands of President Bush's signature education law, saying its efforts to raise student achievement are too costly and too cumbersome. The school district here in Reading recently filed suit contending that Pennsylvania, in enforcing the federal law, had unfairly judged Reading's efforts to educate thousands of recent immigrants and unreasonably required the impoverished city to offer tutoring and other services for which there is no money.

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John Santelli, the lead author of the study, which has not been
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration is proposing to double spending on sexual abstinence programs that bar any discussion of birth control or condoms to prevent pregnancy or AIDS despite a lack of evidence that such programs work. A study by researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on declining birth and pregnancy rates among teenagers concludes that prevention programs should emphasize abstinence and contraception. "Both are important," said Dr.

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Boston Globe Boston Globe
IN 2002, President Bush said the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregated schools was "the right decision." He said we "can't have two systems, one for African-Americans and one for whites." Last month, Bush's education secretary, Rod Paige, said in a speech at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government: "Such division was wrong in 1954, and it is wrong today. It is immoral. It is unjust." The proclamations made by Bush and Paige are eerie in the dwindling of their meaning -- assuming that there was much meaning to start with.

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Boston Globe
IT WAS EASY to get the mistaken impression that the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court to outlaw segregated schools was a really big deal on Capitol Hill, even to Republicans. The presumptive Democratic candidate for president, John Kerry, flew to Topeka, Kan., the site of the case, to say: "We honor the legacy of Brown by reaffirming the value of inclusion, of equality, and diversity in our schools and in our life all across this nation, by opening the doors of opportunity so that more of our young people can stay in school and out of prison."

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Common Dreams
The heart of Bush's [No Child Left Behind] plan calls for federally mandated annual testing of all schoolchildren in grades three to eight in reading and math. If schools fail to improve, the Bush plan threatens to reduce government aid -- sort of like threatening to withhold antibiotics from children who can't bring down their own fevers.

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Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation
Numerous studies confirm that heavy reliance on standardized tests [mandated by NCLB] degrades the curriculum and marginalizes whatever does not contribute directly to short-term gains in test scores, including critical thinking, multicultural studies, citizenship education, the arts, physical education, and bilingual education. And high-stakes testing increases illiteracy by pushing more and more students out of school.

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Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation
It is also important to recall what standardized reading tests actually measure: the ability to scan quickly the texts of a set of unconnected paragraphs and, for each passage, to pick the correct answers to questions from a set of four or five alternatives. As useful as this skill may sometimes be, it has little to do with reading as you or I know it, whether we do it for a practical purpose, for pleasure, or for inspiration. The questions surrounding the validity of these tests are no secret. The Office of Civil Rights in 2000 issued guidelines asserting that the use of test scores as the single factor to determine retention, graduation, and college admission is improper, and possibly a Civil Rights violation.

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Houston Chronicle
Accountability was not high on the lists of then-Gov. Bush and Texas legislators when they approved another of Bush's priorities, a form of educational deregulation known as charter schools. Created by a 1995 law, charter schools are mainly funded by the state but are exempt from many state regulations. The idea was to give private groups or individuals the opportunity to be innovative, to compete with more traditional classrooms for the chance to stimulate bright young minds -- or to provide options to failing public schools. In some cases the idea has worked. In others, it has given would-be, strike-it-rich "entrepreneurs" with questionable academic and management credentials the opportunity to rip off youngsters and taxpayers alike.

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Organic Consumer
Rod Paige, George W. Bush's nominee to run the Education Department, has been praised as a tough administrator who brought a reformist rigor to the job of superintendent of the Houston schools. But under his tenure, the Houston Independent School District joined one of the cheesier recent trends in public Education: the boom in exclusive contracts with soft-drink manufacturers to peddle high-sugar sodas in schools.

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Open Secrets
With many of our own schools in serious disrepair, the Bush administration is talking about rebuilding Iraqi schools now.

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No Child
Be careful not to divert funds to reckless experiments or diploma mills.

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NY Times
Houston schools, under Rod Paige, claimed great success while Bush was governor of Texas. It now appears that their accountants could have worked for Enron. Success was not quite what it seemed.

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