Public Education

Many parents see schools as “bossy” or “interfering” when they tell them what they can and cannot put in their children’s lunch box, Ofsted warns.

Instead parents wanted more advice on how to prepare healthier packed lunches, inspectors said.

They also said heads often felt uneasy about issuing edicts on lunch boxes.

The report also found some secondary schools in England still used systems which made pupils receiving free school meals readily available.

Inspectors visited 39 primary, secondary and special schools in England between September 2009 and January 2010 to see how they were getting the healthy eating message across.

They found more primary than secondary schools complied with the standards set out for school lunches.

In primaries, the guideline most often not met was the requirement to provide a piece of fruit for every pupil eating a school lunch.

In secondaries, the standard most often not met were those restricting meat products, deep-fried foods and starchy foods cooked in oil. Read the rest of this entry »

Kaplan University has an offer for California community college students who cannot get a seat in a class they need: under a memorandum of understanding with the chancellor of the community college system, they can take the online version at Kaplan, with a 42 percent tuition discount.

The opportunity would not come cheap. Kaplan charges $216 a credit with the discount, compared with $26 a credit at California’s community colleges.

Supporters of for-profit education say the offer underscores how Kaplan and other profit-making colleges can help accommodate the mushrooming demand for higher education.

The number of California students choosing for-profit schools has been increasing rapidly, state officials say.

At the same time, government officials have become increasingly concerned that students at for-profit colleges are far more likely than those at public institutions to take out large loans — and default on them.

For better or worse, the tough times for public colleges nationwide have presented for-profit colleges with a promising marketing opportunity. “We thought, in light of the budget crisis and the number of community college classes which are being canceled, if we have that same class here, we would give students the opportunity to take it at Kaplan,” said Greg F. Marino, president of Kaplan University Group, a profit-making business owned by the Washington Post Company. Read the rest of this entry »

The city school board on Monday is expected to approve a $1.95 million contract for online tutorials for students struggling in math and writing.

With only one year of test scores for backup, the vote will be based on scant evidence that Stanford EPGY (Education Program for Gifted Youth) works, particularly in a district hard-pressed to have three working computers per classroom.

Memphis is the only large U.S. school district using the program, based on research done by Stanford University professor Patrick Suppes in the 1960s using computerized modules to help gifted learners.

As Stanford worked to broaden the model, it offered free access to tens of thousands of Memphis City Schools students while it monitored results and tweaked the program.

Last year, for instance, the district paid only $900,000 for access for 30,000 math students; Stanford subsidized 30,000 to 40,000 additional students, said Deputy Supt. Irving Hamer. Read the rest of this entry »

Thousands of students at the University of Puerto Rico who went on strike two months ago to oppose severe budget cuts declared victory on Thursday after reaching an agreement with administrators.

As part of a deal brokered by a court-appointed mediator, students would end their strike — one of the largest and longest such walkouts in Puerto Rican history — in exchange for a number of concessions. Most notably, the university’s Board of Regents has agreed to cancel a special fee that would have effectively doubled the cost to attend the university’s 11 public campuses.

The deal also includes a promise that there will be no sanctions against strike organizers, who clashed at times with the police at the main Río Piedras campus outside San Juan.

The accord must still be approved by a general assembly of university students, which is expected Monday. Christopher Powers, a literature professor at the Mayagüez campus, said it was “nearly a complete victory for the students,” noting that they failed to get a promise that there would be no large tuition increase next year. Professor Powers said planned cuts later this year to the salaries and benefits of professors could set off another round of conflict. Read the rest of this entry »

Stanford University, an incubator for dozens of Silicon Valley companies, has become the focus of a grass-roots effort to pressure the technology industry to crack down on “conflict minerals.”

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, armed groups force villagers to mine minerals like wolframite and cassiterite. Metals processed from such minerals are used in consumer electronics products, including laptop computers, MP3 players, cellphones and digital cameras.

On Thursday, a committee of Stanford’s trustees considered a resolution to create a new proxy voting guideline for the university’s investments. The guideline would support shareholders’ efforts to make companies trace the supply chain of the minerals used in their products.

The board, which met privately, has not announced its decision.

“This is a huge humanitarian crisis, and if Stanford can have an impact at all, we should try to,” said Nina McMurry, a senior and a member of Stand, a student organization that raised the conflict minerals issue with the university.

If Stanford adopts the guideline, it would be the first university in the country to take such action on the issue, according to the Center for American Progress, a policy institute in Washington. Read the rest of this entry »

With effective teaching a top policy priority, certain school districts, the federal government, and nonprofit groups are renewing efforts to pilot and study strategies for pairing effective teachers with students in low-performing, high-poverty schools.

The results could offer clues about how to rectify an imbalance in the distribution of the best teachers within districts—a requirement of both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2009 economic-stimulus law, and one of K-12 education’s most intractable problems.

The initiatives differ from earlier attempts to equalize teacher talent by using more sophisticated techniques to identify and target top teachers, including the use of value-added data.

They also go beyond narrow transfer incentives to include targeted retention strategies, improved professional development, and a focus on the caliber of the school leaders and peers that teachers new to such schools will be working with every day.

Some of the districts are even working to place whole teams of educators—rather than just individuals—in challenging schools, a promising approach, some scholars say, at a time when individual teacher performance has galvanized much policy attention.

“All this focus on individuals, on getting the best and brightest and placing them into schools, is a limited strategy,” said Susan Moore Johnson, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “It is driving so much of what’s going on right now, that we risk neglecting the context of these people’s work.” Read the rest of this entry »

The threat of cuts still hangs over the programme to build new schools in England, with ministers refusing to confirm spending plans.

Education Secretary Michael Gove was pressed repeatedly in the House of Commons to end the doubt over school rebuilding projects.

Mr Gove told MPs that building plans remained under review.

The construction industry has warned that firms will be shut down if school building projects are axed.

Recession

The £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme has been renovating and rebuilding schools across England.

Last autumn saw the biggest opening of new schools since the Victorian era.

But there have been unresolved questions about whether the building programme is going to be stopped by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

Construction industry organisation, the Construction Products Association (CPA), says the school building programme is worth £10bn a year - and has helped to protect recession-hit businesses. - reports BBC. Read the rest of this entry »

Religious education is “inadequate” in one in five secondary schools in England, according to watchdog Ofsted.

Its study suggested many teachers were unsure of what they were trying to achieve in the subject.

Inspectors, who visited 183 primary and secondary schools in 70 areas, also criticised schools for not providing enough training in religious education.

The Church of England said the report was concerning but the National Secular Society said RE should become optional.

Quality decline

Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert said: “This report highlights two things - first the need for better support and training for teachers and, secondly, the need for a reconsideration of the local arrangements for the oversight of RE, so schools can have a clear framework to use which helps them secure better student achievement in the subject.”

The report, Transforming Religious Education, found the quality of religious education had declined since 2007.

RE is not part of the National Curriculum and the content of lessons is determined at a local authority level.

Ofsted found that there was a wide variety in the amount of support and training provided to schools by local authorities.

However the study praised both primary and secondary schools for supporting the appreciation and understanding of pupils from different faiths. Read the rest of this entry »