The Choice Channel

“Rather than send her kids off on the yellow bus, Briana LeClaire has school come to her home. Her kids attend a virtual public school, connecting online to teachers and coursework. Everything from books to microscopes to radish seeds arrives via brown trucks. Mrs. LeClaire describes it as the 21st-century, middle-class version of the private tutor. Her 6th-grader can move quickly through her strong subjects, such as literature, and spend more time on her weaker areas, like math. Enrollment in online classes last year reached the 1 million mark, growing 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning. That’s just the start, says a new paper by the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. Its authors predict that by 2019 half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online.” (05/14/08)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0514/p03s08-usgn.html

“Teaching to national curriculum tests is ruining pupils’ futures and leaving them unprepared for the world of work, says a report released today by a group of MPs.The Labour-dominated Commons Select Committee for Children, Schools and Families warns that the ‘inappropriate focus’ by teachers on test results could rob pupils of a well-balanced education …. The MPs, however, stop short of calling for an end to national curriculum tests — taken by all pupils at the ages of seven, 11 and 14 — saying that they find the arguments in favour of a system of national testing to be ‘persuasive.’ Instead, they say, it is the uses to which the test results are put — such as drawing up league tables of primary schools’ test results and the targets set for individual schools’ performance — that need a drastic revision. ‘The drive to meet government targets has too often become the goal rather than the means to the end of providing the best possible education for all children,’ they argue. ” (05/14/08)

http://tinyurl.com/3vflhh

“The leader of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has said some parents ‘dump’ their children on schools for up to 10 hours a day. Mick Brookes, at the union’s conference in Liverpool, said some parents were ‘abdicating their responsibility.’ But Children’s Minister Beverly Hughes, who was jeered when the issue of league tables and tests were raised, said his remarks were untrue and unhelpful.” (05/04/08)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7382924.stm

“FIRE is pleased to announce its first annual ‘Freedom in Academia’ essay scholarship contest for high school students. To advance FIRE’s mission ‘to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to rights on our campuses,’ FIRE is inviting high school students from across the country who will be attending college in the fall of 2009 to enter this contest. The deadline for all entries is November 20, 2008, with the winner announced on December 19, 2008.” (04/30/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4fakp6

“For most media outlets that reported on an important new survey measuring the impact of technology on teens’ writing skills, the big news from the survey was that emoticons and text-messaging abbreviations are creeping into students’ formal writing assignments. Buried beneath the alarm of writing ‘purists,’ however, was a promising finding with equally important implications for schools: Blogging is helping many teens become more prolific writers.” (04/30/08)

http://tinyurl.com/43t4go

“The Knowledge Is Power Program—KIPP—an open-enrollment schooling network that serves more than 14,000 children in 17 states and the District of Columbia recently released its fifth annual Report Card. (There is a registration requirement, but logging in is easy and free.) The report results, based on information from each of KIPP’s 55 charter schools and two district contract schools, show strong gains at most schools for the 2007-2008 academic year. The gains may be attributable in part to long hours: KIPP students spend about 60 percent more time in the classroom than typical public school students.” (04/30/08)

http://tinyurl.com/3j2fgp

“School reformers across the nation thought they had scored a victory in their efforts to weed out ineffective teachers last year in New York. Then-governor Eliot Spitzer convinced legislators to enact a law requiring new teachers seeking tenure to prove that they successfully use standardized test scores and other forms of student performance data in shaping their classroom instruction. Even sweeter, the law was passed over the objections of the state’s largest public employees union, the United Teachers — an affiliate of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — and its largest local, New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, which has battled the much-lauded school reform efforts of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.” (04/29/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4w7ead

“If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, Americans will have two presidential candidates who are open to school choice measures. Barack Obama went on Fox News Sunday this week and said, ‘We should be experimenting with charter schools’ and ‘different ways of compensating teachers’ — beliefs he’s long held but not always trumpeted, The New Republic’s Josh Patashnik says. Obama advocated charter schools and performance-pay for teachers in Illinois, and has even hinted that he wouldn’t rule out the idea of school vouchers.” (04/29/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4ru694

“Using those cool little applications designed to enhance social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook can make personal information as public as posting it on a billboard.Trouble is, most students (and educators) never have a clue. Consider Sarah Brown. She’s unusually cautious when it comes to social networking. The college sophomore doesn’t have a MySpace page and, while she’s on Facebook, she does everything she can to keep her page as private as she can.” (04/29/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4p9pmr

“Colorado College has denied student Chris Robinson’s appeal of its finding that he and another student violated the school’s ‘violence’ policy for posting a flyer that parodied a flyer of the Feminist and Gender Studies program. The school also has decided not to remove any letters about the case from the students’ files until after graduation. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is assisting Robinson in his case against the school. ‘First, Colorado College trampled over Chris Robinson’s right to engage in an obvious parody, and now the school has further embarrassed itself by denying his appeal,’ FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said.” (04/28/08)

http://tinyurl.com/3gjcs2