Daily EducationNews.org
Monday, April 17, 2006

Akron Beacon-Journal
Law expands voucher eligibility
At least 16,000 more pupils can apply for private-school tuition aid
Students at three area public schools are now eligible to participate in the state's tuition voucher program because of a recent change in state law.

Arizona Republic
Teach kids to use credit cards wisely
Credit is money that is lent to you and that you pay back over time, usually with interest. Credit allows you to buy now and pay later.

Credit card and students: Card disadvantages
Credit Card Disadvantage

Credit card and students: Card advantages
Advantage of credit cards

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Morris Brown faces crises
Fraud trial of two former administrators of college starts Tuesday.

Open-and-shut case
How long will the voters of Gwinnett County allow the school board to persistently violate the state's Open Meetings Act?

Charlotte Observer
College rejections climbing
Record applicants in Carolinas mean even top students getting turned away
High school seniors seeking admission into some of the Carolinas' best-known colleges are facing their toughest test yet.

Chicago Sun-Times
High schools to beef up security
When Kennedy High School kids return from spring break today, they'll find four new security guards walking the halls -- part of an end-of-the-year security push in Chicago public schools battling rising violence.

Christian Science Monitor
Colleges volunteer financial aid for returning soldiers
Schools are offering education, training, and jobs to a group whose transition to civilian life can be challenging. By Amanda Paulson

Young black men at risk
From the president to the local pastor, the nation needs to focus on a group that is largely jobless or in prison. The Monitor's View

Columbus Dispatch
Columbus tries to keep kids in class
4,100 district students have truancy troubles The teenager talks to his father on one line while his mother is on hold on the other.

Dallas Morning News
4th-grader's truancy brings charge
Frisco: Mother who says son has severe allergies to appear in court
FRISCO - Gayle Arebalo said she kept her son Mark home from school many times this year because of his severe allergies.

Des Moines Register
Campuses cater to wireless wave
Universities and colleges will increasingly be yanking the wires out of their campus computer labs, replacing them with open areas with wireless Internet access that foster more face-to-face interaction, information technology experts predict.

Deseret News
Schools scaling back
School districts throughout Utah are scaling back building-project lists because rising construction costs have eaten up money obtained through bond issuances.

Detroit Free Press
Civility new school board rule
Spectators at Detroit Public Schools' board meetings will no longer have to endure wisecracks, insults or other distasteful behavior from board members, under a new policy. By a vote of 10-1, school board members approved decorum rules last week, agreeing to sanction themselves for public displays of disaffection.

eSchool News
New Va. law: Teach web safety
Virginia now requires educators to teach the perils of online predators

Houston Chronicle
Taxes, school finance to be addressed in Texas special session
Legislators convene today to again chase the elusive goal of cutting local property taxes and fixing the school finance system, but this time they face a June 1 deadline to reach agreement or risk a cutoff of state funds to the public schools in an election year.

Cy-Fair set to expand drug-testing programs
The move will add Cy-Fair to the fast-expanding list of school districts turning to drug-testing programs that now enjoy the endorsement of most parents and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Indianapolis Star-Tribune
Drugs halt aid for 8,900 students
Indiana has highest rate of financial-aid seekers denied for drug offenses Tonisha Mauldin had more than her clean record at stake when campus police found marijuana in her IUPUI student apartment last fall.

Inside Higher ED
Finishing the Ph.D.
Yale will review graduate programs, with focus on years 2-4 as key to helping students complete dissertations.

How Much Does Price Matter?
A study of college access in one key state raises questions about the interplay of cost, race and geography.

Arrested Development  
U. of Virginia faces criticism for having students jailed for protesting low wages of some campus workers.

Los Angeles Daily News
Teaching the art of math and science
PALMDALE - An Antelope Valley program funded by a nearly $900,000 federal grant and aimed at increasing math and science achievement among students will be holding a training workshop for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade teachers in June.

UTLA steps into LAUSD reform battle
Union pushes to give teachers more say in curriculum decisions
Opening another front in the battle for control of the LAUSD, a coalition of nonprofit groups led by the teachers union is set todaycq to unveil its own vision for reforming the 727,000-student school district an attempt to pre-empt the mayor's own announcement about the district in his State of the City speech Tuesday.

Miami Herald
S. Florida educators use latest technology in the classroom
BY PETER BAILEY
More educators are using the latest technology--from podcasting to iTunes, to video-conferencing--to create a classroom without boundaries.

Colleges tuned into iPod use
BY HOWARD COHEN
Stroll onto any college campus and you'll see iPods galore. But while many of the students are no doubt cranking Arctic Monkeys, just as many are listening to podcasts of lectures or specially designed video ''vodcasts'' of supplemental classroom material.

New York Daily News 
School grading plan gets an A
Editorials: Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein are moving toward bringing a truly revolutionary concept to the public schools: accountability for improving student performance.

Give it the new college try
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: America's franchise on the future is endangered. We have triumphed because we are a democracy of free enterprise but also one that seeks to maintain equal opportunity. We do this out of a sense of justice and a pragmatic recognition that the realization of innate talents benefits the whole community. Higher education has been the key. We have had a love affair with it and have seen it open the door to the masses through a combination of philanthropy and state support.

Black pessimism, blame and glimmers of hope
Stanley Crouch: It sometimes seems that all we hear about black people is data seeming to prove that they are in worse shape than any other group in America.

New York Post
CLASS TECH BOOM
By DAVID ANDREATTA Education Reporter COMPUTER-BUY BINGE
City schools are speeding down the Information Highway, buying computers at a breakneck pace, an Education Department survey obtained by The Post shows.

New York Times
Voucher Issue a Touchy Topic in Newark Race
By DAMIEN CAVE and JOSH BENSON
Mayoral candidate Ronald L. Rice called fellow candidate Cory Booker a proxy for "ultra-white, ultra-conservative" outsiders seeking to privatize the schools.

In New Jersey, Spending Cap Pinches Schools
By DAVID W. CHEN
Educators and parents say that they are struggling with a major crisis forcing districts to cut programs, shed staff and charge fees for things that were once free.

Police Enter Dormitory at Duke to Query Players in Rape Case
By VIV BERNSTEIN
The police entered a campus dormitory Thursday night to interview Duke men's lacrosse team players as part of their investigation into rape allegations.

Orlando Sentinel
Changes target potential dropouts
Last year, more than 51,000 Florida students who should have been in the class of 2005 failed to march in cap and gown. At least 30 percent of the state's students typically do not graduate in four years, an attrition rate often shrugged off as inevitable.

Palm Beach Post
Libraries evolve with technology
On college campuses, libraries becoming high-tech places to socialize and study.

Tallahassee's new excuse on class-size assignment
Imagine that students have been assigned a major term paper. They have ample time if they get started. But they don't want to do the work. Their attitude is: "Who's the teacher to tell us what to do?"

Pasadena Star News
School's almost out for Klages
ALTADENA - At the end of every day, the fourth- and fifth-graders in Marge Klages' classroom at Loma Alta Elementary School pull out well-worn yellow music books. 

Philadelphia Daily News
No escape from troubled school
By VALERIA M. RUSS
Lisa Waddington isn't sure what to do to help her 14-year-old son get a decent education. Joshua's a 9th-grader at Martin Luther King High School, and he's had his troubles there.

Saint Paul Pioneer Press
Teacher readies kids for reality
Instructor wins state award for course on real-world strategies
BY GITA SITARAMIAH, Pioneer Press
Centennial High School teacher Maxine Peterson recently won a statewide award recognizing her work. But she might come to consider the praise from her students a bigger honor.

San Antonio Express-News
Teachers from Big Easy at home in S.A. schools
Blind chance brought Lisa Jackson to San Antonio. She had never been here, never thought of moving here until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and turned Jackson's world and that of tens of thousands of others upside down.

San Jose Mercury 
Private preschools skeptical of Prop. 82
It sounds like a no-brainer for advocates of early childhood education: a state ballot initiative that would offer preschool to every 4-year-old in California, free of charge to parents. What preschool wouldn't be all for that?

St. Louis Post Dispatch 
St. Louis school's garden plants seeds for learning
For years, spring planting has been a Mullanphy Elementary tradition.

Star Tribune
Holding the line against cheating
As statewide testing gets underway, some wonder if the mounting pressure on schools to do well is an invitation to cheat.

USA Today 
Drug convictions cost students their financial aid Can regain eligibility if they complete rehab
By Donna Leinwand
WASHINGTON One in every 400 students applying for federal financial aid for college is rejected because of a drug conviction, an analysis of Department of Education numbers by a drug policy overhaul group found.

Washington Post
Woodbridge Teen Is Now Activist Leader
Anthony Lemus, 16, charismatic junior at Freedom High School in Prince William County, is known as one of the Washington area's most vocal organizers of the recent student demonstrations against the crackdown on immigration.

Arrests Don't End Wage Protests
The arrests Saturday evening of 17 University of Virginia students who had occupied a campus building for four days to protest the wages paid to university employees did nothing to deter a crowd of demonstrators Sunday.

New D.C. Test Won't Have All the Answers
With Exam Next Week, Schools Busy Showing Students How to Turn Analytical Skills Into Written Responses

Wichita Eagle
Schools can't hire till state sets budget
BY ICESS FERNANDEZ, The Wichita Eagle
Plans by Wichita-area school districts to increase employee salaries and hire more teachers to reduce class sizes are on hold until the Legislature decides how to fund schools.

Wilmington News Journal
Mentors give kids skills to succeed
After-school program seeks volunteers to help students improve reading abilities

International Articles

The Age
Head hunt flawed
The system for recruiting principals may discourage the best candidates, reports Caroline Milburn.

The worldwide classroom
Blogs are the new discussion groups for schools, writes Jennifer Cook.

Postcodes with paunches
Researchers have found that poor neighbourhoods are bad for your health.

Cell division
I am confused by the stem cell debate. What laws are involved?

Life's tourist awakens
Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist explores a life crippled by fear and inertia, writes Margaret Saltau.

Young eyes animate old stories
Moving pictures are bringing history to life, writes Claire Halliday.

Hope after nation's dark days
A school visit to Rwanda was a rare gift for some Warragul teens.

Is this a flight of fancy?
A minister's decision is seen as responsible as well as playing politics.

The voice of the mockingbird
Acclaimed author Harper Lee has spoken publicly for the first time since 1964.

Third degree
It was a sorry sight for Victorian student union leaders on the steps of the state library last Wednesday afternoon.

Campus chatter
About $2 million will be spent on the Innovative Universities European Union Centre.

Quandary
Sometimes failure is not easily turned into success, even with better study habits.

Not as easy as ABC
The degree of precision implied by the A to E rating system is bogus.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
Teachers want play-based learning
A teachers' union wants everyone to spend more time playing, as a "crucial" lifelong learning tool.

Strike threat over trust schools
A teachers' union raises the possibility of strikes in England in protest at the government's education bill.

The Globe and Mail
A little magazine that asks the big questions
GAYLE MacDONALD discovers what can happen when three undergrads with a good idea have breakfast with a generous alumnus

The Guardian 
School sponsors 'wanted in Lords'
Education: Downing Street source says expertise valued
· Automatic link between cash and honours denied

The Gulf Times
Students explore Matbakh beach in Qataf drive
A fresh group of 200 students and families went to Ras Matbakh beach to gather first-hand information about Qataf, or sea lavender.

The Independent (UK)
Islamaphobia on the rise in schools, teachers warn
Teachers' leaders have warned of a rising tide of Islamaphobia in schools in the wake of last year's bomb attacks on London.

The Peninsula
Students prepare for Botball challenge
Doha: Students from across Qatar took part in an intensive robotics workshop as part of preparing for the forthcoming Carnegie Mellon Univesity in Qatar's 2nd International Botball challenge.

The Press New Zealand
Call for tax-cash for kids' obesity ops
Surgeons want taxpayers to pay for weight-loss surgery for children as one solution to New Zealand's ballooning obesity epidemic.