Blue Herald » Education

USA TODAY
The 5-year-old No Child Left Behind law is up for renewal this month, and its fate is uncertain despite notable success.
President Bush’s signature domestic achievement has brought accountability to school districts that for decades shamefully buried their failures in grossly understated dropout rates and vastly overstated academic achievement. Scores of inner-city schools have [...]

Average SAT scores are lowest since ‘99

Jim Swanson 11:13 am (Education)

By Justin Pope
AP Education Writer
Average math and reading SAT scores fell four points for the high school class of 2007 to their lowest mark since 1999.
Last spring’s graduating seniors scored on average 502, out of a possible 800 points, on the critical reading section of the country’s most popular college entrance exam, down from 503 [...]

1 Comment

25 Aug

Queen rocker finally awarded PhD, 30 years on

Jim Swanson 3:08 am (Education, Heroes, Music)

AFP
Queen guitarist Brian May was on Thursday awarded a doctorate, more than 30 years after he first began studying a highly specialised area of astronomy.
May first started his thesis — titled, “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud” — at Imperial College London in 1974, but abandoned it when Queen’s prospects began to brighten.
He finally [...]

1 Comment

10 Aug

American Education: Sign Of Things To Come?

Buck 2:56 pm (Education)

“We looked at the countries who are participating, our scarce resources and our overextended staff and we decided to give it a pass.”
Mark Schneider, commissioner, DOE’s National Center for Education Statistics

Yeah, right. More like saving face! How embarrassing…
This is what we get for having a society that demonizes the intelligent among us, while putting goons [...]

1 Comment

02 Aug

Great-granny becomes oldest to earn masterÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s

Jim Swanson 4:40 pm (Education)

By Reuters staff writers

94-year-old Aussie who quit school at 12 earns degree in medical science
CANBERRA, Australia - A 94-year-old Australian great-great-grandmother who quit school at 12 is said to have become the world’s oldest person to earn a university master’s degree.
Medical Science Master’s Degree graduate Phyllis Turner, from Australia’s Adelaide University, began studying for her [...]

2,300 schools face ‘No Child’ overhaul

Jim Swanson 10:22 pm (Education, News)

By NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP Education Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

NEW YORK - The scarlet letter in education these days is an “R.” It stands for restructuring - the purgatory that schools are pushed into if they fail to meet testing goals for six straight years under the No Child Left Behind law.
Nationwide, about 2,300 schools are either [...]

31 May

Boy wins spelling bee with ’serrefine’

Jim Swanson 11:21 pm (Attaboy!, Education)

By JOSEPH WHITE, Associated Press Writer
Add another name to the list of guys who will never get laid. - JS
WASHINGTON - The winner of the spelling bee sounded as if he’d rather be at a math Olympiad. Thirteen-year-old Evan O’Dorney of Danville, Calif., breezed through the Scripps National Spelling Bee with barely a hitch Thursday [...]

23 May

Dartmouth College President Helps Wounded Vets Get In College

QuestionGirl 9:59 am (Education, Veterans)

A nice story…….
When he first met James Wright, the president of Dartmouth College, two years ago, Samuel Crist was in a hospital bed at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, recuperating from gunshot wounds from a firefight in Falluja, Iraq.
“I was pretty heavily medicated, so my memory is a little bit foggy, but [...]

17 May

Deep in the Heart of Texas…..

QuestionGirl 9:49 am (Church-State Separation, Education, Religious Right)

DALLAS, Texas (AP) — Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against a West Texas school district on behalf of eight parents who say a Bible course violates their religious liberty.
The American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way Foundation sued the Ector County Independent School District, asking the Odessa school system [...]