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 he was visiting people and asking about their experiences in the war and pushing people to get an education,” said Crist, 22, who grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana. “He said he’d been a marine, too, and he’d gone to college after he got out as a lance corporal, the same rank I separated at.”

That hospital visit changed things for both Crist and Wright: On Wright’s advice, Crist enrolled in college courses in Texas, and next autumn he will transfer to Dartmouth.

Wright, 67, meanwhile, has made eight more visits to wounded veterans at Bethesda and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and, with the American Council on Education, started a program to provide individualized college counseling to seriously injured veterans.

Because of advances in medical care, and the speed with which those wounded on the battlefield are treated, the survival rate for service members with serious injuries is far higher in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts than in previous wars. These circumstances have created a pool of young men and women who must remake their lives with brain injuries, amputations and other significant limitations.

Injured or not, veterans get extensive educational benefits. But while service members on active duty have access to many educational counseling programs, such access is harder for those who have left active duty and face long recuperation, especially if they are from families where college is not a given.

More at the International Herald Tribune

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 to stop teaching the course.

“Religion is very important in my family and we are very involved in our religious community. But the public schools are no place for religious indoctrination that promotes certain beliefs that not all the kids in the school share,” Doug Hildebrand, a Presbyterian deacon who is among the plaintiffs, said in a written statement released by the ACLU.

The Ector school board approved the high school elective in 2005. It teaches the King James version of the sacred text using material produced by the Greensboro, North Carolina-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, and uses the Bible as the students’ textbook.

Backers of the National Council include David Barton, who operates a Web site that promotes helping local officials develop policies that reflect Biblical views and encourages Christian involvement in civic affairs. Other supporters of the program include the conservative American Family Association, Eagle Forum and Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute.

“There is no question that these Bible electives are constitutional,” said Kelly Shackelford, Liberty Legal’s chief counsel. “The United States Supreme Court has stated more than once that teaching about the Bible is not only constitutional, but essential to a quality education. This lawsuit is a loser.”

More at CNN

From the Houston Chronicle:

MURFREESBORO, TENN. - Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

“The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them,” said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

Some parents said they were upset by the staff’s poor judgment in light of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 students and professors dead, including the gunman.

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on locked door.

After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.

“I was like, ‘Oh My God,’ ” she said. “At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out.”

Principal Catherine Stephens declined to say whether the staff members involved would face disciplinary action, but said the situation “involved poor judgment.”

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Back in December when I was visiting back east, I prompted my dad to tell a favorite story. When he was in “grammar school,” his class was given a test that asked who discovered America (this was back in the late forties or early fifties). My father had recently read a pamphlet about the Viking Leif Erikson, so he put him down for his answer. He was marked wrong, because the official answer was “Christopher Columbus.”

My father had also retold this incident to a friend who had recently started teaching, and she replied she-d have done the same thing. Her reason? “Christopher Columbus” was what the material taught.

As I told my father (yet again), I strongly disagreed. I had to shake my head at the first teacher, but was horrified by his friend’s answer. Now, I never met the woman, and perhaps she was a nice person otherwise, and a novice teacher (I would hope so!). My stance remains that, first of all, while elementary school teachers typically must be generalists, a teacher should know his or her subject area. The first teacher should have known that Christopher Columbus was not the right answer or the only answer. Much more importantly is that if anything, a student who answered “Leif Erikson” (or even penned a short answer about Native Americans and the funny notion of “discovering” America!) should have been rewarded, not punished. Rather than encouraging independent thought and research, these two teachers asserted that authority trumped empirical truth, and that obedience was more important than honesty and accuracy.

Elliot Eisner has captured this dynamic well in his writings about “the three curricula all schools teach,” namely the explicit, implicit, and null curricula. Basically, the explicit curriculum is the specific knowledge set of a given class, such as the mathematics covered in an Algebra I class. The implicit curriculum is everything the class or school teaches without necessarily stating it outright, such as: “Be quiet, sit in your seats, and do as you-re told.” The null curriculum is whatever the school deems not important by not covering it.
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from U.S. News & World Report

There could be a brand of Bush 101 taught in business schools soon if James Hoopes, the Murata Professor of Ethics in Business at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., gets his way. Just last week, he landed a publisher for Hail to the CEO: The Failure of George W. Bush and the Cult of Moral Leadership. His premise: President Bush, a Harvard University M.B.A. grad, is proof that business schools focus more on leadership than on management. Bush, he says, “talks about values like freedom and democracy in Iraq and tries to pep up his subordinates during Katrina,” like when he told ex-disaster chief Michael Brown, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” But, he adds, Bush “doesn’t do nearly enough managerial work such as planning for the postwar occupation of Iraq or getting the supplies to New Orleans.”

read more at U.S. News & World Report

Not only are teachers not paid enough all across the Country. Not only are classroom sizes way too large (number of students), now Chi Town cuts 775 teachers. Who’s going to teach our kids in 20 years?

About 775 probationary teachers in Chicago public schools learned Friday they are losing their jobs in a purge that district leaders say could improve the quality of instruction in the system’s most challenged schools.

The teachers were dismissed for various reasons, but the most common was an inability to manage their classrooms. Probationary teachers include those who have been in the district less than five years and others who have worked for longer than that as full-time substitutes.

More teachers were let go last year, when a budget crunch forced schools to cut hundreds of teaching jobs. This year’s dismissals were triggered largely by performance issues.

The cuts represent about 11 percent of the district’s estimated 7,000 non-tenured teachers. Last year, principals acknowledged that they fired some probationary teachers for budget reasons, and about 110 of the 1,050 dismissed then ended up being rehired at the same school.

Schools Chief Arne Duncan said the cuts allow principals to build the best teams for their schools, and they are not to solve budget problems or get rid of outspoken teachers, as some critics have alleged. He said the quality and quantity of the teaching recruits this year gives him confidence that these vacancies will be filled by educators who can better reach students in hard-to’staff schools.

Principals always have had the right to dismiss teachers who have been in the district less than five years, but the current union contract makes the process easier.

The practice of firing probationary teachers has proven to be divisive for the teachers union as it prepares for the election of new officers next month. Union President Marilyn Stewart has decried the change in the contract that allows the district to fire the teachers more easily and blames Deborah Lynch, her predecessor and campaign opponent.

Read more at The Chicago Tribune

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

The Vagabond Scholar poetry category isn’t as large as I’d like, but I wrote a fairly extensive post for National Poetry Month last year. I’ve also added a few poetry sites to the VS blogroll since. They can be found on the bottom left. Get yer verse on!

If political poetry is your thing, it’s hard to keep up with the creative output over at Poetic Justice.

I will be adding a few more poetry posts this month, and please feel free to link or add any favorite poems. But to kick things off properly, here’s one of my favorites:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

- William Carlos Williams

The U.S. Department of Education has overcharged millions of Americans with student loans during the past decade despite repeated warnings that it was breaking the law, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday.

A computer glitch apparently caused more than 3 million student loan borrowers to be billed hundreds of millions of dollars more than they owed, said lawyers who brought the class-action suit. It’s unclear how much individuals were overcharged.

“That’s a large amount of money taken from students who trust that this program is run accurately and appropriately,” said Brenda K. Pfeiffer, a 41-year-old Minnesota chiropractor who discovered the problem and is the lead plaintiff.

The Education Department’s student loan programs have been buffeted by a series of controversies and have come under increased scrutiny by Congress. Lawmakers are investigating potential mismanagement and conflicts of interest. Legislation has been proposed to revamp the way the two major federal student loan programs are run.

More at the Washington Post

Green Line in school maps angers right-wingers

Education Minister Yuli Tamir decided on Tuesday that new geography textbooks ordered by the Education Ministry will include the so-called Green Line in their representations of the map of Israel, triggering condemnation from right-wing MKs.

“This is for the purposes of education and demonstration and discussion,” Tamir told The Jerusalem Post , flatly rejecting as “irrelevant” the objections of the politicians who blasted her decision.

“There was a conscious choice to make the Green Line disappear,” she said of previous government policies that left the demarcation line out of official maps, “but I don’t think we should educate to ignorance. Israel’s eastern border has not been marked [in the schoolbooks], and it should be.”

Former chairman of the Education Committee MK Zevulun Orlev (NU-NRP) led the charge against the move, saying that Tamir wanted to impose “Peace Now” ideology on the ministry.

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The term Green Line is used to refer to the 1949 Armistice lines established between Israel and its opponents (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt) at the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Green Line separates Israel not only from these countries but from territories Israel would later capture in the 1967 Six-Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its name is derived from the green pencil used to draw the line on the map during the talks.

more from Wikipedia

ATLANTA — Next year, Justan Holloway’s class schedule will look more like an action movie plot than an academic pursuit. The Savannah State University sophomore will study international terrorism, disaster planning, criminology, social psychology and Arabic.

Holloway plans to be among the first to enroll in the college’s new degree program in homeland security. The program is modeled after one at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., and is among a growing number of homeland security majors available across the country as schools try to meet a rising demand for workers trained in a variety of national defense areas.

More here