Thursday, July 31, 2003

Students Pushed Out to Improve Graduation Rates

The New York Times' Tamar Lewin Lewin and Jennifer Medina report in To Cut Failure Rate, Schools Shed Students that students are being pushed out of some New York City schools to improve graduation figures. They write that, "Many schools are trying to get rid of those who may tarnish the schools' statistics by failing to graduate on time." The students are "classified under bureaucratic categories that hide their failure to graduate. Officially the city's dropout rate hovers around 20 percent. But critics say that if the students who are pushed out were included, that number could be 25 to 30 percent." New York Schools' Chancellor Joel I. Klein stated, "The problem of what's happening to the students is a tragedy. It's not just a few instances, it's a real issue."

More on Dropouts

Jay Mathews discusses school dropouts in his Class Struggle column for today, Defending Dropping Out of School. The column is an interesting followup to his previous column, Is Dropping Out of High School Always Bad? Both columns were spurred by a Ron Wolk column the May issue of Teacher, Dropout Follies.

APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day)

The Astronomy Picture of the Day for today is Galaxy Group HCG 87 by the GMOS-S Commissioning Team, Gemini Observatory. A high resolution version of the photo (32 MB) is available from the Gemini site. The photo comes from the Gemini South Observatory, located high in the Andes Mountains in Chile.

From the Gemini Observatory Images site:

The Gemini Project is an international collaboration between the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Chile, Australia, Argentina and Brazil. The project is building twin 8.1-meter telescopes on Hawaii's Mauna Kea and Chile's Cerro Pachón to provide unobstructed coverage of both northern and southern skies with the highest attainable image quality.

Software Update

The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has released Mars24, version 5.0.9 of their "cross-platform Java application which displays a Mars 'sunclock', a graphical representation of Mars showing the current sun- and nightsides of Mars, along with a numerical readout of the time in 24-hour format. Other displays include a plot showing the relative orbital positions of Mars and Earth and a diagram showing the solar angle for a given location on Mars."

I couldn't get a good download from MacUpdate, but the Goddard site link worked well.

Schools Leaving Special Ed Coops?

Chicago Tribune reporter Lisa Black writes of Illinois schools' choosing to leave the traditional special ed coop in School districts consider leaving special ed groups. Black tells that many Illinois schools are "examining whether they can save money by providing special-education services on their own."

Macs in the Classroom

Noah Kravitz is beginning a new job as the technology coordinator at an elementary charter school in New York. Even though he's "a Mac person," he's not so sure about using Macs in the classroom after attending a CAST conference. He found limited support for Macs in many educational applications at the conference. Why I'm Not Sure I Want Macs in My Classroom on PowerBookCentral.com is a good read.

Devotion for July 27-August 2, 2003

Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is A Lifetime of Love Construction. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals. You can subscribe to Zach's weekly devotional by sending an email to zwdevotions_admin@zwdevotions.com with "Subscribe" as the subject.

Isn't this site closed?

It is, and I'm supposed to be retired by now. But someone at my school system woke up, decided one teacher trying to teach 29 disabled kids to read wasn't too bright, and advertised for another teacher. It still remains to be seen if they really fix things, but I decided with school beginning next month to try an update or two and see how it feels.

Send feedback to

Friday, August 1, 2003

More on Students Pushed Out to Improve Graduation Rates

High School Under Scrutiny for Giving Up on Its Students is a followup report by Jennifer Medina and Tamar Lewin to yesterday's story, To Cut Failure Rate, Schools Shed Students. This report tells of a number of families that have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Education Department in federal district court in Brooklyn.

Michigan Laptop Plan

A plan included in the Michigan state budget to provide laptop computers for all sixth graders in the state continues to draw news. Here's a sampling:

• Educational gold mine is waiting inside computers
• Giving kids laptops excites educators
• Computers for sixth-graders included in state budget

Isn't this site closed?

It is, and I'm supposed to be retired by now. But someone at my school system woke up, decided one teacher trying to teach 29 disabled kids to read wasn't too bright, and advertised for another teacher. It still remains to be seen if they really fix things, but I decided with school beginning soon to try an update or two and see how it feels.

We're Outa Here!

Educators' News is no longer an active site. It was regularly published from April 18, 2001, through April 18, 2003. Content from the site (archives and features) will remain available via the current URLs through February 29, 2004.

For those seeking current education news, let me recommend the following links:

For Macintosh specific news, including some education links, let me suggest:

My sincere thanks go out to the regular readers and contributors to this site for their support over the last two years. Please stay in touch. I'm not dying, just closing this part of the site:-).

Ads shown on this site do not represent an endorsement or warranty of any kind of products or companies shown. Ads shown on archive pages may not represent the ads displayed in the original posting on Educators' News.