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Everything we know about the hero teachers from the California shooting

staff and wire services reports — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:39:09 +0000

As details emerged from Thursday’s shooting at Taft High School in Taft, California, the teacher present in the classroom and a classroom supervisor emerged as heroes for successfully talking the gunman into putting his shotgun down and surrendering before police arrived, the Atlantic Wire reports. Multiple reports identify Ryan Heber as the science teacher whose first period class was interrupted when one of his students entered the class late with a shotgun and fired on another student. The shooter had planned to fire on another student, but Heber and classroom supervisor Kim Lee Fields, who responded once she heard gun shots, didn’t overreact. Heber just participated a shooting emergency prepared class that morning. Heber and Fields were able to talk to the shooter while Heber evacuated the rest of his class to safety. Eventually, they convinced him to put the shotgun down without hurting anyone else. They disarmed the shooter even before police officials could get there…

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College degrees protected recent grads from great recession’s worst

staff and wire services reports — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:37:11 +0000

It was a defining image of the Great Recession: floundering college grads stuck back home, living in mom and dad’s basement. But while rooted in some truth, that picture doesn’t show fully how the prolonged economic downturn broadly impacted people in their early 20s, according to a new study out Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. In fact, those degrees offered strong protections against the recession’s worst effects. The study, an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Pew Economic Mobility Project, makes no claim recent years have been golden ones for new college graduates. Wages were down and have yet to recover, unemployment and student debt were up, and fewer grads have found jobs befitting their education-level. But the report finds all of those negative effects came in much smaller doses for college graduates than for those with associate’s degrees and only a high school credential, and that fewer graduates fell out of work entirely…

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Report: Most kids who need mental health care don’t get it

staff and wire services reports — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:35:29 +0000

Hot off the presses, here’s a report from the Government Accountability Office on the state of children’s mental health care. It reveals some major problems, the Huffington Post reports.

“Most children whose emotions or behavior, as reported by their parent or guardian, indicated a potential need for a mental health service did not receive any services within the same year,” the GAO wrote.

The report comes after Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (Calif.) requested that the GAO look into how psychotropic drugs affect the long-term development of kids who grow up in foster care. While the report is very specific in its scope, it’s sure to be a relevant piece of evidence as the Obama administration formulates policy to deal with the ramifications of the Newtown, Conn. elementary school shooting. The shooting has sparked a nationwide debate on gun control, but it has also directed America’s attention to the state of its mental health care system…

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No one knows how many vets graduate: Why it’s a problem

staff and wire services reports — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:33:07 +0000

The federal government has spent more than $20 billion helping 817,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan go to college, the Huffington Post reports. Yet, nine months after President Obama signed an executive order directing the Veterans Administration, the Department of Defense and the Department of Education to track completion rates, no one knows how many vets actually graduate. Earlier this month, a partnership was announced between the Department of Veterans Affairs, Student Veterans of America and the National Student Clearinghouse. Together they will research and track student veteran college completion rates, Stars & Stripes reports. The news comes as veterans’ advocates worry Congress may cut some post-9/11 G.I. Bill benefits as they squabble over the federal budget deficit…

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How a school library thrives–without books

staff and wire services reports — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:51:25 +0000

The library at Minneapolis’ Benilde-St. Margaret’s has no books, but the space at the Catholic preparatory school is proving to be more useful than ever – digitally, the Huffington Post reports. The school scrapped its entire 5,000-copy print collection in 2011, save some reference titles. Teachers selected titles they wanted to keep for classroom libraries, and the rest were donated to schools in Africa. Now, the once bookshelves-filled library is occupied simply by tables and chairs where students work with school laptops. While schools across the country cut back on library resources for budgetary reasons, the move at Benilde was influenced by shifts in student need and behavior, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune…

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Calif. teachers fund moves to divest from firearms

staff and wire services reports — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:49:46 +0000

The nation’s largest teacher pension fund took the first step Wednesday toward divesting from companies that make guns and high-capacity ammunition magazines that are illegal in California, the Associated Press reports. State Treasurer Bill Lockyer made a motion to begin the divestment process after pension fund officials determined that the fund invests in the owner of a company that manufactured one of the weapons used in the Connecticut school shooting. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System’s investment committee unanimously approved the motion.

“CalSTRS’ action targets ammunition clips that turn ordinary guns into killing machines, assault weapons and other firearms that pose extreme dangers to public health and safety,” Lockyer said.

The pension fund has investments in private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP, which owns the manufacturer of an assault weapon used at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The pension fund also owns shares of Sturm, Ruger & Co. and Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., two publicly traded gun-makers…

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What English classes should look like in Common Core era

staff and wire services reports — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:43:30 +0000

The recent controversy over how much fiction and non-fiction high school students are supposed to read under the Common Core State Standards begged the question of where the 70 percent non-fiction 30 percent fiction for seniors actually came from and how English classes should look, says the Washington Post. Here Carol Jago, a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, explains. She has taught high school for 32 years and is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She is the author of “With Rigor for All: Meeting Common Core Standards for Reading Literature and Classics in the Classroom…”

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‘Virtual’ public schools draw interest of religious families

staff and wire services reports — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:41:37 +0000

Worried about exposure to foul language, immodest dress, peer pressure and other inappropriate behavior, Susan Brown didn’t want her two daughters attending public schools — even though she’s a substitute teacher in a public school in Minnesota, Religion News Service reports. Brown initially home-schooled her daughters until a friend told her about the Minnesota Virtual Academy, an online public school that is fully accredited. She liked the curriculum, and as a single mom relying on substitute teaching income, she preferred how the school provided the supplies instead of having to buy supplies herself as a home-school parent.
“You can’t give your kids an effective moral and religious upbringing if you only see them a couple of hours a day,” said Brown, a Catholic whose daughters, now in the 10th and 12th grade, started virtual school in the second and fourth grade. “When you’re at home with them, you can incorporate your beliefs into the day…”

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Laptops go up against tablets at Consumer Electronics Show

staff and wire services reports — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:38:10 +0000

Acer’s Iconia W510, released in November, is a tablet PC that can be used in three different modes: tablet, productivity, and presentation.

Pity the poor laptop. The darling of the tech world just a couple of years ago, laptops have become one of the biggest casualties of the tablet phenomenon. For consumers enamored of touch-screen tablets, laptops suddenly seem like stale, clunky gadgets whose basic clamshell design hasn’t changed all that much in two decades.

It opens. It shuts. Yawn.

But this week at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the laptop is attempting a comeback. The stodgy clamshell is being cast aside by manufacturers who are trying to create a new category of device that combines the feel and functions of tablets and laptops.

Call them hybrids. Call them convertibles. These new computers fold. They twist. They slide. They detach.

And, more importantly, they are spawning like crazy. This wild burst of experimentation is being driven by a number of trends that suddenly converged: thinner designs, better touch screens, and the arrival in October of Windows 8, Microsoft Corp.’s new operating system designed for touch screens.

But there’s another crucial element: desperation. Industry insiders say laptops have to change quickly or face a long, slow decline.

(Next page: A roundup of ‘multi-mode’ devices)

Hundreds of Texas, Ohio teachers flock to gun training

staff and wire services reports — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:57:57 +0000

School teachers in Texas are flocking to free firearms classes and hundreds more in Ohio have signed up for training in the wake of the Connecticut elementary school massacre, some vowing to protect their students with guns even at the risk of losing their jobs, Reuters reports. In Ohio, more than 900 teachers, administrators and school employees signed up for the Buckeye Firearms Association’s newly created, three-day gun training program, the association said. In Texas, an $85 Concealed Handgun License course offered at no cost to teachers filled 400 spots immediately, forcing the school to offer another class, one instructor said. The two Texas classes graduated about 460 educators.

“Any teacher who is licensed and chooses to be armed should be able to be armed,” said Gerald Valentino, co-founder of the Buckeye Firearms Association. “It should be every teacher’s choice.”

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