In Georgia, court ruling could close some charter schools

A ruling by the Georgia Supreme Court on Monday cast doubt on the future of 17 charter schools there, leaving thousands of families uncertain about whether classes will continue through the end of the academic year and how students will continue in the fall, reports the New York Times. In a 4-to-3 decision, the Georgia court struck down a law empowering a special statewide commission to approve and finance charter schools even over the objections of local school boards…

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Speaking up in class, silently, using social media

Wasn’t it just the other day that teachers confiscated cellphones and principals warned about oversharing on MySpace?  Now, Erin Olson, an English teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa, is among a small but growing cadre of educators trying to exploit Twitter-like technology to enhance classroom discussion, reports the New York Times. Last Friday, as some of her 11th graders read aloud from a poem called “To the Lady,” which ponders why bystanders do not intervene to stop injustice, others kept up a running commentary on their laptops…

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Chaos at home stalls tuition aid for Libyan students in U.S.

Loqman Mohamed, a 28-year-old Libyan student from Benghazi, has been spending his nights scouring the web for the latest on the war ripping apart his homeland, reports the New York Times. Now, he has one more thing to worry about. Like other Libyans studying in the United States, Mr. Mohamed has had his tuition at the English-language school he attends in Denver, and the living expenses for his family here, paid by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi…

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Gadgets you should get rid of (or not)

The common rap against technology is that it leads to an accumulation of devices. But the nature of technology is changing, reports the New York Times. Fewer products are doing more tasks–all accomplished by countless lines of massless software code. And so we no longer need to accumulate products. If anything, we can cut down. The question is, Which can be replaced and which are fine, or even preferable, to keep? It is plain as day that paper maps and Rolodexes have given way to their digital counterparts. But what else can you get rid of? Here is a list of common consumer technologies and products and a somewhat opinionated judgment on whether to keep or pitch it…

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Diplomas, and an uncertain future, for Japanese pupils

Schools here begin class in April and hold graduation ceremonies in March; like spring, they represent renewal and rebirth. On Tuesday morning, in a school meeting hall in this tsunami-ravaged seaport, it became something else: an act of defiance, reports the New York Times. Gathering in the shadow of this seaport’s tsunami disaster zone, two solemn and often tearful crowds met to award diplomas to the sixth- and ninth-grade classes of Hashikami Elementary and Junior High schools. Inside the junior high auditorium, hundreds of refugees from the March 11 tsunami rolled up their blankets and moved to the rear to make way for a ritual that any parent would instantly recognize: the strains of Pachelbel’s Canon; the students’ march to the podium; the singing of school songs; the snapping of cellphone photos…

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For law students with everything, dog therapy for stress

Yale Law School, renowned for competitiveness and its Supreme Court justices, is embarking on a pilot program next week in which students can check out a “therapy dog” named Monty along with the library’s collection of more than one million books, reports the New York Times. While the law school is saying little so far about its dog-lending program, it has distributed a memo to students with the basics: that Monty will be available at the circulation desk to stressed-out students for 30 minutes at a time beginning Monday, for a three-day trial run…

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SAT’s reality TV essay stumps some

Every year, the SAT reduces more than a few teenage test-takers to tears. But few questions on the so-called Big Test appear to have provoked more anxious chatter–at least in this era of texting and online comment streams and discussion threads–than an essay prompt in some versions of the SAT administered last Saturday in which students were asked to opine on reality television, reports the New York Times.

“This is one of those moments when I wish I actually watched TV,” one test-taker wrote on Saturday on the web site College Confidential, under the user name “littlepenguin.”

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Loan study on students goes beyond default rates

According to the New York Times, for each student who defaults on a loan, at least two more fall behind in payments on their student debt, a new study has found. The Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization, said in a report that two out of five student loan borrowers were delinquent at some point in the first five years after they started repaying their loans. Almost a quarter of the borrowers used an option to postpone payments to avoid delinquency. The institute said the goal of its study was to develop a fuller picture of the debt burden that students face by compiling data on students who have trouble repaying their loans, but do not default…

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Cuts to Head Start show challenge of fiscal restraint

The difficulty Senate Republicans faced voting this week for a bill full of spending cuts is best illustrated on the home page for the Alaska Head Start program’s web site, reports the New York Times. On the bottom of the page is a picture of Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, receiving an award for her long support for Head Start, the preschool program for poor children. At the top of the page is a note imploring Alaskans to call Ms. Murkowski’s office and beg her not to vote for a Republican bill that would cut the program’s budget by $2 billion, or nearly a quarter of President Obama’s 2011 budget request of $8.2 billion. The current level is $7.2 billion. On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Murkowski did so anyway…

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Most public schools may miss targets, Education Secretary says

More than 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools could be labeled as failing under No Child Left Behind, the main federal law on public education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Congress on Wednesday, reports the New York Times. Mr. Duncan said the estimate, based on an analysis of testing trends and the workings of the law’s pass-fail school rating system, was the latest evidence of the law’s shortcomings and the need to overhaul it. Even many of the nation’s best-run schools are likely to fall short of the law’s rapidly rising standardized testing targets, Mr. Duncan said…

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Half the game is mental; So is the other half

There is a narrow little room inside the sprawling brick tangle of Hershey High School, not far from the dual smokestacks of the famous chocolate company. The door is not numbered and the walls have no windows. A teacher named Colette Silvestri spends Thursday afternoons inside, leading her team in practice. She times a group of students staring hard at pieces of paper, or sometimes at a deck of cards or pictures of people they do not know. The students memorize all they can, usually in 15-minute stretches of tedious silence, reports the New York Times. Then they spill their memory to recall, say, 120 random words in exact order. (That is roughly the length of this article to the end of this sentence, but with the words shuffled.) Or maybe they will try to match 159 unfamiliar names to photos of strangers, or recall 227 exact words, capital letters and punctuation of a poem read for the first time…

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Opinion: Why blame the teachers?

With states and cities going through hard times, teachers, their pensions and their unions have become big targets for budget cutters, says the New York Times. Lawmakers in some states are trying to change teacher tenure rules and school districts are laying off teachers by the thousands. In public debate and private conversations, teachers have come under increasing criticism for being ineffective and overpaid. Yet not long ago, education reform efforts sought to elevate the prestige and pay of teachers as a key to improving achievement in the classrooms…

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