Amir Abo-Shaeer, a Goleta, California physics and engineering teacher at Dos Pueblos High School, last week got more than just a bit of spotlight — he was one of the 23 MacArthur Fellows of 2010. The MacArthur Foundation annually gives out so-called Genius Awards — a no-strings grant of $500,000 each — to folks who excel in their professions.

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Filed under: K-12 Education News | 1 Comment »

Tags: Minority Group Teachers, Teacher Awards, Teachers

The eleven states and the District of Columbia, which won the Race to the Top competition, will divvy up a prize of $4 billion in federal education grants. But the ultimate winner may be STEM education. All the winning states have plans to bolster STEM subjects and to fully integrate them into their future K-12 education reforms.

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Tags: Education Policy, School Budgets, STEM education, STEM subjects

Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, now tackles another big issue: poor education. America spends more than any other developed country on education, but its students attain bottom-bumping test scores. In Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for “Superman,” the villains are America’s two largest teachers unions.

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Tags: Education Policy, Public Policy

Many education experts decry the length of America’s school year, saying it’s too skimpy and a century out of date. Now, President Obama has stepped into the fray, insisting the school year should be lengthened, and that teachers who perform badly should be fired.

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Contributors to American technological prowess include 1968 Nobel laureate Luis Walter Alvarez, Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman astronaut, who is now deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and Dan Arvizu, who heads the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

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Tags: Engineering in History, History, Minority Group Engineers

This report discusses how 15 public high schools excelled. The schools were featured at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University in June of 2009. At the conference, teams from each of the schools made brief presentations with evidence of their impressive achievements and then faced extensive questioning from experts about the methods by which they achieved such progress.

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Tags: Education Policy, Research, Research on Learning