Nearly Half of Schools ‘Failing’
Posted on December 19th, 2011 by Mary Lord
Nearly half the nation’s public schools failed to meet federal benchmarks this year, up from 39 percent in 2010 and marking the largest washout rate since the No Child Left Behind Law took effect a decade ago, a new national report calculates. That’s still well below the 82 percent failure rate that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan predicted earlier this year, but the nonpartisan Center for Education Policy’s findings still indicate an alarming trend.
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Tags: Education Policy, NCLB, New York City public schools, Principals, protest, Public Policy, standardized testing
How do top-scoring science students in New England stack up against their counterparts in the mid-Atlantic or South? Not very well, according to a new analysis of state science assessments by Change the Equation. That’s because states set the bar for proficiency at widely varying levels.
Want to boost the nation’s supply of engineers? A new survey of 1,000 U.S. teenagers conducted by the Intel Corporation found that two-thirds wouldn’t consider a career in engineering but may point to a relatively simple solution: expose more middle and high school students to the profession.
Albert Einstein is no Caped Crusader. But as a comic book, his theory of relativity can pack as much punch as any superhero–at least in Japan, where students have learned math and science from manga (comic books) for decades. Now, a U.S. publisher has translated a host of these STEM comics, giving English readers access to manga versions of subjects ranging from calculus to biochemisty and yes, relativity.
Angela Zhang, a high school student from Cupertino, Calif., won the 2011 Siemens Competition and a $100,000 scholarship for research that created a tiny particle she likened to a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatments” because of its precision in targeting cancer tumors. She was one of six individuals and six teams competing in this year’s annual Siemens Foundation high school science competition. The final judging took place over the weekend in Washington, D.C. with winners announced December 4. Washington, D.C.
Al Siedlecki — known as “Sie” to his students — has taught science at Medford Memorial Middle School in New Jersey for more than three decades. But a few years back, as Sie was helping a group of students study for a test, something happened that in all his years in the classroom had never occurred before: a former student called to thank him for inspiring a love of science — and career as a neurosurgeon. Hear their StoryCorps tale.
Talk about old school. Building blocks, those indestructible wooden mainstays of elementary classrooms since the 1900s, are finding new favor as a way to boost student learning, particularly in math and science. In New York City, parents are creating castles and toppling towers at oversubscribed building-block workshops. Some charter schools advertise block corners along with chess programs and science labs. 
Atlanta Public Schools has a plan for easing its shortage of math and science teachers: Create them. The 50,000-student district is launching an urban residency program to prepare both career-changers and current educators to work in math and science classrooms. Recruits will spend a year shadowing a high-performing APS teacher while completing a master’s in education from Georgia State University. 
Can project-based STEM programs boost student achievement and engagement in all subjects? Massachusetts is betting on it. This fall, the Marlborough school district became the first of six systems to launch an engineering-focused STEM early-college initiative.
