…Brownsville, Texas. The other finalists were Aldine Independent School District, Texas; Broward County Public Schools, Florida.; Long Beach Unified School District, California; and Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
The New York Times notes Brownsville’s honor comes on the same day that Texas authorities announced that the district had failed to meet achievement targets for two years under NCLB.
For the first time in seven years, Seattle public high-school students who do poorly can receive a failing grade on their report cards. Since 2000, not one student in Seattle’s public high schools has technically failed a class. The policy has been to hand out a grade of ”N” for “no credit,” which didn’t affect a student’s grade-point average. A grade of “E,” however, counts as a zero when figuring a GPA, and effective immediately the failing grade of “E” is back.
“The change has been welcomed by many principals and teachers who believe that students should face more consequences for failure,” the Seattle Times reports.
The return of the E could cause difficulties for some athletes because the school district requires students to have a C average to play. It also might affect some students’ prospects as they apply to college, although area colleges are aware of what Seattle was doing. But it will stop what many say was an unintended consequence: Some students decided it was better for their GPAs if they just gave up and lost credit for a class rather than earn a D or even a low C.
“For a number of years now, people have been feeling that the N policy is problematic,” said Marni Campbell, principal at Nathan Hale High School.
A hat tip to Joanne Jacobs, who likes the plan. My 10th grade social studies teacher would agree. ”Failure is a part of life,” Mr. Wilson often counseled.
USA Today’s Greg Toppo takes note of the presidential candidates’ debate on education, or lack thereof, and sounds the same tone of non-surprise as the rest of us. “The USA’s teetering economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have all but squeezed out education,” he notes, “a topic important to previous elections.”
Still, the paper produces a nice chart detailing the various stands and pronouncments by the McCain and Obama camps. “The two split most notably on how much federal funding they believe schools can expect in 2009 and beyond,” Toppo writes. “They also have different visions of what drives schools to improve. Obama focuses on improving teacher quality. McCain cites competition from taxpayer-supported private schools along with independently and publicly funded charter schools.”
The Portuguese government today began an ambitious plan to distribute half a million super-cheap “Magellan” laptops to school children at a subsidized price of 50 euros –about $68 U.S — in a bid to boost the computer literacy of Portugal’s elementary age school children.
Portugal has some of the lowest school achievement levels in western Europe and Prime Minister Jose Socrates has made boosting education a key priority. The project’s goal is two create a two-student-per-laptop ration in the country’s schools by 2010.
The computers cost just under $400 without the government subsidy.
