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Spooked by the effects of globalization on their low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political energy into education. In the United States, it has been proclaimed that no child will be left behind. Whether this program, launched by George Bush in 2002, has raised standards will be a big issue in the 2008 presidential election. Next year Britain will introduce ambitious new qualifications, combining academic and vocational study. For the industrial countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), average spending on primary and secondary schooling rose by almost two-fifths in real terms between 1995 and 2004. Oddly, this has had little measurable effect. Read more in The Economist.

Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur with such books as The Naked and the Dead, died Saturday, November 10, 2007, his literary executor said. He was 84. Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author’s biographer. From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as The Armies of the Night, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality. Read more of his obituary at MSNBC.com.

 Prospects for renewing the No Child Left Behind education law this year are essentially dead, as Capitol Hill lawmakers appear content to leave the legislation to the politically charged environment of next year’s presidential election. Senate leaders made a bipartisan decision recently to delay consideration of NCLB renewal legislation until next year. House negotiations over a similar bill continue to sputter along and, complicating matters further, Democratic education leaders railed against President Bush yesterday after he threatened to veto a labor, health and education spending bill.

That Democrat-crafted bill exceeds Bush’s funding request for the Education Department by some $4.5 billion, including $600 million more than he requested for NCLB programs, according to House Democrats. House education panel Chairman George Miller, California Democrat, said the veto threat “sharply reduced the prospects” for bipartisan negotiations over NCLB renewal. “He thinks he can have his education legacy on the cheap. He is profoundly mistaken,” Miller said of Bush. Read more in The Washington Times.

 There is growing doubt whether Congress will reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law in the waning days of the current session. Even Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is tempered in her confidence. “I have worked hard to get a reauthorization,” she told a Monitor-sponsored breakfast with reporters last week. “The bad news is that we are attempting to do it ... on the eve of a presidential election.” Congress is supposed to make revisions in the law and reauthorize it every five years. Whether or not Congress changes the legislation through reauthorization, it will remain on the books and “is strong as mustard gas,” Secretary Spellings said. Read her colorful take on education policy in The Christian Science Monitor online.

 As they sat in the Oval Office one day in January this year, President Bush and Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) put their differences over the Iraq war behind them and focused again on ways to reshape the nation’s education system. “We“re going to get moving on this, right Ted?” Bush asked. Yes, Mr. President, Kennedy said. He could pass it by March. Ten months later, the optimism has vanished and the campaign to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law has bogged down. Not only has it not passed, but no legislation has been introduced. In an interview last week, Kennedy said it will not happen this year after all. “It’s going to tip over to next year,” he said, right into the teeth of a presidential campaign with candidates on both sides denouncing the program. Read the article in The Boston Globe.

Educators from O’Fallon High School in O’Fallon Township, Illinois, mentioned at a recent conference in Atlanta that their school fell short of state benchmarks for the Prairie State Achievement Exam. Their counterparts from around the Metro East area gasped. Then, representatives from Edwardsville High School said that they, too, failed to meet annual progress targets on the reading and math tests taken by all Illinois 11th–graders. The embarrassing moment for two top–performing high schools in Southern Illinois shows that even the most well–regarded schools aren’t immune to dings under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. O’Fallon parent Cindy Lafrance said she cares more about the individual scores of her children than the overall performance of the school. “The kids do well and enjoy their classes,” she said. “That’s what matters.” Read more in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch online

 Rep. George Miller (D-CA) has never been one to back away from a brawl—he once warned an adversary that if he wanted to fight, it was going to take a while, so he’d better bring lunch. But as Miller pushes to renew the landmark education law known as No Child Left Behind, he faces so many fights that the fate of the bill is increasingly in doubt. As chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Miller is sparring with Republicans who see his proposed changes as an unacceptable watering down of the law’s core standards. Teachers object to his proposal to link pay to performance. Even his fellow Democrats are giving him a hard time, largely for not doing enough to soften the law’s most rigid requirements. Read the article in The Los Angeles Times online.

Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic “The Golden Notebook,” won the Nobel Prize for literature today (Thursday, October 11, 2007). She was praised by the judges for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.” Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated for “The Golden Notebook” and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric. Read more about her at CNN News.

 Under pressure from the right and the left, President Bush said Tuesday, October 9, that he is open to reformulating his signature No Child Left Behind education law but stressed that he remains unwilling to surrender on its core elements of testing and accountability. “As we move forward, we will continue to welcome new ideas,” Bush said in the Rose Garden after meeting with civil rights leaders. “And I appreciate the ideas I heard today. Yet there can be no compromise on the basic principle: Every child must learn to read and do math at, or above, grade level. And there can be no compromise on the need to hold schools accountable to making sure we achieve that goal.” Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

  Following the release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math results yesterday, which showed that reading test scores improved two points for fourth grade students, and only one point for eighth grade students, IRA President Linda Gambrell pointed out the need to continue to stress adolescent reading instruction.

“The inability of eighth grade students to demonstrate continuing growth is significant because it reflects a second type of achievement gap—one that narrows students’ options just as they are beginning to make adult life choices about careers and further education.” Gambrell suggested that the mainly primary school model of reading instruction may be dated. “As students age, they confront more complex material in and out of school that requires an increasing level of reading accomplishment. Why not provide middle and high school students with an instructional focus that allows them to master content in science, social studies, and other areas while improving their critical reading skills? As for students who are still grade levels behind in reading, provide special assistance so they can close their skills gap. The older they are, the more urgent the challenge.” Read more of Gambrell’s comments.

The nation’s fourth- and eighth-graders continue to improve steadily in mathematics, and fourth-grade reading achievement is also on the rise, according to test scores released this morning. But progress in narrowing racial and ethnic performance gaps remains slow and in some cases has stalled. This year’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed non-Hispanic white students well ahead of black and Hispanic students in reading and math. In addition, eighth-grade reading scores remained about the same as they were in 1998, confirming the belief of many educators that middle schools need improvement. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

Average reading and math scores on the SAT test declined slightly this year, as the number of high school students taking the standardized exam grew larger and more diverse than ever, according to a report released by the College Board on the high school class of 2007. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

Long criticized for showing gangsta rap videos and those with scantily clad female dancers, Black Entertainment Television is now taking those images—spiced with profanity and frequent use of the N-word—and remixing them into an audacious animated video promoting literacy and black pride that is drawing both praise and condemnation. Read more about the video in this article from the Los Angeles Times.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children are failing to get an education in Syria after fleeing the violence back home. While Syria has given all Iraqis access to its education and health services, the sheer number of refugees seeking help mean most don’t get what they need. The Syrian government estimates there are 1.7 million Iraqis within its borders. The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, puts the total at 1.4 million. UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF believes about half of all Iraqi refugees in Syria are of school age. Most are unable to attend classes because their families fled without the documents they need to enter the Syrian education system—and because of poverty. Read more at BBC News.

Adapting to weightlessness was hard. Readapting to gravity was even tougher for teacher–astronaut Barbara Morgan. Morgan passed up the opportunity to check out space shuttle Endeavour with her six crewmates after landing Tuesday, August 21. She was too weak and wobbly and hinted that she was nauseous, as well. “The room still spins a little bit, but that’s OK,”she said. As for her 13–day flight, it was “absolutely wonderful.” Morgan said she can’t wait to see what schoolchildren and teachers do with the 10 million basil seeds she carried into space. The plan is for students to devise mini–greenhouses like the two she left behind at the international space station. Read more at CNN.com.

 When Maribel Heredia’s son told her that his first-grade teacher was “going to college” and that there would be a substitute in the classroom two days a week, she started asking questions. Only then did she learn that the teacher the Hayward Unified School District labeled “highly qualified” was still a student herself. Calling the teacher highly qualified allows the district to meet the provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind education law, which requires that all students be taught by skilled teachers in core subjects such as English and math. The district’s classification is legal. Heredia said she believes such classifications are misleading and allow districts to place unqualified teachers in classrooms. On Tuesday, August 21, she was among a group of parents and education advocates who sued the U.S. Department of Education over its interpretation of what makes a highly qualified teacher. Read more of this article from The Boston Globe.

Space Shuttle Endeavour rolled to a stop today (Tuesday, August 21) at the Shuttle Landing Facility after a perfect landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Scott Kelly guided the spacecraft through its complicated glide back to Earth at 12:32 EDT, completing a mission that added a new piece to the International Space Station, delivered almost three tons of supplies to the laboratory and proved a new power transfer system works. The landing also marked the completion of teacher–turned–astronaut Barbara Morgan’s first spaceflight. Read more and find other media resources at the NASA Space Shuttle website.

The STS–118 crew is making final preparations for its return to Earth aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour to complete a successful assembly mission to the International Space Station. Landing is scheduled for 12:32 p.m. EDT today (Tuesday, August 21), at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Endeavour’s payload bay doors are now closed. If flight controllers decide to press ahead with landing, Commander Scott Kelly and Pilot Charles Hobaugh will fire Endeavour’s engines at 11:25 a.m. to begin the descent to Kennedy. Landing will bring to an end the first flight for Mission Specialist Barbara Morgan, an educator who was selected to become a mission specialist astronaut. She was first selected by NASA in 1985 as the backup to Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe. For news of the landing, visit the NASA website.

Their mission cut short by Hurricane Dean, astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour are wrapping up their work in orbit and preparing to come home Tuesday, August 21. Dean no longer posed much of a threat to the Houston home of Mission Control, but managers did not want to take any chances. NASA said the preliminary weather forecast looked good for Tuesday’s planned early afternoon touchdown at Kennedy Space Center. Teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan, Christa McAuliffe’s backup for the doomed Challenger flight, was scheduled to join Endeavour commander Scott Kelly and Canadian astronaut Dave Williams for a chat with students in Saskatchewan Monday. Read more at bostonherald.com.

Whether they are poor or rich, white students are scoring higher than their African American and Latino classmates on California’s standardized tests, results released Wednesday show. And in some cases, the poorest white students are doing better than Latino and black students who come from middle class or wealthy families. This year’s test scores show that the difference in academic achievement between ethnic groups is more than an issue of poverty vs. wealth. Read more of this article from The Sacremento Bee.

After days of anxiety about a gouge in the belly of the shuttle Endeavour, NASA got some good news: Tests suggested repairs may not be needed. Meanwhile, the agency fulfilled a longstanding dream of a teacher talking to students from space. Teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan took questions and spoke to hundreds of youngsters packed into the Discovery Center of Idaho in Boise, less than 100 miles from the elementary school where Morgan taught before joining the astronaut corps. One child wanted to know about exercising in space. In response, Morgan lifted the two large men floating alongside her, one in each hand, and pretended to be straining. Read more about the mission at nytimes.com.

After conducting high–tech 3-D scans of the 32,000 heat tiles on the Space Shuttle Endeavour, officials now seem far more optimistic about the condition of the shuttle and the safety of the crew. The shuttle crew has a 68–day food supply on board and the space station now is generating so much solar power that the astronauts easily could stay in space if it became necessary to send a rescue shuttle in October. The news has reassured family members, including Clay Morgan, the husband of teacher–turned–astronaut Barbara Morgan. Clay said he was able to speak to his wife Sunday night and she said she was enjoying her time in space. He said his wife and the crew are working a lot. “There’s no rest for the weightless up there,”Clay said. “They are working so hard.” See a picture of Barbara Morgan and read the article at ABC News.

New images of the space shuttle Endeavour confirmed that the shuttle’s protective thermal shield has been breached, prompting an intensive flurry of tests to establish whether it could be at risk during its return to Earth. NASA officials said the entire thickness of a heat-resistant tile has been pierced, raising the possibility that hot gases could seep in and overheat the vehicle during re–entry later this month. They stressed, however, that it was still unclear whether such a risk exists—and even if it does, the crew is equipped to carry out simple repairs while in orbit to make it safe. Read the story and see a picture of Barbara Morgan, educator, astronaut, and longtime member of the International Reading Association at the London Times online.

Space shuttle Endeavour safely carried teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan into orbit August 8, 2007, fulfilling her long–deferred dream and overcoming one of the agency’s greatest failures. NASA last tried to send a teacher into space on shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. The ship exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing social studies instructor Christa McAuliffe and six crewmates. Morgan, McAuliffe’s backup, was on hand to see her friend’s mission end in tragedy. This time, no cloud of smoke or fireball marred the clear blue Florida sky as Endeavour soared into space. After the shuttle’s 8½-minute ride into orbit, Mission Control commentator Rob Navias proclaimed: “For Barbara Morgan and her crewmates, class is in session.” Read the article at USA TODAY.

  U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told state legislators Congress would seek a major overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act, which states have protested as an unfunded mandate and unprecedented federal intrusion into schools. “So different will this bill be from the original No Child Left Behind, that we're thinking of changing it’s name,” Pelosi said Wednesday (Aug. 8) addressing the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Read more about Pelosi’s speech in this article from Stateline.org.

More than 20 years later, educational attainment is higher and felony arrests are lower for the alumni of a Chicago early intervention program for low-income children. The enrollees, now in their late 20s, are also more likely to have health insurance, according to a follow-up study released this week. Chicago’s Child-Parent Center program was—and is—more intense than Head Start, the main federal assistance program for low-income children and their families. Read more about the study in this article from The Kansas City Star.

 After nearly a year of debate, the education committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures failed to reach a unanimous decision on where the panel stands on national standards—setting up a debate and likely vote by the national group’s entire legislative body. The more-than-100-member education committee had been poised to endorse a policy taking a firm stand against any national standards, mirroring the group’s opposition to some parts of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. But not all states participating in the committee meeting agreed with such a stance. Read more about the debate in this article from Education Week.

Reading the written word may be mightier than lead poisoning, researchers in Baltimore reported. They found that avid reading, which stimulated cognitive reserve, helped fend off the cognition-draining effects of lead exposure in a group of smelter workers. Read more about this research in this article from the website MedPage Today.

 The chairman of the House education committee, an original architect of the federal No Child Left Behind law, said Monday that he wanted to change the law so that annual reading and math tests would not be the sole measure of school performance, but that other indicators like high school graduation rates and test scores in other subjects would also be taken into account. “Our legislation will continue to place strong emphasis on reading and math skills,” the chairman, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said at the National Press Club. “But it will allow states to use more than their reading and math test results to determine how well schools and students are doing.” Read more about Miller’s speech in this article from The New York Times.

 Congress has delayed any significant action on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act until it returns from its summer recess after Labor Day. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, announced that his committee would not consider an NCLB bill before lawmakers take their August break. Read more of this article from Education Week.

A former Normandy School District grounds crew supervisor claims in a lawsuit that the district violated the Americans With Disabilities Act when it fired him for being illiterate. Read more of this article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Parents: Before you spring for that Nintendo Wii or other game system for your high schooler, consider this: Kids who spend a lot of time playing video games still socialize with friends, but don’t have a lot of time to spare to do their homework, according to a new University of Michigan study. Compared to non-gamers, kids who play video games spend 30% less time reading and 34% less time doing homework, the study showed. Read more of this article from the Detroit Free Press.

 U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday proposed “a more nuanced” way of evaluating schools under President Bush’s No Child Left Behind school reform law—one that would differentiate between schools that are close to meeting state math, reading and science standards and those that are “chronic, chronic underperformers.” Read more of this article from USA Today.

 President Bush urged lawmakers yesterday to renew No Child Left Behind, his landmark education initiative, but one of his biggest political liabilities in achieving that goal comes from an unlikely source: his former aides. Five years after they helped craft and implement the initiative, senior administration officials from Bush’s first term are speaking out against the law with increasing boldness. The shift, combined with mounting criticism from both the political right and left in Congress, is causing supporters of the law to worry that it might not win renewal this year. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

  Nearly two-thirds of American adults want Congress to re-write or outright abolish the landmark No Child Left Behind Act that mandates nationwide testing of elementary students to determine if public schools are performing adequately. Opposition is especially high among people most familiar with the law, according to a survey of 1,010 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University. Read more about the survey in this article from the Scripps Howard New Service website.

The adventures of boy wizard Harry Potter can stay in Gwinnett County school libraries, despite a mother’s objections, a judge ruled Tuesday. Laura Mallory, who argued the popular fiction series is an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft, said she still wants the best-selling books removed and may take her case to federal court. Read more about the decision in this article from The Washington Post.

Elementary school students have a stronger grasp of U.S. history, and what it means to be a knowledgeable citizen, than they did a few years ago, according to results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released last week. And part of the reason they’re better informed about history and citizenship, some argue, is that they’re better readers. Find details in this article from Education Week.

 A former adviser to the federal Reading First program will leave his current position at the U.S. Department of Education at the end of next month, the agency announced one week after a congressional report questioned whether he had gained financially in that previous job by promoting certain commercial products. Edward J. Kame’enui will resign as the commissioner of special education research at the Institute of Education Sciences, which is a division of the department, at the end of June, the IES said in a May 16 statement. Read more about Kame’enui’s resignation in this article from Education Week.

  Many of the 41 freshman Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives criticized the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind law while on the campaign trail as an unfunded federal mandate that forces schools to narrow their instruction so that students can pass standardized tests. But now, many of those members are seeking common ground with key Democratic architects of the NCLB law, most notably Rep. George Miller of California, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Read more about the politics involved in the NCLB renewal debate in this article from Education Week.

 Legislation was introduced before the U.S. House of Representatives today that would authorize a new 5-year grant program to help states and local education agencies establish literacy programs for students in grades 4–12. States and schools would use these funds to create school literacy teams, provide adolescent literacy training for teachers and school leaders, improve reading curriculum, and involve parents in adolescent literacy instruction. Introduced by Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth, the legislation is modeled after a Striving Readers pilot program that was conducted in eight school districts nationwide, including one in Yarmuth’s district.

For commentary, see joint statement of four leading education associations applauding and urging passage of this bill.

 Four officials who helped oversee a federal reading program for young students have pocketed significant sums of money from textbook publishers that profited from the $1 billion-a-year initiative, a Democratic congressional report disclosed yesterday. The report from the office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) offers fresh details on the extensive financial ties between publishers and officials who helped implement the Reading First program. Read more about the report in this article from The Washington Post.

 The chairman of the House education committee asked the White House yesterday to turn over all its communications about the scandal-tarred student loan program and also Reading First, the administration’s $1-billion-a-year reading initiative, which has been besieged by accusations of conflict of interest. The request by the lawmaker, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, carries his inquiries into education policy-making beyond the Education Department itself and into the Bush White House. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

Despite Rwanda's stated support of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative of Nicholas Negroponte, currently on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, some questions have been raised about the feasibility of the Rwanda project. The Rwandan government has said it will make sure each pupil in all primary schools owns Negroponte's invention, the XO laptop, within five years. But recent reports indicate XO laptops are not free. Each child will have to part with $100 for the laptop, according to a report in The New Times. Other potential problems include teachers' lack of training in computer technology, the short supply of electricity and some difficulty in operating the hand-cranked computer. Read more about the OLPC program at allAfrica.com.

 President Bush fought with the Democrats over war financing yesterday morning. But in the afternoon he came to Harlem to seek common cause with the rival party, on its home turf, on his signature education initiative, No Child Left Behind. Read more about the president’s trip to Harlem in this article from The New York Times.

 Members of the House Education & Labor Committee often appeared incredulous as they questioned administrators and educators involved in the Reading First program during a hearing Friday in Washington, DC. The representatives expressed disbelief, dismay and disgust at what George Miller, D-CA, the committee chair, called a “process that was cooked from the beginning.” Near the end of the five-hour hearing, Inspector General John P. Higgins, Jr. of the U.S. Department of Education, told committee members that his office had referred names of some people involved in the program to the U.S. Department of Justice for further investigation. He did not provide the names. Miller said his committee might join in the request, providing its own list. Read the Inspector General’s final report, and articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post. To see the complete list of committee members, click here.

 Faced with the possible loss of millions of dollars in federal aid, Northern Virginia school systems have acquiesced reluctantly to federal requirements for testing children with limited English skills. But the dispute between local educators and federal regulators could influence the rewriting of the No Child Left Behind law. Read more about this ongoing dispute in this article from The Washington Post.

 A slow-motion scandal surrounding Reading First has its first congressional hearing this week, but it remains to be seen whether the scrutiny will shed any new light on a complex, contradictory tale of textbooks, tests and allegations of federal arm-twisting. A key part of President Bush’s efforts to remake public education, Reading First was launched in 2002, giving schools $1 billion a year to improve reading in early elementary grades. Five years later, early evidence suggests that it may be helping. But investigators say a handful of advisers have railroaded schools into buying textbooks and other materials that they and associates developed. Read more of this article from USA Today.

 The next year and a half should bring a flood of data about the effects of the federal Reading First program, but most of those studies are not quite ready to be released, two scholars said recently at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives education committee announced a list of people who will testify at an April 20 hearing on allegations of mismanagement and conflicts of interest in the program. Read more of this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich equated bilingual education with “the language of living in a ghetto” and mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages. “The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto,” Gingrich said in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women. Read more of this article from the Associated Press on CNN.com.

 A billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program that ran into scathing criticism over conflicts of interest now has a new one: The government contractor that set up the Reading First program for the Education Department is also part of the team hired to evaluate it. Read more about what Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), chairman of the Senate education committee, calls “a classic case of the fox guarding the chicken coop” in this article from the Houston Chronicle.

The House Education and Labor Committee has been investigating the implementation of the Reading First program, according to U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the committee.

On Friday, April 20 at 9:00 a.m. the committee will convene an investigative hearing into mismanagement and conflicts of interest in the Reading First program.

“The Bush administration’s implementation of the Reading First program has been marred by mismanagement and conflicts of interest, and taxpayers deserve a full accounting of what went wrong and who was responsible,” Miller said in an advisory news release.

The hearing will be in the Education and Labor Committee Hearing Room, 2175 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC. Reading First was created in 2002 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act to improve reading instruction from kindergarten through third grade. The U.S. Department of Education provides formula grants to states with approved applications; states award sub-grants competitively within the state.  

 In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) urges reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. He writes, “We know the law has flaws, but we also know that with common-sense changes and adequate resources, we can improve it by building on what we’ve learned. We owe it to America’s children, parents and teachers to reinforce our commitment, not abandon it.” Read more of Senator Kennedy’s column in The Washington Post.

 U.S. Education Department officials and their contractors appear to have improperly backed certain types of instruction in administering a $1 billion–a–year reading program, congressional investigators found. The Government Accountability Office report supports assertions by the inspector general of the Education Department, who has released several reports in recent months about the Reading First program, a key part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law. Reading First offers intensive reading help for low-income and struggling schools. Read the article at The Houston Chronicle website. To see the entire report, click here.

  Legislation introduced by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Patty Murray (D-WA) will vastly expand the capacity of schools to help older students who struggle with reading, according to Alan Farstrup, IRA executive director. The Striving Readers Act of 2007, introduced today, authorizes $200 million for FY2007 for adolescent literacy programs directed at students in 4th through 12th grade. As Tim Shanahan, IRA’s president, points out, “Enhanced primary grade reading instruction is effective, but insufficient. The number of older students who struggle with reading—particularly boys and language minority youth—is troubling. This legislation sends a positive message that it is not too late for older students.” The bill is cosponsed by Senators Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Richard Burr (R-NC), Thad Cochran (R-MS), Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Pete Domenici (R-NM), John Kerry (D-MA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Trent Lott (R-MI). Read more details about IRA’s support of this bill.

 Virginia Sens. John W. Warner and James Webb have introduced legislation to protect schools from Bush administration threats to withhold millions of dollars in aid in a clash over federal testing rules. The bipartisan measure addresses a controversy that has swelled in Virginia and other states over testing requirements for students with limited English skills. Read about the proposal in this article from The Washington Post. In addition, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher voices his support for one of the Virginia school administrators caught in the middle of the dispute in this column.

U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey is to open her second school for poor South African youth March 16, this one an innovative, environment-friendly institution she hopes will be a model for public education in this country. The 12 million rand (US$1.6 million; euro1.2 million) Seven Fountains Primary School in Shayamoya, a remote town in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, was funded by Winfrey’s Angel Network, a public charity that supports organizations and projects focused on, among other issues, education and literacy. Read the article at The Star online.

 More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate—including the House’s second-ranking Republican—will introduce legislation today that could severely undercut President Bush’s signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates. Some Republicans said yesterday that a backlash against the law was inevitable. Many voters in affluent suburban and exurban districts—GOP strongholds—think their schools have been adversely affected by the law. Once-innovative public schools have increasingly become captive to federal testing mandates, jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning funds from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity, critics say. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

 Under attack for improprieties uncovered in its showcase literacy program for low-income children, the Department of Education will convene an outside advisory committee to oversee the program, known as Reading First, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Wednesday. Read more about the promises Secretary Spellings made to a Senate subcomittee considering appropriations for No Child Left Behind in this article from The New York Times.

  No Child Left Behind, the landmark federal education law, sets a lofty standard: that all students tested in reading and math will reach grade level by 2014. Even when the law was enacted five years ago, almost no one believed that standard was realistic. But now, as Congress begins to debate renewing the law, lawmakers and education officials are confronting the reality of the approaching deadline and the difficult political choice between sticking with the vision of universal proficiency or backing away from it. Read more of this article from MSNBC.com.

 By sticking to its teaching approach, the Madison, Wisconsin school system passed up $2 million under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade. Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program. Other reading experts, like Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, challenge the case for phonics. Read more about this ongoing controversy in this article from The New York Times.

 A federal contractor overseeing states’ implementation of the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program did not take appropriate steps to prevent conflict of interest among its staff members and subcontractors, and may have inappropriately guided at least two states toward adopting a specific reading assessment, a federal report concludes. Read more about the latest report from the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general in this article from Education Week.

Public school teachers in Hawai’i are putting in an average of 15.5 hours of work per day, much of it on tasks demanded by federal mandates, according to a first-of-its-kind study. More than half of that time is unpaid, according to the study by a joint committee made up of teachers’ union and state Department of Education members. Get details in The Honolulu Advertiser.

Senators Patty Murray and Jeff Sessions will introduce into the U.S. Senate next week the Striving Readers Act, aimed at creating nationwide reading programs in grades 4–12. The program would cost $200 million in its first year. Read more about the proposal in this article from the Montgomery Advertiser of Alabama.

 President Bush proposed $56 billion in Education Department funding, level with his proposal for the current fiscal year but 3 percent less than what Democrats are expected to approve for this year. He also sought about $1 billion in new spending related to the landmark No Child Left Behind law. Read more about the proposed education budget in this article from The Washington Post.

Afghanistan’s education minister has dismissed a Taliban plan to set up its own schools in six southern provinces as “political propaganda,” and claimed the militia would use them as a front for terrorist training. Mohammad Hanif Atmar told a news conference Monday, “Their aim is to shift terror centers from Pakistan to Afghanistan. We won’t allow it and the people will never accept these schools.” Abdul Hai Muthmahien, the purported chief Taliban spokesman, said the group will begin providing Islamic education to students in March, first to boys first and later to girls. The fundamentalist militia barred girls from class during its six-year rule. Read more at Pravda.

The two most prestigious awards for American children’s books went yesterday to Susan Patron, a relatively unknown author who was awarded this year’s Newbery Medal, and to David Wiesner, an illustrator who won the Caldecott Medal for the third time. Patron won for “The Higher Power of Lucky,” the story of a motherless 10-year-old in a tiny town in the California desert. Wiesner won for “Flotsam,” his wordless tale of a boy who finds an underwater camera at the beach and of the wonders that unfold when he develops the film it contains. Read more of this article from The Washington Post. Read about all of the literary award winners honored by the American Library Association.

Despite reports that teachers en masse are leaving Zimbabwe for jobs in neighboring countries, education officials say there is no shortage of teachers. More college graduates continue to seek teaching positions, an indicator the so-called exodus is manageable, they said. Some teachers, citing poor working conditions and low pay, left at the beginning of the year for countries such as South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Swaziland. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

All teachers in public and private schools in Kenya would have to be licensed, according to new draft legislation. To be licensed, one would have to hold a degree, diploma or certificate in education or an equivalent qualification accepted by the licensing authority. The new laws are contained in a draft bill on education and training under discussion by stakeholders at the Kenya Institute of Education in Nairobi. In line with the Children’s Act of 2001, the bill would make primary education compulsory. Anyone who denies a child the right to go to school could be fined or be jailed for 12 months. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

Violence is everywhere in Canada—on TV, in music and on the Internet—and children spend about 6 1/2 hours a day watching and listening to it. A new coalition of academics, teachers’ unions, police and parents says it’s clear youngsters are being exposed to way too much violence. The debate over whether aggressive behavior is caused by violence in the media continues, with some saying protections for children already exist. The coalition now is working with Ontario education officials, teachers and parent groups to develop programs that will help children better analyze media they are exposed to and the impact it has on them and those around them. Read more at The Toronto Star website.

 While President Bush and top education lawmakers agree on many of the principles in the No Child Left Behind Act, they may struggle to renew the law if they can’t compromise on how much to spend on it. Mr. Bush, his secretary of education, and the leaders of the education committees in Congress have reaffirmed that they stand firmly behind the law’s ambitious achievement goals and its testing and accountability rules. But congressional Democrats and the president are not seeing eye to eye on how much to spend on its array of K–12 programs—a divergence that could derail their attempts to reauthorize the law on schedule this year. Read more of this article from Education Week.

  In complying with the No Child Left Behind act, students in Virginia take the state Standards of Learning reading test. But for students with no or limited English skills, the state used an alternate English proficiency test to measure reading skills. Last year, the U.S. Department of Education said the alternate test was not linked to Virginia's learning standards, and its use was disallowed. Now, school districts there face a dilemma—do they give students with no or very limited English language skills a reading test in that language, knowing the students will fail because they cannot understand or read English? Or do they opt not to test the students? Read more of this article from the Daily Press in Newport News.

 The No Child Left Behind law was supposed to level the playing field, promising students an equal education no matter where they live or their background. From state to state, however, huge differences remain in what students are expected to know and learn. This has prompted some education advocates to propose standards of learning that are uniform nationwide. Read more of this article from the Associated Press on the CBS News website.

 As Congress prepares to debate renewal of the No Child Left Behind law, controversy has emerged over how to measure the progress of children learning English. The federal government objected last year to the way 18 states test limited-English students. Often, federal officials indicated, the state tests for such students were not demanding enough. They said that all students in a given state must be held to the same standards. School officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, are protesting that federal mandate and plan to propose a resolution that would authorize officials to refuse to give immigrant students tests that they think most would fail. Read more about this standoff in this article from The Washington Post.

 President Bush, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and many other officials noted the fifth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind act yesterday. The White House released the president’s comments on the anniversary, as well as an NCLB fact sheet. Secretary Spellings celebrated the anniversary with a speech before national education and business leaders at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Senator Reid issued a press release stating that NCLB has been underfunded and that its accountability measures have been too punitive. You can read coverage on the fifth anniversary of NCLB here from The New York Times and here from USA Today. The Salt Lake Tribune has an article on Michael Petrilli, a former U.S. Department of Education associate assistant deputy secretary, who has withdrawn his support of the law.

By participating in the New Teacher Project beginning last fall, the Thurston County school district, about 60 miles south of Seattle, Washington, hopes to retain 85 percent of this year’s 20 incoming instructors. Rochester is one of seven school districts, along with two educational service districts, to join in the New Teacher Project. Spearheaded by the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession (CSTP) with a four-year, US$3 million grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the program aims to draw attention to mentoring and other ways that Washington’s public schools can keep more of their beginning teachers. Read the article on The Seattle Times website.

U.S. public schools could have as much as $77 billion more a year to improve teaching if they reduced spending on seniority pay increases, teacher’s aides, class size limits and other measures often found in teacher union contracts, a report from the Washington-based think tank Education Sector contends. Teachers union officials sharply disputed the report’s findings. School administrators and school board representatives said that although they would like more flexibility in the use of funds, there was little evidence that cutting such provisions would raise achievement. Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

Where a child is raised in the United States can predict whether he or she has a chance for success in life, according to Quality Counts 2007, published by Education Week. The analysis by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center uses a “Chance-for-Success Index,” to track state efforts to connect education from preschool through postsecondary education and provides a perspective on the importance of education throughout a person’s lifetime. Virginia, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire rank at the top of the index, while Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, and New Mexico lag significantly behind the national average in descending order. To learn more, visit the Education Week website.

A new online community seeks to democratize the process of curriculum development, giving educators the ability to tailor instructional content to the needs of their students, wherever they are, free of charge. Dubbed the “Wikipedia of curriculum” by its creators, the online community known as Curriki—accessible at www.curriki.org—aims to provide a place online where educators from anywhere in the world can post curricula and lesson plans for review and use by fellow classroom teachers. Read more at eSN Today.

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world’s most prestigious universities will be available online for free to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won’t have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement aims to disperse knowledge to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn. Besides MIT, Tufts, and Johns Hopkins, the OCW consortium in the United States includes among its members Michigan State, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Utah State. Internationally, members include groups of universities in China, Japan, and Spain. Read more at the CBS News website.

Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by crime rates and by high dropout rates in high school, educators across New York and the nation are struggling to rethink middle school and how best to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change. The New York Times has begun a series of articles called “The Critical Years: Adolescent Experiments” that looks at changing theories of how middle school should be taught. Read the first in the series, “Trying to Find Solutions in Chaotic Middle Schools” at the newspaper's website.

During the year marking the 200th anniversary of Britain voting to end the slave trade, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said there could be no better commemoration than to abolish all child labor, and ensure that all young children go to school. In his opinion piece in The Guardian January 4, he calls on every government to give every child access to schooling. He says the cost would not be prohibitive — an extra US$10 billion a year by 2010. That’s about 2 pence (a little more than two cents) a day for each person in the richest nations, he said. Read his piece at The Guardian website.

Researchers have found that the one social factor consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income. Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education “keeps coming up.” And, health economists say, those factors that are popularly believed to be crucial — money and health insurance, for example, pale in comparison. What may make the biggest difference is keeping young people in school. A few extra years of school is associated with extra years of life and vastly improved health decades later, in old age. Read the article at The New York Times website.

Warning that Americans face a grave risk of losing their prosperity and high quality of life to better educated workers overseas, a panel of education, labor and other public policy experts has proposed a far-reaching redesign of the United States education system that would include having schools operated by independent contractors and giving states, rather than local districts, control over school financing. Read the article from The New York Times website.

An organization that monitors ethics in the federal government filed a lawsuit last week against the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for their failure to release documents related to the Reading First initiative. Read the article from the Education Week website.

 Reading First’s $1 billion-a-year investment in improving reading instruction seemed to be the kind of incentive that would push publishers to develop a new generation of products and approaches to match the research base the No Child Left Behind Act requires. But the money for instructional materials has not spread much beyond the handful of big publishing companies and name-brand programs that have dominated the market for years, according to industry reports and observers. Read more of this Education Week article.

 As owner of a small educational publishing venture in Savannah, GA, Cindy Cupp sells her reading kits to 80 of Georgia’s 1,267 elementary schools. She has also emerged as something of a giant-killer. With relentless sleuthing, she has become one of several whistle-blowers who uncovered evidence of conflicts of interest and favoritism in the Bush administration’s $6 billion Reading First program. Learn about her in The New York Times.

The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) has been forced to cut almost all non-emergency aid to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. The cuts come as aid workers struggle to cope with the emergency needs of almost 100,000 people displaced in recent fighting. Women’s literacy programs, where women received food in return for attending classes, are being hit hardest. Learn more at BBC News (UK).

Amid a political debate over illegal immigration that is reminiscent of the one in the United States, teachers’ collectives across France have been staging protests and helping shelter families facing deportation. One educator in the Education Without Borders Network, said teachers such as he find it “intolerable” that children they have taught for years could be “brutally ripped from their studies” and sent back to poor and sometimes dangerous countries. Get details in Education Week.

The growing use of high-stakes school testing, characterized as punitive by its opponents, is becoming a major campaign issue in at least three U.S. gubernatorial races. Find more information in The Washington Post.

In the wake of a report last month that found U.S. Department of Education officials had acted improperly in administering Reading First, Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa have asked the Bush administration to provide additional information about how the $1 billion-a-year program has been carried out. Rep. Miller also has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to launch a criminal inquiry based on findings in the report, issued by the Education Department’s inspector general. Find more information in this