We have another example of homeschooling outperforming public schooling.
The National Geographic Champion for 2005 is Nathan Cornelius from Minnesota.
The homeschooled 13-year-old from Cottonwood, in the southwestern part of the state, edged out Rhode Island's Karan Takhar, a 14-year-old eighth grader at the Gordon School in East Providence, in a tense competition today at the National Geographic Society's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Story here.
If you want to score high on the SAT"s essay question, simply write lots of words and make up some facts.
Dr. [Les] Perelman [of MIT] studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing "anchor" samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.
He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. "I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," he said. "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time." The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.
It gets better.
Dr. Perelman contacted the College Board and was surprised to learn that on the new SAT essay, students are not penalized for incorrect facts. The official guide for scorers explains: "Writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays. For example, a writer may state 'The American Revolution began in 1842' or ' "Anna Karenina," a play by the French author Joseph Conrad, was a very upbeat literary work.' " (Actually, that's 1775; a novel by the Russian Leo Tolstoy; and poor Anna hurls herself under a train.) No matter. "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts."
There you have it. I suspect this procedure is institutionalizing the existing norms for many high school students. I have graded hundreds of undergraduate essays and I often find them to be wordy and consist of half-truths. I assume they learned that this is an acceptable strategy in high school. Read the story here.
In a stinging rebuke of President Bush's signature education law, the Republican-dominated Utah Legislature on Tuesday passed a bill that orders state officials to ignore provisions of the federal law that conflict with Utah's education goals or that require state financing. The bill is the most explicit legislative challenge to the federal law by a state, and its passage marked the collapse of a 15-month lobbying effort against it by the Bush administration.
Why the resistance?
Several lawmakers said in the debates on Tuesday that they admired Mr. Bush, but they described the 1,000-page federal education law that he signed in January 2002 as an unconstitutional expansion of the federal role in education.
Did I read that correctly? A state objects to an unconstitutional expansion of federal power? It's about time especially regarding education. The public education system is turning into a disaster and federal intervention is not the answer. These federal programs have the potential to make matters worse as teachers learn ways to game the system in order to protect their jobs at the expense of the children (see here and here). Allowing competition between schools better addresses the problems as it increases the ability of the parents to put there kids in better schools. That is, let the consumer decide on the best products rather than some federal agency. Here is the whole story.
What do you do when a university decides to cancel a doctoral program? Move it to another university.
The announcement came as a shock to Matthew Nesbitt, a student in the doctoral program in audiology at Seton Hall University. He and his classmates would be the last to graduate from the program because, the university said, it had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on it since its inception in 1999.
But rather than watch the program die, the audiology students and faculty members contacted Montclair State University, 13 miles away, with an unusual request: to take over the struggling program.
Montclair State readily agreed, and now, pending approval of the necessary state financing, it appears that the 17 students in the audiology program who started at Seton Hall will wind up graduating with a degree from Montclair State.
Here is the whole story.
I do not think so. Neither does Claudia Goldin. She
hailed Summers's leadership while conceding he needed to work on his style. She said the real dispute was over his drive to centralize power and budgeting which had upset some faculty and administrators.
"This is best compared to some period in English history where there is a weak king and strong feudal lords, and all of a sudden a strong king comes in and the feudal lords aren't too happy," she said.
Here is the story.
