Morning Announcements: December 14, 2010

Yesterday, President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a bill that provides more money to districts for school lunches and improves nutritional standards for food provided in schools. According to Education Week, the bill will provide the first noninflationary increase for school lunches in more than 30 years, adding 6 cents per meal to district food-service budgets. The legislation will make it easier for more students to qualify for free lunches. 

Education Week also reports on ‘data mining’, the emerging discipline, concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational settings, and using those methods to better understand students, and the settings in which they learn.

Report Round-Up: Friday, October 15, 2010

Finishing the First Lap: The Cost of First Year Student Attrition in America’s Four Year Colleges and Universities from the American Institutes for Research. Nationally, only about 60 percent of students graduate from four-year colleges and universities within six years. This analysis AIR vice president Mark Schneider finds that more than $9 billion was spent by state and federal governments to support students at four-year colleges and universities who left school before their sophomore year during a five-year period. 

White Paper: Next Generation Learning from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This white paper outlines how technology can help students and educators dramatically improve student outcomes, both in high schools and in postsecondary education.

Cutting to the Bone: How the Economic Crisis Affects Schools from the Center for Public Education.  According to this report, although the recession technically ended last year, budgets for LEAs nationwide will likely not reach pre-recession levels until late in the decade.

Morning Announcements: October 4, 2010

Reaching out to big business, President Barack Obama is set to announce a new program that links top companies with community colleges in hopes of ramping up America's job skills, the Associated Press report.

Michael Levine, the Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Conney Center, reviews Waiting for Superman in The Huffington Post. And you can read another review of the documentary in the Dallas South News.

In South Dakota, the state Education Department is collaborating with teachers, school administrators and others to take a new approach to improving academic achievement and graduation rates among American Indian students, who as a group lag behind the state’s non-Indian students, according to the Rapid City Journal.

In Georgia, state education officials are reviving a debate about whether to toss the current graduation test and instead require students to pass end-of-course tests in each subject as they go through their high school years, according to The Augusta Chronicle.

The State reports that South Carolina has flipped the switch on the first phase of a new student information system that officials say takes a quantum leap in technology that can track students' progress and find ways to improve instruction.

The Phi Delta Kappan asks, “Incompetent Teachers or Dysfunctional Systems"?

Morning Announcements: September 23, 2010

The New Times in Connecticut takes a look at the Latino Scholarship Fund which provides role models of successful Latinos and financial and emotional support to those who want to pursue an education beyond high school.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, school funds don't match teacher layoffs and districts that didn't take hits are looking for ways to spend federal job money.

California’s $34 million student database system is a year behind schedule, the Sacramento Bee reports. “Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has threatened to pull the plug if the new system can't reliably relay data by the end of the year. The failed California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System is cited as a key reason why the state has twice failed to qualify for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Race to the Top funds.”

The Black Voice News writes about the high school dropout crises and opens up their story with a 15-year old named Tevon who thinks “School ain’t for me. I’ve been failing since I was in the sixth grade.”

Morning Announcements: August 12, 2010

In order to prevent high school dropouts, Michigan has develops a new database that tracks high school performance indicators such as attendance, behavior and class work.

States are considering how they will spend their part of the $26 billion job saving measure that President Obama signed into law yesterday. See what is happening in: Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, North Dakota,

According to Getting Past Go, a national initiative to help states increase the college success of students who are placed in remedial education, only about one in four Georgia students who take remedial classes earn an associates degree in three years or a bachelor's degree within six years.

Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, visited Oklahoma for two days to share lessons learned in turning around Florida’s education system.