Mercury News – Cupertino students could add electronic “tracking devices” to the list of items they carry in their backpacks this fall. The Cupertino Public Safety Commission wants to test a new program that uses a tracking device to count how many students walk and bike to school in the notoriously congested tri-school area near Bubb and McClellan roads. The commission is working on the logistics of bringing the Boltage program to Lincoln Elementary and Kennedy Middle schools this fall. The goal is to get more cars off the road. The Boltage system uses a machine called the Zap, a solar-powered radio frequency identification reader. Students who walk and bike in the program get an RFID tag that attaches to their backpack, and the Zap reads their unique number when they go past it at the school. Read Article
Sydney Morning Herald – An Afghani woman whose schools for girls were forced “underground” during the height of the Taliban government has spoken of the positive signs emerging in her troubled country. Sakena Yacoobi founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) in 1995, a non-governmental organisation that provides education, health and medical services. Dr Yacoobi says she believes “education is the key infrastructure that Afghanistan needs” although the security situation continues to get in the way of delivering it.
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Alaska Star – A new partnership between the Anchorage School District and the U.S. Army Alaska will add a military presence to local schools. But rather than keeping the peace, these warriors will be serving as math or reading tutors, helping out in the computer lab or maybe firing a few dodge balls. Read Article
The Guardian – When the order came to evacuate the Totia high school, hundreds of girls ran from their desks clutching handkerchiefs and their headscarves over their mouths. School bags were abandoned as some leapt out of the ground floor windows of their dilapidated two-storey school block rather than trying to push their way through a melee of teenage girls all rushing to get out to fresh air. Teachers tried to organise an orderly departure but their efforts were in vain amid rising panic that the school had become the latest in Afghanistan to be hit by an apparent poison gas attack. Read article
Daily Telegraph – Vice-chancellors have been warned that funding may be slashed by 35 per cent over the next five years, it has emerged. The warning – delivered in a series of meetings between Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, and university bosses – would represent the biggest cut in resources since the 1930s, it is claimed. It would be equivalent to the current £5,441 annual Government subsidy for each student being reduced to just £3,537. Read article
The Independent – Teenagers across the country celebrated record GCSE grades today as national results showed that around one in 10 are now sitting English and maths exams early. The GCSE pass rate has risen for the 23rd year in a row, and almost one in four entries was awarded at least an A grade. The results also show that girls are pulling further ahead of boys, and that while more pupils are choosing to take science GCSEs there has been a massive slump in the numbers taking foreign languages. Read article
BBC – Private firms are lining up with parent groups to run the Conservatives’ flagship “free schools” in England. These are the new schools that Education Secretary Michael Gove wants parent or teacher groups to set up and run with public funds. Some education firms are already working with groups on their applications to set up the new schools. Others are seeking to get into the market by teaming up with education charities. The charities themselves are also joining up with parents and teachers to try to establish new schools. Read article
Telegraph – An American university has been forced to halt a plan to DNA test new students and give them the results following a backlash by public health officials, genetic watchdogs and privacy groups. Under the University of California, Berkeley programme called “Bring Your Genes to Cal” around 5,500 people had been sent testing kits for them to submit saliva swabs. Read Article
ScienceDaily — There isn’t a lot of research that links early childhood test scores to earnings as an adult. But new research reveals a surprising finding: Students who learn more in kindergarten earn more as adults. They are also more successful overall. Read Article
NY Times – Women’s precarious rights in Afghanistan have begun seeping away. Girls’ schools are closing; working women are threatened; advocates are attacked; and terrified families are increasingly confining their daughters to home. For women, instability, as much as the Taliban themselves, is the enemy. Women are casualties of the fighting, not only in the already conservative and embattled Pashtun south and east, but also in districts in the north and center of the country where other armed groups have sprung up. Read article
Telegraph – Schools are being turned into “prisons” as children are subjected to increasingly sophisticated surveillance and security measures, according to a report. Researchers found the widespread use of CCTV, ID cards, electronic registration systems, fob-controlled gates and fingerprint technology as schools attempt to crackdown on troublemakers. Read Article
New Scientist – FIFTEEN years ago when, as a doctor, I treated people in Rwanda, we relied on presumptive diagnosis – anyone with a fever was treated for malaria. A great deal of progress has been made since then on the complex issues of diagnosing malaria, drug resistance and access to care. Nonetheless, in this raw and vivid account, Sonia Shah gives an alarmingly accurate picture of how basic practices like presumptive diagnosis still endure. In too many countries malaria is viewed with little more seriousness than the common cold, not as a public health crisis that kills close to a million people each year. Read article
Daily Mail – Syria has banned face-covering Islamic veils from the country’s universities. The surprise move comes as similar moves in Europe – including controversial calls in Britain for a ban on burkas – have sparked cries of discrimination against Muslims. The crackdown was ordered by the secular government in Damascus amid fears of increasing Islamic extremism among young Muslim students. Syria is not a Muslim country. An official at the ministry says the ban affects public and private universities and aims to protect the country’s secular identity. Read article
Telegraph – The squeeze on graduate jobs caused by the recession left almost 25,000 students across the country out of a job after finishing their courses last year. New statistics showed that more than 25 per cent of graduates from London Metropolitan University and London South Bank University were not in full time education or employment six months after leaving university. Read Article
Newsweek – To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result)….there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. Read article
Telegraph – Researchers found the widespread use of CCTV, ID cards, electronic registration systems, fob-controlled gates and fingerprint technology as schools attempt to crackdown on troublemakers. Staff at one comprehensive patrolled corridors and playgrounds with radios to make sure children behaved at lunchtimes, while teachers at a private school used technology to spy on children’s computer and internet use. Researchers suggested that the sheer scale of surveillance was fuelling paranoia among many pupils. Read Article
Nature – Suzanne Cory became the first elected female president of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) on 7 May. Hers is the latest in a string of recent appointments that have seen women installed in top Australian scientific posts, including that of the chief scientist for Australia and the head of CSIRO, the nation’s largest research network. “I hope my appointment is one more thing that will encourage women to stay in science. …around the world there is still the same problem: not enough women are staying in science for their full careers. I’d like to encourage more women to hang in there for the long haul.” Read article
Telegraph – Top universities are struggling to select the best students because of exam “grade inflation”, according to research. More than half of institutions found it increasingly hard to pick out top candidates because A-level results have been artificially boosted by re-sits and “teaching to the test”, it was claimed. All admissions tutors at institutions belonging to the elite Russell Group said sixth-form exams were no longer a completely accurate indicator of students’ ability. Read Article
Guardian – Complacency and “general hopelessness” have been blamed for the failure of young British men as research reveals that underperformance in school and university is now creeping into their working lives. A report published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank says male graduates are far more likely to be unemployed than their female counterparts. Read Article
Kansas City.com – Five years ago, Sprint erected an 85-foot cell phone tower in the middle of California’s Vista Del Monte Elementary school. At the time, Sprint studied the tower’s structural safety and an initial power reading, but since then teachers and students have become increasingly concerned about the tower’s electromagnetic effect on health. The Vista Del Monte tower is 20 feet from classroom buildings and next to the playground and lunch tables. Read article
NY Times — There was in the city an old garden, and in that garden there were trees, and under the trees there were women. And there were no scarves on the heads of the women who sat under the trees in the old Kabul Women’s Garden. That was all something remarkable once upon a time, as it is even now. Read article
Daily Mail – Children as young as five should be taught about sex, the Government’s controversial health watchdog said last night. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence – whose main role is to ration NHS drugs – is to write to every primary school telling it to start sex education when pupils are five. It will tell teachers that children should not be taught to say no to sex – but should learn about the value of ‘mutually rewarding sexual relationships’. Read Article
The Times – SCHOOLS are inflating their league table scores by entering pupils for “easier” vocational qualifications, previously secret government data have shown. For the first time, the figures show separately the proportion of children gaining good grades at GCSEs and those gaining the grades in less academic alternatives. Until now, official league tables have combined the two, obscuring the difference between schools that are more or less academic. Read article
Wall St Journal – The cognitive effects are measurable: We’re turning into shallow thinkers… The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best 2,000 years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” Today, the Internet grants us easy access to unprecedented amounts of information. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers. Read Article
Wall St Journal – Amid the silly videos and spam are the roots of a new reading and writing culture, says Clay Shirky. Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. …these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse. Read Article
