Parents are making their voices heard regarding the amount of homework their children are bringing home each day. Many school officials are starting to listen. How much is too much? A Duke University psychology professor says students should have 10 minutes of homework each evening for each grade they are in school. So a fifth grader would have 50 minutes of homework a night. As [...]
The American Student Association of Community Colleges (ASACC) seeks to enhance student leadership by helping student governments at member schools address issues that affect students. Founded in 1984 by nine community colleges in the Great Lakes area, ASACC has been steadily growing and making a tangible impact on education legislation. On its website, ASACC credits itself with the passing of Section 127 of [...]
An extremely popular topic among the education community at present concerns new developments in technology and their implementation in American classrooms. Most media coverage on such topics cites computerized textbooks, electronic homework platforms and instructional video games as the teaching methods of the future. To this end, many public schools are beginning to embrace these new methods as their sole educational tools, even [...]
President Barack Obama is proposing a multibillion-dollar investment in the nation's community colleges, a $12 billion effort over ten years to help the two-year institutions reach, teach, and train more people for "the jobs of the future." Some of the money could be available by the 2010 budget year that begins Oct. 1. Half a billion, or $500 million, would go toward online education [...]
For over 50 years, Advanced Placement (AP) testing has been a way for students to earn college credit while still in high school. The tests have been geared mainly toward the memorization of facts, and with thousands of pages of content that is all fair game on the exam, teachers rarely have time to cover any one topic in depth for fear that [...]
We’ve all had a class where we ask ourselves, “Why did this person become a teacher?” And as much as we’d like to believe every educator is another Jaime Escalante, the fact of the matter is that most aren’t. So what does it take to be a great educator? Are teaching skills innate, or can they be learned? Alas, the age-old question of [...]
A new trend in school leadership is emerging. School districts are beginning to hire nontraditional candidates--from leaders at non-profit organizations to top corporate executives to former government officials--to be their new superintendents. States such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania are taking measures to create a process whereby nontraditional candidates may be hired as school administrators. So what began this interest in choosing those [...]
The number of students taking Advanced Placement exams has been rising from year to year. In 2010, just under two million students took over three million AP exams, up about 10% from 2009. The College Board, which sponsors the AP exam, offers thirty-four courses that, if a student scores high enough on the exam, can transfer over to college credit. Fifty-eight percent of [...]
Back in tenth grade US history class, I was indoctrinated into the wonder of National History Day. This event was a celebration of world and American history, designed to encourage students to pursue what might not be taught in the textbooks. The two main components of this contest were a research paper and some sort of visual project. Prior to this exercise, I [...]
In 2009, legislatures in New York and California, among other states, enacted laws that limit, to one degree or another, the use of student achievement data in teacher performance evaluations. New York's legislature prohibited the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was publicly opposed to these laws, saying, "Believe it or not, several states, including [...]