corporacioneducativacec.com

Archive for August, 2011

Cord Jefferson at Good Magazine points to research that shows that first-and second-generation black immigrants make up 41 percent of all black students at Ivy League universities, even though they constitute less than 1 percent of the U.S. population.

Jefferson writes that Ivy League schools brag about their diversity while “admitting hugely disproportionate numbers of wealthy immigrants and their children rather than black students with deep roots—and troubled histories—in the United States.” Check out the story here.

WHITMAN, Mass. – Parents may be ready to send their kids back to school, but some schools aren’t ready to take them back.

Power failures, flooding, road closures and other problems left by Irene have led some superintendents in New England and elsewhere in the East to delay the start of school.

Parents have had to scramble to find child care for kids who were supposed to be in school but now will be hanging around the house longer than expected.

“I hired baby sitters for the summer, but they’re done now,” said Tara Coleran, of Whitman, Mass., who has been busy searching for someone to watch her three boys this week because their first day of school, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been delayed until Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.

Coleran, a bookkeeper for a nonprofit, said she expects to miss up to three days of work because she can’t find a babysitter.

“I know people in the area who I could ask, but everybody has no power, so it’s difficult,” she said.

The school year is also expected to start late in other districts including some in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island and Vermont.

An extra day or week of summer vacation may be fun for kids, but the calendar reshuffling has caused problems for school administrators who must now reset schedules so students can make up the missed days either during the school year or at the end.

School officials in the Massachusetts communities of Whitman, Hanson, Marlborough, East Bridgewater and Springfield were among those who decided to put off the start of school for one to three days because schools, homes or both were still without power Tuesday. School officials also said they were not comfortable opening and allowing children to walk to schools while utility crews are still removing downed power lines.

“In a nutshell, it’s just the lack of power and making sure we keep everybody safe and have everything ready for students when they come back,” said Marlborough Superintendent Anthony Pope, who decided to push back the start date for the city’s 4,700 students from Wednesday until next Tuesday.

“I have three kids of my own and I know how it is getting kids ready for the beginning of the school year, so we want to make sure that parents have that opportunity to get their children off to a good start,” he said.

The school year has been postponed in some districts in Vermont, a landlocked state that was perhaps the hardest hit by Irene, then a tropical storm, with many roads washed out and entire communities cut off from the outside world.

In Rhode Island, more than a dozen public school districts have put off the first day of school. More than 30 daycare centers and pre-schools remained closed Tuesday because of power outages.

“We’ve had no damage to the schools but there are just too many unsafe conditions out there,” said Robert McIntyre, superintendent of schools in Barrington, R.I. “I just want to give the cleanup crews more time to get out there and I didn’t want to put buses on the road.”

McIntyre said three schools were still without power Tuesday. School had been scheduled to begin Monday, but the start has been delayed more than a week, until Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.

Jenna Young, 7, of Kingstown, R.I., was supposed to start second grade on Tuesday. Now, she’s not going back to school until next week.

She and her family had a picnic and enjoyed an extra day of summer at Viscoli Park in Providence on Tuesday.

“If they say it’s fit for the kids to be there, you just have to trust them,” said Young’s father, De Kim.

In Maryland, friends Brandy Mosby, 26, and Heather Comer, 25, hopped on the subway and headed to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on Tuesday on the second day of canceled schools for their children. The moms and four children grabbed a dinner and then did some sightseeing along the waterfront.

Mosby, who stays at home, has two daughters, ages 10 months and 9 years old. Comer, a hairdresser, has two boys, ages 5 and 9.

Mosby thought the schools should have to get generators to make sure students weren’t kept out of school in situations like this.

Two school districts in southern Maryland were the only ones in the state that would still be closed on Wednesday due to flooding.

In Connecticut, 42 of the state’s 166 school districts had been slated to start the new year Monday, followed by dozens more on Tuesday.

Mark Linabury, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, said school officials were still tallying the number of districts that delayed their start dates to Wednesday and later. He said the school districts were grappling with power outages, flooding, road closures and disruption to bus routes — all caused by the remnants of Hurricane Irene.

“It’s such an uncertain situation right now in many districts based on all of the circumstances,” said Linabury.

Parents of younger children also were affected by the aftermath of the storm as daycare centers were forced to close because they had no electricity.

Megan Karavish, 36, of South Glastonbury, Conn., said she had to use a vacation day Monday to care for her 2-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter because their daycare was closed. She expected to shell out more than $ 100 for the babysitter she felt lucky enough to find Tuesday.

“The whole situation is very stressful, and quite frankly the extra costs this is bringing on is really adding to the stress,” said Karavish, a tax software sales representative.

“The fact that there’s no answer about how many more days it’ll last is really what’s the worst part. There’s just no way to plan ahead.”

Colleges were not spared, either.

The storm delayed student move-ins and early classes on a number of campuses, though by Tuesday most appeared to be up and running. Two State University of New York campuses were still without power Tuesday, spokesman Morgan Hook said. Several were dealing with flooding.

The University of Vermont escaped serious damage, though some colleges farther south in the state were partly cut off by road flooding. Water covered playing fields and poured into an athletics building at Castleton State, rising to 56 inches in the football team’s locker room and leaving pads strewn about the mud when the water receded.

One big challenge was that flooding at a state office building left public college campuses around Vermont with only intermittent Internet access. Students at numerous schools struggled to reach campus, while the schools offered assurances professors would understand if they missed early classes.

Marlboro College — a small private college in south-central Vermont — was still evaluating whether to start classes Thursday, and changed to a rolling course registration process to accommodate students who couldn’t arrive in time.

Many school districts with planned openings after Labor Day are expecting to open on time, even though some are still struggling with power outages.

In Richmond, Va., six schools were still without electricity Tuesday, but since classes don’t start until next week, they were still expected to open as scheduled, said schools spokeswoman Felicia Cosby.

In Boston, some schools had tree limbs to clear off their grounds after the storm, but none had prolonged power outages. Schools are expected to open Sept. 8 as scheduled, said school spokesman Matt Wilder.

“We will be ready to go,” he said.

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Laura Crimaldi in Providence, R.I., Stephanie Reitz in Hartford, Conn., Sarah Brumfield in Baltimore, Md., and AP Education Writer Justin Pope.

ORMOND BEACH, Fla. – Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, government screening has made it harder for foreign students to enroll in civilian flight schools as a handful of the hijackers did, banking on America being inviting and a place to learn quickly.

But the most rigorous checks don’t apply to all students and instructors, so schools and trainers have to be especially alert to weed out would-be terrorists.

“Prior to 9/11, I wouldn’t have had the phone number and name of my local FBI agent posted on my wall. I do,” said Patrick Murphy, director of training at Sunrise Aviation in Ormond Beach, Fla., near Daytona Beach.

Hundreds of U.S. flight schools fiercely compete for students. In Florida, some still pitch the good weather as a way for students to fly more often and finish programs faster. The 9/11 hijackers sought out U.S. schools partly because they were seen as requiring shorter training periods.

Florida schools have reason to be careful: Three of the 9/11 hijackers were simulating flights in large jets within six months of arriving for training in Venice, Fla., along the Gulf Coast. Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the hijackings, and Marwan al Shehhi enrolled in an accelerated pilot program at Huffman Aviation, while Ziad Jarrah entered a private pilot program nearby.

The terrorists obtained licenses and certifications despite rowdy behavior and poor performance at times.

The U.S. commission that investigated the attacks said in its report that Atta and Shehhi quickly took solo flights and passed a private pilot airman test. The two later enrolled at another school, where an instructor said the two were rude and aggressive, and sometimes even fought to take over the controls during training flights. They failed an instruments rating exam. Undeterred, they returned to Huffman. Meanwhile, Jarrah received a single-engine private pilot certificate.

Hani Hanjour obtained his private pilot license after about three months of training in Arizona. Several more months of training yielded a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator. An instructor found his work substandard and advised him to quit, but he continued and finished the training just 5 1/2 months before the attacks, the commission said.

Today, it would be tougher for the four men to enter U.S. flight schools.

There is a stricter visa process for foreign students seeking flight training in the U.S. They cannot start until the Transportation Security Administration, created after Sept. 11 to protect U.S. air travel, runs a fingerprint-based criminal background check with the FBI’s help and runs their names against terrorist watch lists. TSA inspectors visit FAA-certified flight schools at least once a year to make sure students have proper documentation verifying their identities and haven’t overstayed their visas.

Plus, TSA shares intelligence with other agencies and has other layers of security to catch people before they can do harm even if they slipped through the cracks and were able to get flight training in the U.S.

The stepped-up measures involving flight schools are not foolproof or uniform, however.

There are numerous flight instructors with access to planes and simulators who don’t all get an annual TSA visit, and are subject only to random TSA inspections if they train only U.S. citizens. The TSA has access to a database of all student pilots that is maintained by the FAA. But TSA said it only runs the names of U.S.-citizen students against watch lists, and not necessarily before those students can start their programs.

TSA said the fingerprinting and criminal background checks done on foreign students before they can enter U.S. flight schools are not done on U.S. citizens. TransPac Aviation Academy in Phoenix tells domestic applicants they need proof of citizenship, a high school diploma or college transcripts, a medical card, a driver’s license and any pilot licenses already held. Other schools do the same, said Tom Lippincott, TransPac’s vice president of business development.

And one security measure never employed by the government, despite interest from the 9/11 commission, was requiring that transponders that help officials locate commercial planes can’t be turned off as the hijackers did. The FAA said if there is an electrical fire or malfunction, pilots must be able to turn off the transponder for safety reasons.

The shortcomings have led schools to self-police.

Andre Maye, vice president of administration at Phoenix East Aviation in Daytona Beach, pays attention to red flags including inconsistencies in addresses applicants provide and discrepancies on financial statements. He monitors the size of wire transfers from students when they pay for their tuition, which can total $ 46,000 or more, and looks for consistency in the transactions.

James Coyne, president of the National Air Transportation Association, a trade group for aviation service businesses including flight training companies, said the industry is open to more rigorous and uniform vetting of students.

The safeguards in place haven’t deterred foreign students from flocking to the U.S. — Sunrise Aviation’s Murphy said the majority of students are international at many flight schools, including his.

They come because the training industry is more developed and efficient than programs at home. Also, pilot hiring in the U.S. is stagnant, while growth in Asia has fueled a need for pilots there. Students often come to the U.S. with their own money or financing.

Akshai Stephen, 27, of New Delhi, has been at Sunrise about five months. He said the month it took him to go through the approval process and start training didn’t discourage him.

“What I thought was, just tell the truth, `I want to fly. I want to fly,’” he said. “If you are truthful and have good intentions, you have nothing to worry about.”

Of the 41 recommendations in the 9/11 commission’s report, none specifically addressed flight schools. Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor who chaired the commission, told The Associated Press the feeling at the time was that the federal government already was working to close that loophole.

Huffman Aviation, where Atta and Shehhi trained, closed after the attacks. Owner Rudi Dekkers said in a recent interview that considering what he knew 10 years ago, there is nothing he could have seen that would have alerted him to what his students were planning.

And despite the enhanced government screening today, he isn’t convinced the same thing couldn’t happen at another school.

“You have someone who doesn’t behave, you think that makes them a terrorist?” Dekkers asked. “Then half the country is a terrorist.”

___

Follow Harry R. Weber at http://www.facebook.com/HarryRWeberAP

ALBANY, N.Y. – New York’s comptroller has spiked a $ 27 million contract with one of media giant Rupert Murdoch’s companies because of the phone hacking scandal in Great Britain.

The Daily News reports ( http://nydn.us/rl95Rp) that Thomas DiNapoli (dee-NAP’-oh-lee) rejected last week a state Education Department contract with Wireless Generation, a News Corp. affiliate.

Wireless Generation was to get $ 27 million of the state’s $ 700 million in federal Race to the Top money to develop software that would track test scores.

News Corp.’s British tabloid News of the World was shut down last month amid the phone hacking and police bribery scandal. Besides the scandal, DiNapoli’s office also said there was an incomplete record about the company’s qualifications.

Jonathan Burman, an education department spokesman, tells the Daily News that DiNapoli bowed to pressure from teachers’ unions.

(Thinkstock)

Is taking a college course over the Internet just as good as attending an in-person seminar? The nation’s college presidents think so.

Slightly more than half of 1,055 presidents of public and private colleges said that an online-only course has the same educational value as an in-person class, according to the Pew Research Center and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Only 29 percent of the general public agreed, including fewer than 40 percent of students who have taken online courses.

College administrators have turned to online courses as a cost-saving measure, as a way to offer popular courses to the most students possible, and in order to accommodate part-time or distance students (many of whom earn their degrees entirely online). Half of college presidents said a majority of their students will be taking online courses within 10 years.

But the availability of online courses varies widely by the type of college. Only 60 percent of four-year private colleges offer online courses, compared to 89 percent of four-year public schools. Private college presidents are also more skeptical of their value, with only 36 percent saying they are as good as in-person courses, compared to 50 percent of public college presidents who think so. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the presidents of two-year colleges say an online course is just as good as an in-person one.

Forty six percent of people who graduated college in the last 10 years said they have taken an online course, according to the survey.

But only 39 percent of students who have taken courses over the Internet said that the course’s educational value was equal to that of an in-person class, suggesting that students have experienced online education are in disagreement with college presidents on the matter.

A meta-analysis by the Department of Education of 50 studies of online courses showed that they can be “modestly” more effective than in-person classes. Courses that combined virtual elements with in-person instruction were more effective than either online-only or classroom-only classes. But providing that combination erases the cost savings of an entirely virtual class, making it less attractive to schools.

ALBANY, N.Y. – New York’s comptroller has spiked a $ 27 million contract with one of media giant Rupert Murdoch’s companies because of the phone hacking scandal in Great Britain.

The Daily News reports ( http://nydn.us/rl95Rp) that Thomas DiNapoli (dee-NAP’-oh-lee) rejected last week a state Education Department contract with Wireless Generation, a News Corp. affiliate.

Wireless Generation was to get $ 27 million of the state’s $ 700 million in federal Race to the Top money to develop software that would track test scores.

News Corp.’s British tabloid News of the World was shut down last month amid the phone hacking and police bribery scandal. Besides the scandal, DiNapoli’s office also said there was an incomplete record about the company’s qualifications.

Jonathan Burman, an education department spokesman, tells the Daily News that DiNapoli bowed to pressure from teachers’ unions.

___

Information from: Daily News, http://www.nydailynews.com

SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Weeks after Indiana began the nation’s broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.

It’s a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools. Opponents say the practice violates the separation of church and state.

In at least one district, public school principals have been pleading with parents not to move their children.

“The bottom line from our perspective is, when you cut through all the chaff, nobody can deny that public money is going to be taken from public schools, and they’re going to end up in private, mostly religious schools,” said Nate Schnellenberger, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association.

Under a law signed in May by Gov. Mitch Daniels, more than 3,200 Indiana students are receiving vouchers to attend private schools. That number is expected to climb significantly in the next two years as awareness of the program increases and limits on the number of applicants are lifted.

The vouchers are government-issued certificates that can be applied to private tuition, essentially allowing parents to channel some of the tax dollars they would normally pay to public schools to other institutions.

Until Indiana started its program, most voucher systems were limited to poor students, those in failing schools or those with special needs. But Indiana’s is significantly larger, offering money to students from middle-class homes and solid school districts.

Nearly 70 percent of the vouchers approved statewide are for students opting to attend Catholic schools, according to figures provided to The Associated Press by the five dioceses in Indiana. The majority are in the urban areas of Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend and Gary, where many public schools have long struggled.

John Elcesser, executive director of the Indiana Non-Public Education Association, said it’s not surprising that Catholic schools are receiving so many of the vouchers, even though they make up fewer than half of the 415 schools in the group.

Most Catholic schools already had state accreditation, which some private schools lack. And they are more established and have more space available, he said.

John West, an attorney for a group suing to stop the Indiana program, said during a hearing on the issue that only six of the 240 private schools that have signed up for the voucher program are secular.

Our Lady of Hungary Catholic School in South Bend is among those institutions reaping the benefits of the vouchers. Just two years ago, it was threatened with closure by the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend. At the time, the bishop said several other schools were at risk of closing, too.

Now enrollment at Our Lady of Hungary has jumped nearly 60 percent over last year, largely because of an influx of voucher students. The halls are bustling more than they have in years.

“This has exceeded all crazy expectations,” Principal Melissa Jay said.

At its height in 1953, the school had 702 students. But that number had fallen to 135 last year. It now has 213 students.

The enrollment boom has forced the school to hire three more teachers. It’s also allowed all but the seventh and eighth grades to be separated into single classes. In years past, the school has combined grade levels because of low enrollment.

Other states that have introduced voucher programs also have seen booms in parochial school enrollment.

In Ohio, where children from low-performing public schools can use vouchers to attend private schools, about 70 percent of students receiving vouchers have used them to attend Catholic schools, said Chad Aldis, executive director of School Choice Ohio.

That demand comes at a price to public schools, which say the voucher program siphons off money they need.

The South Bend district expects to lose $ 1.3 million in funding if all the students who have signed up for vouchers leave.

Interim Superintendent Carole Schmidt instructed principals to contact parents of students who are leaving to find out why and make a last pitch for them to stay.

Rita Baxter of South Bend said she won’t be dissuaded from sending her 14-year-old daughter to the private Marian High School in Mishawaka.

The Baxters’ 16-year-old son attends a public high school in South Bend, and his parents are pleased with his education. But they think Marian is a better fit for their daughter.

Baxter and her husband planned to pay their daughter’s tuition to Marian on their own until he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer two years ago. His illness devastated their finances and made it impossible for him to continue working as a vice president for the Silver Hawks minor league baseball team. He is still recovering and can’t work full time.

At first, they assumed Sara would have to forget about Marian. Then they heard about the voucher program.

“We’re hoping that my husband makes a full recovery and goes back to work, and we can go back to just being normal and let somebody else have the voucher,” Baxter said.

___

Tom Coyne can be reached at http://twitter.com/TomCoyneAP

ATLANTA – Atlanta public school officials appeared on Friday before a county grand jury investigating alleged cheating by teachers and principals on standardized tests and turned over 95 volumes of subpoenaed documents, officials said.

The documents were on DVDs, CDs and cassettes, Atlanta Public Schools spokesman Keith Bromery said in a statement.

The school system asked for a three-week extension to deliver other documents subpoenaed by the Fulton County grand jury, Bromery said.

The district needs more time to put the documents in a digital format, he said.

“The district is awaiting a response to this request, although the Fulton County District Attorney indicated that he will support the request for an extension,” Bromery said.

A state report issued last month identified 178 teachers and principals accused of cheating in state standardized testing in 2009 as a way to inflate student scores.

Prosecutors in three Atlanta-area counties are weighing whether to file criminal charges.

About 130 of the 178 educators named in the state report are still employed by the school system, the others having resigned or retired, Bromery said.

Termination proceedings against the remaining 130 educators have been delayed until after prosecutors decide whether to press criminal charges, Bromery added.

(Reporting by David Beasley; Editing by Jerry Norton)

LOS ANGELES – Prosecutors say a Los Angeles school police officer made up a story about being shot by a car burglary suspect to look like a hero.

In opening statements Friday, prosecutors said 31-year-old Jeff Stenroos accidentally shot himself while patrolling a high school, but lied about it, saying he’d been shot while wearing a bulletproof vest.

Stenroos is facing a non-jury trial on charges of preparing a false police report, planting false evidence and other counts stemming from his Jan. 19 report. Some 9,000 students were held in their schools for hours while hundreds of police officers searched for a gunman.

Defense attorneys declined to offer an opening statement.

Stenroos could be sentenced to more than five years in prison if convicted.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]AP – A Roman Catholic high school dropped plans for a Ramadan dinner after hearing complaints about its partnership with a Muslim advocacy group that federal officials have linked to a terror financing case.