In the News Blog

In Economic Downturn, Colleges Eye International Education: Cut Back or Forge Ahead?

Global: Over the past decade, talk of internationalization has peppered the speeches of presidents and provosts, graced strategic plans, and been incorporated into campus mission statements. But the economic downturn has forced some colleges to scale back once-ambitious plans or devise more cost-conscious ways to achieve their goals of globalizing teaching, learning, and research.

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Teaching the teachers lessons on culture

Massachusetts: To remedy concerns about what some say is a gap in city teachers’ knowledge of students’ culture, language, and customs, students and advocates from Sociedad Latina, a community-based youth organization in Roxbury, have launched a campaign to persuade city leaders to provide teachers with more comprehensive cultural training. They are surveying students at youth programs and festivals this month about their experiences in school as part of an effort to develop policy recommendations.

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Kindergartens see more Hispanic, Asian students

United States: The kindergarten class of 2010-11 is less white, less black, more Asian and much more Hispanic than in 2000, reflecting the nation's rapid racial and ethnic transformation. The profile of the 4 million children starting kindergarten reveals the startling changes the USA has undergone the past decade and offers a glimpse of its future. In this year's class, for example, about one out of four 5-year-olds will be Hispanic.

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Arizona, Tucson at Odds Over Ethnic Studies

Arizona: Arizona education department officials and administrators for the Tucson Unified School District are set to do battle over whether the school district should continue to offer its ethnic studies, particularly Mexican-American studies, in light of a new state law tightly restricting such classes.

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You Don’t Have to Take My Word For It #2: Value-Added and the LA Times

California: Much of the concern about value-added analysis of teachers, as exemplified by this weekend’s already infamous LA Times feature, comes from teachers and other advocates for urban schools that have been singled out under NCLB and Obama administration policies, with no regard for the increased difficulty of serving low-income, minority students.

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British High Commission provides English language training to Sri Lankan teachers in conflict-affected areas

Sri Lanka: The British High Commission in Colombo said that it has recently concluded a project aimed to improve the English language proficiency of teachers in the Northern and Eastern Provinces through direct training of local trainers who in turn will train other teachers in the two provinces.

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Curriculum Producers Work to Reflect New Standards

United States: It was a giant wave: Three-quarters of the states adopted a new set of common academic standards in the past six months. As that wave crests, education groups and publishers are preparing to follow with one of their own—curriculum materials that aim to embody the new standards.

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"We Are America" (Video)

New York: "We are America." That's what Children at the Resource Center for Refugees are saying as they ask themselves what makes us great. The kids are creating drawings to answer that very question, and the pictures will be on display in refugee centers across the country.

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Finally, charter schools step up on English language learners

Massachusetts: Charter schools in the state’s biggest cities have made notable gains in reducing the achievement gap between whites and African-Americans, but they have lagged in enrolling children from non-English speaking families. So it was reassuring that a list of proposed new charter schools includes five that aim to draw many of their students from immigrant families.

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WIDA Tally: Minnesota Joins Consortium

Minnesota: Minnesota has joined the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment Consortium, bringing the total of states adopting the consortium's English-language-proficiency test to 23 plus the District of Columbia. 

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Performance Is Not Necessarily Learning

United States: A report by the Institute of Education on more than 100 international studies found that obsessing on performance on standardized tests is counterproductive to learning about the subjects evaluated by these tests.

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Western Schools Sprout in South Korea

South Korea: On Jeju Island, South Korea is conducting a bold educational experiment, one intended to bolster opportunity at home and attract investment from abroad. By 2015, if all goes according to plan, 12 prestigious Western schools will have opened branch campuses in a government-financed, 940-acre Jeju Global Education City, a self-contained community within Seogwipo, where everyone — students, teachers, administrators, doctors, store clerks — will speak only English. The first school, North London Collegiate, broke ground for its campus this month.

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Colleges Extend Conditional Admissions to Pull In More International Students

Global: Standing in the way of a Saudi Arabian student's dream was the reality that his English skills weren't strong enough to allow him to keep pace in an American college classroom. But he was able to win admission to Plymouth State University, in New Hampshire—with the stipulation that he raise his language proficiency before starting classes. Already, Mr. Alanazi, who has a scholarship from the Saudi government, has moved from a beginner to an intermediate level of English-language instruction and hopes to begin studying for a business degree next year.

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Saakashvili on the “Education Revolution”

Georgia: Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili spoke about the “education revolution” in Georgia late on Sunday. Speaking at a meeting in Batumi with the native English speaking teachers of the programme Teach and Learn with Georgia, Saakashvili named teaching English language to “every school child” in Georgia as a main priority in the education system. 

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Signing, Singing, Speaking: How Language Evolved

Global: These words you are reading are really just a collection of arbitrary symbols. Yet, after some decoding by your brain, these symbols convey meaning. That's because humans have evolved a brain with an extraordinary knack for language. Researcher David Armstrong says he thinks gestures involving the hands may well have been the earliest form of complex human communication.

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