Hawaii starts ‘Furlough Fridays’
By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 2 Comments
The state’s public schools are now on a four-days-a-week schedule
School’s out for Fridays. Hawaii’s 256 public schools have switched to a four-day school week as part of statewide cost cuts. Hawaii now has the shortest academic calender in the country, with only 163 school days each year. Parents and politicians are protesting against the new “Furlough Fridays” program. “We are about to rob 17 days from our children’s school year,” lamented Democratic representative Neil Abercrombie. “Days they will never get back.”
The policy has left parents scrambling to find adequate supervision for their liberated little ones—and local news agencies fearing the worst. The Honolulu Advertiser predicted that students would “wind up at grandma’s house or . . . simply be unsupervised at Hawaii’s beaches and malls.” But in the face of a projected $1-billion state deficit, schools superintendent Patricia Hamanoto insists there is no choice: “During this difficult economic period the department is utilizing the resources it has.” Continue…
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A co-ed school in Saudi Arabia
By Michael Barclay - Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 0 Comments
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Forget an A, here’s $20
By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 7 Comments
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Reading, writing, and radicalism?
By Jen Cutts - Thursday, May 28, 2009 - 0 Comments
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Shocking news: Canada does something important well
By Paul Wells - Friday, April 24, 2009 at 3:14 PM - 52 Comments
From a McKinsey & Company study designed mostly to demonstrate that the U.S. school system is letting the American people, and the American economy, down, let us snatch a few charts that allow us to compare Canada’s education performance against the world’s.
McKinsey’s source is the OECD’s Pisa study, a large international survey of 15-year-olds’ performance on standard math, science and reading tests. Pisa’s handy: you get large samples, lots of buy-in, a time series that results from administering the tests repeatedly, and other good stuff. And here’s what it shows about how Canadian 15-year-olds do compared to their peers in dozens of other countries.
1. Canadian students perform near the top of the world.
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Dumbed down
By Lianne George - Friday, November 7, 2008 - 58 Comments
