New York Times -  Steve Lohr

“Kennith Tham, a high school sophomore in Arcadia, Calif., strive to improve his grades and scores on standardized tests.  Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-Internet headset while he sites at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen.  The tutor is in India.” (more)

SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle) -  Nanette Asimov

“The third-graders looked puzzled when asked what they liked best about science.  No answer.  OK, then, next question:  ”What is science?” a visitor asked the children in a hallway at Bessie Carmichael Elementary School in San Francisco.  ”Science is like art,” said Manual, 7, who let that cryptic response hang in the air as he ducked away.  He might have meant that both can open the heart to beauty.  Or maybe he was saying that science, like art, is something students don’t much of these days in elementary school.  If it were the latter, a new survey of 923 Bay Area elementary school teachers would agree.  About 80 percent of those teachers said they spent less than an hour each week teaching science, according to researchers from the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley and from WestEd, an education think tank based in San Francisco” (more)

“Outside the Box -  Juliann Talkington

“Children from the Panama City Renaissance School will be singing in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish at the Festival of Nations on Saturday, October 27 and Sunday October 28, 2007.  In addition, the school will host an educational booth at the festival.“ (more)

Outside the Box -  Juliann Talkington

“Stay up to date on the latest local, national and international education news and provide your views and comments.  http://www.pcrschool.org.news“ (more)

SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle) -  Mark Morford

“My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom.  He speaks not merely of the sad decline of overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy, slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and with reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations….It gets worse.  My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with functioning understanding of written English.  They do not know how to form a sentence.  They cannot write an intelligible paragraph.  Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually know how to use a ruler.“ (more)

New York Times -  Kevin Sack

ATLANTA, Oct. 19 – Spurred by the growing crisis in child obesity, the nation’s schools have made ‘considerable improvements’ in nutrition, finess and health over the last six years, according to a new government survey that found that more schools require physical education and few sell French fries.” (more)

New York Times -  Elissa Gootman

The Bloomberg administration and the New York City teachers’ union announced an agreement yesterday on a plan that would give teachers bonuses based largely on the overall tst scores of students at schools….” (more)

Economist -  Staff Writer

“CONVENTIONAL wisdom about eastern Europe is usually wrong. Few believed the communist ice-cap would melt so quickly in 1989. Today’s growth rates seemed unimaginable in the early 1990s. Surely nothing could now derail the great locomotive of economic growth?

Indeed something could: a lack of brainpower. So far, the region has benefited from the twin windfalls of low labour costs—a perverse gain from communist mismanagement—and fast economic integration with the rich half of the continent. Now the big challenge is not becoming more efficient in order to be cheaper, but innovating in order to be better. That depends chiefly on the quality and quantity of brainpower available.“ (more)

USA Today – Tracy Wong Briggs

“It’s 6 a.m. and All-USA Teacher Team members Benita Hackett Albert and Amber Larkin already are arriving at work.In Oak Ridge, Tenn., a town built on physics research, Albert usually pulls into the Oak Ridge High parking lot to find students waiting, Starbucks in hand. Albert, 62, opens her classroom for tutoring by 6 a.m., through both lunch periods and after school until 4 p.m. or later. Her willingness to explain college-level calculus as many times as it takes has made Albert a legend in this science town where she is in her 40th year of teaching“ (more)

Forbes -  Vivian Wai-yin Kwok

“This summer we exceeded 440,500 student enrollments in our language training and test preparation course, a 30% increase of the same period last year,” Yu said.  It expanded it number of locations, opening two schools and 17 learning centers, bringing its total numbers to 149 schools and learning centers, up from 115 a year ago.” (more)