The Success in the Middle Act
Nmsa.org
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) was joined by Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) in introducing the Senate version of "Success in the Middle" S. 2227, a bill that would authorize grants to states and school districts to improve low-performing middle schools. Senator Obama will be urging other Senators to join him. A companion bill HR 3406 was introduced in the House by Representative Grijalva (D-AZ) and currently has 15 cosponsors. Representative Grijalva will offer "Success in the Middle" as an amendment when NCLB is marked up by the House Education and Workforce Committee. Senator Obama will work to get the bill included in the Senate HELP Committee's NCLB proposal, which will be reviewed by the end of this year.

Universal Design’ Concept Pushed for Education
Christina A. Samuels, Education Week
he same design principles that brought Braille panels to public elevators and curb cuts to city sidewalks should be imported to the classroom and used to transform lessons and textbooks, says a coalition of education groups.

Before-and-after help yields results
Rosalind Rossi and Art Golab, The Chicago Sun Times
As the closing bell rings at Evanston’s Willard Elementary, the desk of 9-year-old Marcello Africano is a rat’s nest of jumbled books and loose, crumpled papers. In swoops Margaret Rothe for her daily rescue — part of a tailor-made support plan for the Willard fourth-grader. Rothe, a school social worker, quickly sorts Marcello’s mess into a neat stack and helps pack his bookbag with everything he’ll need for his homework.

Training Law Students for Real-Life Careers
Jonathan D. Glater, The New York Times
Forget all the jokes about what should be done with the lawyers. What should be done with the law students? That question is being tackled — seriously — at a variety of law schools around the country as they undertake a broad series of changes to their curriculums. The changes range from requiring new courses for first-year students to expanding clinical programs to adding electives in the later years to encouraging law students to take courses in other graduate-level programs at their universities.

Classroom of the Future Is Virtually Anywhere
Joseph Berger, The New York Times
The university classroom of the future is in Janet Duck’s dining room on East Chocolate Avenue here. There is no blackboard and no lectern, and, most glaringly, no students. Dr. Duck teaches her classes in Pennsylvania State University’s master’s program in business administration by sitting for several hours each day in jeans and shag-lined slippers at her dining table, which in soccer mom fashion is cluttered with crayon sketches by her 6-year-old Elijah and shoulder pads for her 9-year-old Olivia’s Halloween costume.

Closing the College Achievement Gap
Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed
The inexorable rush to rankings glory, which tends to reward colleges and universities the more academically selective and wealthy they become, has not been good for low-income and minority students. By now the statistics are pretty well known: About half of Americans from low-income backgrounds go on to attend college, compared to about two-thirds of middle income Americans and 80 percent of those with large incomes. Barely two in five black and Hispanic freshmen earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of entering college, compared to about 60 percent of white freshmen and 64 percent of Asian Americans. And white Americans are twice as likely as black Americans and three times as likely as Hispanic Americans to have earned a bachelor’s degree by the age of 29.

Student Aid Is Up, but College Costs Have Risen Faster, Surveys Find
Libby Sander, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Aid to college students has increased by 82 percent over the past decade but still falls short of covering the average price of a college education, as the cost of attending the nation's public universities has continued to outpace inflation, family income, and sources of grant aid, according to two new surveys from the College Board.

Spain's church-state battle goes to class
Tracy Wilkinson, The LA Times
The new course introduced in Spanish schoolrooms this fall seemed innocuous enough: civic lessons on the meaning of the constitution and the rights that every citizen of Spain can expect. But the curriculum has become the latest battleground in a raging war between Spain's leftist government and the still-powerful Roman Catholic Church.

'Learn as you earn' at your desk
Melissa Jackson, BBC News
Imagine a world where education came to you without you having to leave the office or factory where you work.

School's closure in Japan exposes tough times for foreign teachers
Christopher Johnson, The Christian Science Monitor
Twenty years ago, native English speakers in Japan used to joke that they could make $100 an hour as an ESL teacher because they speak "a" language. These days, teachers feel as if the joke is on them. Some 4,000 foreign teachers are without jobs and are owed $4,000 in back pay after Japan's largest school chain, Nova Corp., closed its 900 schools last week, declared bankruptcy, and failed to pay refunds to its 400,000 students.

Homeschooled students a growing force in Canadian PSE
Janice Tibetts, Vancouver Province
 It is estimated that there are 60,000 to 80,000 home-schooled students in Canada -- about 1% of the student population.  With higher numbers and impressive applications, some colleges and universities are setting up processes to admit home-schooled applicants -- even those without transcripts. 10 years ago, home-schooled students were told they needed to do a makeup year at a formal secondary school; some still do so, to improve their chances of admission.

Young adults in debt peril, study suggests
Rita Trichur, The Toronto Star
A second study in as many weeks is sounding alarm bells about Canadians racking up "troubling" amounts of debt, mostly because of reckless spending and irresponsible use of credit cards.

University of Manitoba Announces first Creative Writing and Oral Culture Centre in Canada
University of Manitoba Press Release
Dr. Emőke J. E. Szathmáry, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manitoba, is pleased to announce the creation of a unique centre in the Faculty of Arts dedicated to creative writing and oral culture. The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture (CCWOC) will be the first institute of its kind in Canada when it opens in early 2008 following renovations. The CCWOC will be home to scholars, students and visiting artists who wish to collaborate, create new works of verbal art, and study the relationships between oral and written culture.

Canadian university endowment funds skyrocket
Pauline Tam , CanWest News Service
The value of Canadian university endowment funds has reached an all-time high, surpassing $10 billion, according to a new survey. The latest figures from the Canadian Association of University Business Officers show the country's ivory tower has come of age as a fundraising and investing force, generating average annual assets worth $1 billion.

Fast degrees to solve crisis
Guy Healy, The Australian
Universities are shortening undergraduate degrees, splitting degrees between campuses and workplaces and bringing in short masters conversion courses to get students into skill-starved industries faster.

First five years shapes kids' future
Justin Farrari, The Australian
BY the age of four, most children can name five colours and identify numbers, shapes and an average of eight letters of the alphabet, a study of about 10,000 children has shown.

ECS Launches One-of-a-kind, Nationwide High School Databases to Boost Efforts by State Policymakers

The Education Commission of the States (ECS) launched three high school databases to assist state policymakers with questions about International Baccalaureate, student accountability, and student support and remediation. ECS also launches an updated database on promising local reform initiatives at the state and district level from around the country.

"These databases address emerging or peaking issues for state policymakers," ECS High School Policy Center Project Manager Jennifer Dounay said. "For instance, many states are concerned with dropout prevention and how to help young people drop back into the system after they've dropped out. The student support and remediation database helps policymakers assess what work is being done across the states to tackle this issue, along with a host of related topics."

To go to the databases' website, click here.

The Educational Policy Institute is an international non-profit think tank dedicated to the study of educational opportunity. The Week in Review is a weekly publication that highlights the top news stories, reports and statistics related to academic preparation and access and success in the US, Canada, and beyond. The publication also features a commentary written by either President Watson Scott Swail, EdD or Vice-President Alex Usher.

To submit comments, news releases, or submissions, please email Dr. Watson Scott Swail at wswail@educationalpolicy.org or call (757) 430-2200.