Real innovation should be focus of charter schools
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 | | Tony Habit, NCNSP president |
With the historic political shift in the North Carolina General Assembly, conversation has turned to not "if" the cap on charter schools will be lifted but how and with what consequences. The North Carolina New Schools Project was established to spark sustainable innovation in the public schools, and the evidence continues to grow that our partner schools are delivering the goods - more students graduate and more students succeed in courses that prepare them for college. But weren't charters schools intended to spark that kind of innovation when the legislature opened the door to their development with a law passed in 1996? Read more....
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Nation's Report Card: Needs improvement in science
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 The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress provided fresh evidence this week that students are graduating with weak mastery of science.
Only one in five seniors scored at least proficient on the 2009 NAEP in science, a lower proportion than students in fourth and eighth grades. Four in 10 seniors were below the "basic" level on the national assessment.
"That means that a double-digit percentage of our students are just going nowhere," NAEP board member Alan Friedman told Education Week. "They're uncomfortable with science, they don't understand it, and they probably don't like it."
Read more from Education Week ...
Read more from the NAEP report ...
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Study finds that college students lag in critical skills
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Critiques of high school often focus on the fact that many students graduate without strong ability in such key skills as critical thinking, writing and problem solving. Now, a study published this month finds college students falter in those areas as well.
Forty-five percent of students who were included in the study made no significant gains in those "higher-order" thinking skills during their first two years of college, according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.
That finding drew this response from one educator in a New York Times online debate prompted by the study:
"High school graduates .... come to college entirely unaccustomed to close reading, habits of disciplined analysis, skills in writing reasoned arguments and a basic grasp of the conduct, methods and purposes of science," said Leon Botstein, president of Bard College.
Read more ...
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Nearly 60 percent of NCNSP schools promoted at least 95 percent of their 9th graders in 2010, compared to about 25 percent of other NC schools.
