See The first college on the American continent founded by the Pilgrims only 16 years after landing in America 372 years ago!!!
Australia
Murdoch : “schools a moral scandal”-"Rupert Murdoch has used his fourth Boyer Lecture to slam Australian schooling. No punches pulled here. "Our public education systems are a disgrace" was almost his opening sentence. And the reason is clear : "despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less."....A residual affection for the land of his birth is probably the main driving force of his critique. His country is going down the gurgler. It is a realistic assessment of the situation we are in. India and China especially are poised to wipe us out. Finland irks. Singapore and Korea also graduate students who both know more and think better than Aussie grads....
New Jersey
School-funding soap opera: NJ Supreme Court continues to dictate despite astronomical costs-"
Whatever your feeling on the latest round of judicial intervention in New Jersey’s urban public-school-funding soap opera, one thing is clear: The state Supreme Court intends to continue its override of the Legislature’s decisions on school funding . . .
To wit, Newark Superintendent Clifford Janey recently revealed that 96 percent of Newark graduates who went to Essex County College needed re mediation, and only 20 percent ever received an associate’s degree. Certainly, $20,482 per student (more if we include teacher pension costs) should buy more for our students . . .
The second is that they [the state Supreme Court] continue to fuel the class war around Abbott funding while undermining the Legislature’s ability to manage the growth of the most expensive sector of government-public education, where roughly two-thirds of all state aid is distributed. Bar none, it is — via construction costs in ex cess of $90,000 per student, average teacher salaries of almost $60,000 increasing at near twice the rate of inflation, and stunning pension and health-care commitments — the cost-driver in the state. To the extent this expense is not managed as revenues decrease, the situation becomes all the more dire . . ."
UK
Times writer blastsscouts condom plan-"News that the Scout Association is jumping on the sex education bandwagon has been slammed by a columnist writing in the Times.
Ross Clark asks: “Can there be a youth left in Britain who doesn’t know how to roll on a condom, or that having sex without contraception is liable to result in babies?
“Such is the prevalence of sex education in schools that it seems to me that any British teenager, unless educated at home and a member of some obscure religious sect, already has sufficient knowledge by the age of 14 to lead a UN birth control programme in a small African nation.”
Yet in spite of millions being poured into sex education schemes, Mr Clark writes that the pregnancy rate among under-16s “has hardly shifted at all, and nor has the overall number of pregnancies. Britain retains, after the US, the second-highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the developed world."
School Choice
School Choice: The Good News-"It might be said that trying to reform the public schools is more difficult than trying to move a cemetery. In other words, almost impossible.
Exhibit A is school vouchers, to fund students rather than institutions. This is common in higher education and, for basic education, it was first proposed by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Thus the idea is older than the beginnings of the nation's public school system with the passage of Pennsylvania's Common School Act in 1834, and even older than the United States, which began with the adoption of the Constitution in 1787.
Further, the idea has long been a reality in this nation in states such as Vermont and Maine, not to mention other nations, such as Sweden which has a universal voucher program for all students."-Interesting article on school choice!!!
