Check out the latest education-related news from around the web -- then be sure to sign the Mom Congress petition to fix No Child Left Behind.

‘Race to the Top' grant rules laid out (Chicago Tribune, 11/13/09)

Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued rules for a $4 billion grant program to promote innovation in education, allaying fears from some education groups that it would be too focused on testing.

'Staggering’ Crisis in U.S. Education Found in Study (Bloomberg, 11/9/09)

More than two-thirds of U.S. teachers disapprove of how their public schools are run and 90 percent say “routine duties and paperwork” interfere with their teaching, a report found.

Gates Foundation gives $335M for teacher quality (Associated Press, 11/19/09)

Three school districts and a coalition of charter schools have agreed to be test kitchens for some radical ideas for improving teacher quality. In exchange, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $290 million in grants to the four groups, plus another $45 million for education research aimed at uncovering what exactly is an effective teacher.

Schools in the dark about tainted lunches (USA Today, 11/17/09)

Following an outbreak of over 100 illnesses at five area schools in Racine, WI – believed to have been caused by flour tortillas from Chicago's Del Rey Tortilleria – parents and school officials are wondering why the FDA never alerted them to company’s long history of making children sick.  See the U.S. agriculture chief’s response and pledge to issue better food alerts to schools on USAToday.com.

One NJ school district considering fee for detention (Philadelphia Inquirer, 11/19/09)

School board members in one New Jersey town want parents of high school students who are habitually sent to detention to pay, saying the district spends $10,000 per year in overtime and maintenance to run after-school detention.

Check out the latest education-related news from around the web -- then be sure to sign the Mom Congress petition to fix No Child Left Behind.

“Race to the Top” education grant propels reforms (USA Today, 11/4/09)
States that want their share of the $4.35 billion federal grant must commit to closing historic achievement gaps and getting more kids into college – and while the first batch of money isn't scheduled to go out until January, state legislatures are scrambling to rewrite laws governing these systems.

A year after election, Obama focuses on schools (Boston Globe, 11/4/09)
President Obama is using the anniversary of his election to call for "a national mission" to improve public education and build it into a pillar of the new economy.

Rachael Ray's sizzling taco strategy to have students eat healthier (New York Daily News, 10/24/09)
This week, 1,200 public schools across New York City will serve up Ray's "sizzling soft tacos" as part of a plan to get kids to eat healthier meals.

Teacher Training Termed Mediocre (New York Times, 10/22/09)
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has implored universities to change the way they prepare teachers to run classrooms, saying a “revolutionary change” was needed to train as many as one million new teachers in five years.

School chooses Kindle; are libraries for the history 'books'? (USA Today, 10/27/09)
A Boston-area boarding school replaces most of the library's books with a brand-new, fully digital collection.

It's official: Baby Einstein DVDs are not magic brain expanders, as many parents were led to believe.

Read No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund (New York Times)  

From the article:

"Last year, lawyers threatened a class-action lawsuit for unfair and deceptive practices unless Disney agreed to refund the full purchase price to all who bought the videos since 2004. “The Walt Disney Company’s entire Baby Einstein marketing regime is based on express and implied claims that their videos are educational and beneficial for early childhood development,” a letter from the lawyers said, calling those claims “false because research shows that television viewing is potentially harmful for very young children.”

The letter cited estimates from The Washington Post and Business Week that Baby Einstein controlled 90 percent of the baby media market, and sold $200 million worth of products annually.

The letter also described studies showing that television exposure at ages 1 through 3 is associated with attention problems at age 7."

Disney, who owns the Baby Einstein brand, announced that they would allow an exchange or a refund of their products. (Visit Baby Einstein.com for the detailed instructions.)

So -- who has Baby Einstein DVDs at home? Did you watch them often, and did you think they were educational? What do you think of the charges of "unfair and deceptive practices" against Disney?

 

This week, President Obama floated the idea of year-round school.

So far, the national conversation has been -- you guessed it -- divided.

Supporters say that shorter vacations (2-3 weeks off, several times a year) will keep their kids from losing ground over the summer. That schools have the potential to be more than just classrooms, but can be community centers. That eventually, the standard of U.S. education will rise, and that this can only make us stronger, economically.

Those against it say that summer vacation is more than just a perk; it's much-needed down-time for families to spend time together. It also fuels the travel and tourism industry for a quarter of every year, and businesses large and small would suffer from the missing business.

What do you think? Would you want your children to go to school year-round? Why or why not?

And if anyone has gone to year-round school, or if your child is on this schedule, what's the scoop? We want to know the pros and cons!

 

In sixth grade I was known as the girl with the frizzy hair. I was not cool or popular, but to this day, I've attributed my general kindness to strangers to my days of being teased in middle school. Yes, it may have stunk when I was going through it, but I came out a better, tougher person, right?

Maybe not.

Last week my awkward middle school memories came flooding back when I read a new Swedish study claiming that kids who are unpopular in middle school are more likely to have health issues later in life.

"The kids no one wants to work with in sixth grade may be at a health disadvantage as adults," according to the study.

How in the world, do you ask, did they come to this theory? In 1953, researchers asked a group of sixth graders to name the three classmates they liked working with the most. The kids were then ranked by popularity based on how many times a child was named by their classmates. The classification researchers used went like this:

"Favorite" kids = at least 7 nominations

"Popular" kids = 4 to 6 nominations

"Accepted" kids = 2 to 3 nominations

"Peripheral" kids = 1 nomination

"Marginalized" kids = no nominations

Decades later, researchers checked back in on the now-50-year-old subjects and here is what they found: the "marginalized" sixth graders were about twice as likely as those who were "favorites" to have been hospitalized for conditions like mental health disorders, alcohol abuse, accidents, and nutritional disorders.

The study doesn't show why the unpopular kids were more likely to be hospitalized, nor does it attempt to explain why the "marginalized" kids were unpopular in the first place -- frizzy hair, maybe. But either way, the results left me pondering what you would think.

Take a look at your own life: were you popular in middle school and healthy now? Or were you on the uncool side and feel unhealthy? Do you worry about your own middle schooler being unpopular in fear that it may lead to health issues as an adult? Or are you too disgusted by children being labeled "marginalized" and "peripheral" to think clearly on the subject? Because that's OK, too.