Education
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Two New Libraries for Boise in 2007
More libraries for Boise was one of Mayor Dave Bieter's agenda items, and the city council voted unanimously Tuesday night to approve the expansion of Library services. The move means the citizens of Boise will have more opportunities to use Library services than ever before in the city’s history.
(Perhaps we should say Library! since that's what the sign on the Capitol Boulevard library building says.)
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You are an obsession, you're my obsession
Buttars’ Gay-Straight Alliance Obsession ContinuesSen. Chris Buttars isn’t happy with watered-down “school-club” legislation that just passed through the House. The bill, which was created by Rep. Aaron Tilton and the Senate Health and Human Services Committee isn’t tough enough for Buttars and he plans to remedy that by restoring the bill to its original form according to the Deseret Morning News. [more]
Same ol' Same ol'
Utah Legislature Haggles over Vouchers and AbortionOh boy! The Utah Legislature has been hard at work this week coming up with old ways to waste taxpayer money. First, the private-school voucher bill, which would give Utah parents the option of using taxpayer cash to send their children to private school, is likely to pass; and secondly, the House Health and Human Services Committee tossed in an unexpected bill asking the legislature to ban abortions in Utah –at any cost. [more]
EDUCATION ECONOMICS
States Wait on Rural School FundingAs logging on federal lands diminishes in the West, many states are wondering what is going to fund the mechanism that helps their counties pay for rural schools. For decades, rural counties received payments from the federal government in lieu of taxes those counties couldn’t collect on federal land within their borders. Those payments primarily came from timber and other revenue-producing resources on those federal lands, but as logging continues to decline, the counties’ share of revenue also grows smaller.
Legislative fixes are in place to make up that difference, including the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, also known as the Craig-Wyden bill, after its sponsors, Republican Sen. Larry Craig from Idaho and Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. This bill creates a stable payment structure for county road and school districts, and according to the Associated Press, paid out $385 million for schools and roads to rural counties last year. But it expires this year.
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Wyoming Media Grok
Down To The BuzzerSo what do you do, when the front-page lead article of the state-wide newspaper is about your spouse, best friend and life-long partner, but doesn't mention her name?
If you're me, you call New West's managing editor, Courtney Lowery, whose sage advice is to either ignore it, or be 100 percent transparent.
So here goes:
My wife, Sharon Farquhar, is the gymnastics coach for the Natrona County and Kelly Walsh High Schools gymnastics teams. The Curriculum and Instruction Committee (CIC) of the Natrona County School District has recommended that the gymnastics AND the alpine skiing teams be dropped after this season, which would result in those two sports being dropped statewide.
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Who gets punished for the education planners' "mistakes"?
Bozeman Braces for Another School Bond VoteHere we go again. Cantankerous Bozeman seems poised to leap into another battle as mail ballots go out this week for a bond issue to supplement funds already voted to build a new Chief Joseph Middle School.
Or maybe not. When you listen to the explanations of the need and look at the designs, it seems a slam dunk. If we don’t approve this bond issue, education for our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders will take a giant step backward and Bozeman will no longer lead the state of Montana in educational standards and accomplishments.
But here’s what’s likely to set the talk radio crowd to jabbering: we just passed a $55 million bond issue in 2005. That was to renovate the high school, buy land for a future second high school, and buy land and build a new middle school (the current Chief Joseph Middle School.) Now the schools are coming back to the well because of mistakes made in that earlier bond issue. And some folks are grumbling about punishing someone for those mistakes.
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Opportunities/Challenges Abound
Energy Money A Concern To UW & LegislatureThe nexus of energy money, higher education and the state's coffers dominate Wyoming news today.
Conservationists have cautioned University of Wyoming leaders about the potential strings that energy companies might attach to donations or research grants for the new School of Energy Resources, just as donations hit the $12 million mark.
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NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND TURNS 5
As President Touts Education Law, Another Federal Official Say’s It’s FlawedTo celebrate his landmark education law’s fifth anniversary, President Bush gathered a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers to discuss renewal of the No Child Left Behind law. After the White House meeting, Bush said there was strong interest in making some changes to the law but denied any interest in weakening it.
The New York Times reports that Democratic leaders in Congress have vowed to overhaul the law to make it less punitive for under-performing schools and to increase funding for impoverished schools singled out by poor scores on the law’s mandated tests.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who did not attend the meeting at the White House, said he wants states to have more flexibility in how they meet the federal standards.
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, who now chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he’s in favor of states adopting a uniform academic standard that would help prepare students for the rigors of college and or workforce demands. Kennedy is also championing the expansion of social programs for low-income students and for the federal government to assume a role in school construction and renovation.
Just as President Bush was urgng lawmakers to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law, a former Education official who helped promote the law during the past five years, said the legislation was fundamentally flawed from the get-go and said the legislation should be dumped.
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QUALITY COUNTS 2007
Annual Education Report Tracks Students from Cradle to AdulthoodEducation Weekly’s Annual Quality Counts report historically tracks states’ efforts in key areas of education. This year, the report takes a much more sweeping look at those key policies and analyzes how they connect with other socio-economic factors within the states, such as early childhood education, teacher preparation, postsecondary education, and economic and workforce development.
This year the report looks at how well states’ policies ease the transition from early childhood to elementary education and from high school to secondary school and into the workforce.
On Thursday, an Associated Press article in the Santa Fe New Mexican painted a pretty dismal picture of New Mexico’s ability to prepare its children for life after formal education.
The state ranked 47th in the nation for academic performance of its students and 39th in its ability in to align education systems to carry students from preschool to the workforce.
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They Really, Really Like Us
Forbes: Boulder is ‘America’s Smartest City’Cross-posted from Osman Parvaz's Boulder Real Estate blog.
From Forbes:
"Boulder, Colo. may seem like a surprising winner, but it’s no ordinary university town. The University of Colorado’s students and staff account for about 38,000 of the city population of 282,200. Boulder, though, is also sticky enough to keep many of its own graduates around--and attract others."
The magazine provides some numbers that prove this:
-- Percentage with a bachelor’s degree or higher: 52.9
-- Percentage of population 25 and older whose highest educational attainment is a bachelor’s degree: 31.55
-- Percentage whose highest degree is a master’s degree: 14.20
-- Percentage whose highest degree is a professional degree, such as a degree from law or medical school: 3.13
-- Percentage whose highest degree is a Ph.D.: 4.01
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