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NetHappenings Headlines

<Karen>



"Stalled in Secondary: : A Look at Achievement Since the No Child Left
Behind Act"
<http://www2.edtrust.org/edtrust/press+room/stalled+in+secondary>
  A new report student released by the Education Trust, "Stalled in Secondary:
A Look at Achievement Since the No Child Left Behind Act", says that
achievement in reading and math lags in the middle- and high-school grades, and
too many states are not making progress closing achievement gaps. While some
states are making good progress, the overall story demonstrates the need to
move faster on reforms. The Education Trust analysis of student achievement on
state assessments finds that while elementary schools are making modest gains,
alarming trends persist at the secondary level.
Read the summary and find a link to the full report at:



Amid Armstrong Scandal and Bush Push for NCLB in High Schools,
http://www.NCLBgrassroots.org
Finds Growing Evidence of Failure of   Scheme
http://www.mysan.de/international/article25733.html
NCLB is not  working in communities
across America and only one Web site
continues to zero in exclusively on documenting the failure of the Bush
education
reform campaign. The four-month-old Web site now contains more than 1,200 news
stories from nearly every corner of the U.S. and is reaching an ever-widening
audience of parents, grandparents, taxpayers and other concerned Americans.


Department's of Education's  PR Activities Scrutinized
<http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/01/19/19promote.h24.html>
A series of unsavory revelations about the U.S. Department of Education's
efforts to sway the public in favor of the No Child Left Behind Act could stain
the law's reputation and cast doubt on future information from the agency, say
many observers, including supporters of the law.



Texas Takes Aim at Tainted Testing Program
<http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/01/19/19cheat.h24.html>
Responding to a potential cheating scandal uncovered by a recent newspaper
investigation, Texas officials last week announced a sweeping review of test
security and plans for a new monitoring scheme for the state accountability
system, which has served as a model for other states as well as the federal No
Child Left Behind Act.



Teachers and Science.. a major problem..
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2004/12/01/14faking.h24.html
Teachers, like students, cannot know what they were never taught. Nearly 20
percent of high school science teachers nationwide lack even a minor in their
main teaching field, according to a 2000 report by the National Commission on
Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century. That report,
commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, also found that 56 percent
of high school students taking physical-science courses were being taught by
out-of-field teachers. Twenty-seven percent of high school students taking 
math,
by comparison, fell into that category.
  Of the teachers who get in touch with Mr. Robertson, a majority are seeking
help in physics, he says. Recent research seems to bear out that need.
According to a 2002 report by Horizon Research Inc., only 56 percent of high
school
physics teachers have taken six or more college courses in their subjects,
compared with 67 percent of chemistry and 92 percent of biology instructors.
Another report by Horizon found that at the elementary level, fewer than
one-third of teachers believed they were well-qualified to teach each of the
science disciplines.


Cobb schools to appeal ruling
(http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/cobb/0105/18evolution.html)
Wednesday, January 19, 2005 Atlanta Journal  Constitution
School board votes to contest judge's  order to remove evolution disclaimers
from  textbooks.
As if taking a federal  judge's ruling against them as fighting words, the
Cobb County school board voted Monday to appeal  a court order to remove
evolution disclaimers from textbooks.

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Classroom management skills is the number one concern. Find
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online resources that integrate technology into the classroom.
Teaching Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Theory
<http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/newteacher.html>
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"Date-Rape Hoax Circulates Campus"
<http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=15700&repository=0001_article>
Messages circulating on the popular social-networking site
Thefacebook.com warn students about a date-rape drug that
allegedly sterilizes its victims, but health officials say the
story is a hoax. (The Stanford Daily)


"Using Grid Computing to Combat Global Warming"
<http://asia.cnet.com/news/systems/0,39037054,39213652,00.htm>
A new distributed-computing project -- modeled, like many
others, on Berkeley's SETI@home program -- will test the
potential of grid computing to coordinate more-efficient energy
use. (CNET Asia)


"U. of Mary Washington Police Hunt Author of Missive"
<http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2005/012005/01182005/1639340>
Police officers at the University of Mary Washington hope to
track down the author of an e-mail message, sent to about 4,000
students, that berated "dems and liberals" on the Virginia
college's campus. (The Free Lance-Star)


"Hacker Breaches Computers at UC-San Diego-Extension That Store
Student and Alumni Data"
<http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20050118-9999-1m18hack.html>
Computing officials have notified some 3,500 students and alumni
of the University of California at San Diego Extension that
their personal information may have been exposed in a November
hacking incident. (San Diego Tribune)


"State Bill Could Cripple P2P"
<http://news.com.com/State+bill+could+cripple+P2P/2100-1028_3-5540937.html?t
ag=nefd.top>
Proposed legislation in California would threaten developers of
file-sharing software with hefty fines and jail sentences if
they failed to stop piracy on their networks. (CNET)


Canadian lawsuit raises messaging privacy issue
<http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,98979,00
.html>
Private messages exchanged using corporate BlackBerry wireless devices
may not be quite so private after all.
In a lawsuit filed in Toronto this week, the Canadian Imperial Bank of
Commerce (CIBC) submitted scores of BlackBerry e-mails and messages as
evidence that several former executives took confidential information
from the company and tried to recruit others while they were still
employees at the bank.

Linux fights off hackers
<http://www.vnunet.com/news/1160588>
Linux systems are getting tougher for hackers to crack, security
experts have reported today.
A study by not-for-profit IT security testing organisation Honeynet
Project [1] has shown that, on average, Linux systems today take three
months to fall prey to hackers, up from 72 hours in equivalent tests
conducted between 2001 and 2002.


Phishers, virus writers exploit tsunami disaster
<http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2005/1/18/technology/99339
74&sec=technology>
PETALING JAYA: Computer security firms have issued warnings about
phoney e-mail and fraudulent websites that seek to exploit the Asian
Tsunami disaster to steal confidential data or spread malicious
viruses.
Sophos Plc has discovered a mass-mailing worm that poses as a plea for
donations. The VBSun-A worm (W32/VBSun-A) spreads via e-mail, tempting
innocent users into clicking its malicious attachment by pretending to
be information about how to donate to a tsunami relief effort.


Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/technology/17test.html>
There was a time when researching a high school or college
term paper was a far simpler thing. A student writing
about, say, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, might have
checked out a book on the history of aviation from the
local library or tucked into the family's dog-eared
Britannica. An ambitious college freshman might have
augmented the research by looking up some old newspaper
clips on microfilm or picking up a monograph in the stacks.
Today, in a matter of minutes, students can identify these
and thousands of other potential resources on the Internet
- and, as any teacher will attest, they are not always
adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Now the Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit group
behind the SAT, Graduate Record Examination and other
college tests, has developed a new test that it says can
assess students' ability to make good critical evaluations
of the vast amount of material available to them.



Scholars Say College Admissions Offices Misuse Advanced Placement Data
<http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i20/20a02701.htm>
A study finds that the high-school courses aren't always good predictors of
college success
College-admissions officers should be cautious when weighing Advanced
Placement courses on applicants' high-school transcripts, according to a
working paper presented here at the annual meeting of the American Economic
Association this month. The paper asserts that the mere act of taking AP
courses in high school -- as distinct from scoring well on the official AP
tests -- does not predict that a student will perform well in college. The
paper's authors -- Kristin Klopfenstein, an assistant professor of economics
at Texas Christian University, and M. Kathleen Thomas, an assistant
professor of economics at Mississippi State University -- analyzed the
records of more than 28,000 students who graduated from Texas high schools
in 1999 and who enrolled that fall in the state's four-year public
universities. The researchers posed two central questions: Did the Texas
students who took Advanced Placement courses in high school have higher
grades in their first year of college than their non-AP peers? And were they
less likely to drop out before their sophomore year?



In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth Of Personal Data
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22269-2005Jan19.html>
It began in 1997 as a company that sold credit data to the insurance
industry. But over the next seven years, as it acquired dozens of other
companies, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. became an all-purpose
commercial source of personal information about Americans, with billions of
details about their homes, cars, relatives, criminal records and other
aspects of their lives.

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