Dragged down by poor reading and math scores, a low graduation rate and eroding funding for schools, California education received a grade of C and ranked 30th in the nation on an annual survey released Tuesday.
The state's score dropped slightly from 2010, when it received a C-plus in the Quality Counts survey conducted by the Maryland-based nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.
States throughout the nation struggled to earn a passing grade. Researchers awarded U.S. education systems as a whole a C. California earned 76.2 points on a 1-to-100 scale -- that was not graded on a curve -- summing up six areas of policy and performance.
California lags in nearly all of them. The state earned a D-minus in achievement, and a C in the three areas of finance, the teaching profession and factors contributing to student success. It did better, receiving a B-minus, in integrating different levels of education. And the state earned an A-minus in testing, standards and accountability, for 17th in the nation.
Paul Hefner, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, noted that the academic portion of the survey is pegged to national tests given to random fourth- and eighth-graders, a test that doesn't necessarily align with the California curriculum. California students have historically performed much worse on that test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, than on the annual state STAR tests.
Still,
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"We can't afford to be satisfied with a C for California schools," said Tom Torlakson, the state's newly instated superintendent of public instruction, in a prepared statement.
For the third year in a row, Maryland was ranked above all other states, receiving a B-plus overall, followed by Massachusetts and New York, which recorded B's. At the bottom were Nebraska, South Dakota and the District of Columbia, which were given D-pluses.
On the survey's component measuring achievement, California ranked 46th with a D-minus, below South Carolina and above New Mexico. Massachusetts topped that category with a B, followed by Maryland and New Jersey. The achievement index measured 18 indicators, including test achievement, year-to-year improvement and disparities based on family income.
But an indication of the dismal state of the country's schools, the average state earned a D-plus in achievement. Four states and Washington, D.C., earned F's.
The report also addressed the effect of the recession on schools and noted that the nation had stalled in widening opportunity for students to succeed. The survey's "chance-for-success" index looked at the role education plays over a lifetime by measuring 13 indicators ranging from family income, preschool and college enrollment to adult employment. California scored 42nd among states, rating a C. The national average was a C-plus.
While the recession hit schools hard, Uncle Sam has played a major role in keeping schools from falling off a financial cliff, the survey found. About one-third of all federal stimulus funds, or $80.6 billion, flowed through schools, it noted. Those moneys saved or created more than 650,000 jobs.
In spending on education, California scored 60.1, or just barely a D-minus. But its overall score in the finance category was boosted by its efforts to equalize funding among districts and disparate groups.
The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center is a nonprofit focusing on preschool through 12th grade. It also publishes the periodical Education Week, focusing on K-12 education. Quality Counts 2011 was its 15th annual survey.
The day after Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid last September, Michelle Rhee, the city's schools chancellor and No. 1 lightning rod, had an OMG moment. For three years, Fenty had constantly spent political capital defending Rhee as she fired hundreds of teachers and principals, closed schools, and earned both education reformers' adoration and teachers' unions' wrath. He eventually paid with his job -- and she knew she'd soon pay with hers. What am I going to do? she thought.
She went to Hawaii with her fiancé, Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star, charter-school founder, and Sacramento mayor. At this point, she was flooded with job offers. "I know how you are. You just want to make a decision and jump into the next thing," Johnson said to Rhee. "I'm not going to let you do that. We're going to take our time." She replied, "That's not how I operate." "Well, this is the way you're going to do it this time," he said.
On October 13th, Rhee announced her resignation. Suitors -- rumored to include Chicago mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie -- kept coming after her. She says one private-sector exec offered her well north of $1 million a year, "and I literally wasn't going to have to do anything." Says Johnson: "She was getting really antsy because she doesn't like being in limbo."
In October, Charlie Rose interviewed Rhee at the Forstmann Little conference in Aspen, Colorado. As they discussed the problems with America's education system, a plan began to crystallize in her mind. Later that day, Rhee flew to Sacramento and went with Johnson and his mother to dinner at Mulvaney's, one of her favorite restaurants. Johnson could sense something was up. "She just had this clarity and this peace," he recalls. He gave Rhee his business card, and she started scribbling on the back. By dinner's end, they had the outline of an organization that would throw huge amounts of money behind the brand of reform that Rhee has long advocated, first as founding CEO of the New Teacher Project and then as D.C. chancellor. It would be set up not as a charity but as a political-advocacy and membership group, along the lines of AARP or the NRA, and it would rely on private donations and Rhee's star power. "This is it," Johnson told her with a smile.
On December 6th, Rhee announced on Oprah that she would not work for anyone else. Instead, she was starting an organization called Students First. She planned to raise $1 billion and recruit 1 million supporters in year one. Right after the show, Rhee's 11-year-old daughter, Starr, texted her, saying, "I plan on signing up to be a supporter."
A base of a million people and a billion dollars would be unprecedented within education reform. Rhee is reluctant to name her potential donors, but IMG chief Theodore Forstmann tells Fast Company that he is "very supportive of everything she stands for -- and will continue to be." Philanthropist Eli Broad says he "expects to be a major contributor." "People supporting the status quo have spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain it," Broad says. "I think she'll be a game changer."
In the coming weeks and months, Rhee plans to push her main points. She wants to change the tenure and seniority rules that she says have favored adults and their jobs over kids' educations. She'll campaign for parents to have more control over what public schools their children attend. She will lobby for cities to choose mayoral, rather than board, control of schools, because she believes that concentrating authority -- as in New York and D.C. -- is a prerequisite for real reform. And given the soaring spending but middling performance of American public schools, she'll advocate stronger fiscal responsibility.
A key pillar of Students First's strategy is to build grassroots support, much as Barack Obama did during the 2008 presidential campaign -- with thousands of small donors and on-the-ground campaign workers. Johnson has pushed Rhee hard on this: "They didn't do as good a job as they should have on community involvement in D.C.," he says. "Unless you have the grassroots folks who want it even more than the policy makers, it's never going to happen."
Rhee may have to modulate her sales pitch to succeed. "An important segment of the education community sees her as divisive, anti-teacher, and confrontational," says Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia Teachers College. Andrew Rotherham, cofounder of the ed-reform not-for-profit Bellwether Education Partners, adds that Rhee cannot act as she did in D.C. "There is a half-life to the ass-kicking Michelle Rhee," he says. "She's also the very thoughtful Michelle Rhee of the New Teacher Project. She has to strike that balance."
In a series of interviews in New York and Sacramento, Rhee told Fast Company the inside story of the genesis of Students First, discussed her hopes for the organization, and talked about those audacious goals.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Custodians at public schools across the city have been directed to search for evidence of toxic chemicals in light ballasts following protests at PS 36, Annadale, where the toxins were discovered before Christmas break.
A memo sent by Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm of the city Department of Education instructs that visual inspection for leaks or stains that "would be either brownish/black or a lighter shade of yellowish/brown" is to begin "immediately." Those leaks could indicate the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a manmade chemical in common use until its banning in the mid-1970s. Studies have shown that longtime exposure could lead to cancer.
If a ballast appears to be leaking, custodians are to check the floor beneath the fixture. If stains are found, they are to be reported and the area is to have limited access, the memo said.
Ballasts that don't work, even after the bulb is changed, should be checked as well.
Leaky ballasts are to be reported to the deputy director of facilities with a work request, though ballasts will not be replaced without further instruction.
Earlier this week, parents at PS 36 kept their children home from school until physical inspections -- in which custodians removed the lenses and light bulbs in every ballast -- were performed, with leaky ballasts replaced, and air monitor tests completed.
Just 26 percent of the school's 923 students were at school yesterday, following a dismal 25 percent the previous day, according to DOE spokeswoman Margie Feinberg.
Tests conducted more than a week ago showed PCB levels to be high in light ballasts in two classrooms. Those fixtures have since been replaced, and work is being done on other ballasts.
City Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore), who joined Ms. Grimm, the deputy chancellor, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Rep. Michael Grimm (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) on a tour of the school yesterday morning, said he was happy to see the DOE taking such an initiative.
"This directive is a major policy change," he said. "This unfortunate circumstance at PS 36 may actually have a positive outcome."
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has been pressuring the city to inspect and replace ballasts that could contain PCBs in about 740 city public schools.
DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz has said the city is taking the issue "seriously" but that federal funding would be necessary "or this could have devastating consequences on our education budget."
A memo sent by Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm of the city Department of Education instructs that visual inspection for leaks or stains that "would be either brownish/black or a lighter shade of yellowish/brown" is to begin "immediately." Those leaks could indicate the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a manmade chemical in common use until its banning in the mid-1970s. Studies have shown that longtime exposure could lead to cancer.
If a ballast appears to be leaking, custodians are to check the floor beneath the fixture. If stains are found, they are to be reported and the area is to have limited access, the memo said.
Ballasts that don't work, even after the bulb is changed, should be checked as well.
Leaky ballasts are to be reported to the deputy director of facilities with a work request, though ballasts will not be replaced without further instruction.
Earlier this week, parents at PS 36 kept their children home from school until physical inspections -- in which custodians removed the lenses and light bulbs in every ballast -- were performed, with leaky ballasts replaced, and air monitor tests completed.
Just 26 percent of the school's 923 students were at school yesterday, following a dismal 25 percent the previous day, according to DOE spokeswoman Margie Feinberg.
Tests conducted more than a week ago showed PCB levels to be high in light ballasts in two classrooms. Those fixtures have since been replaced, and work is being done on other ballasts.
City Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore), who joined Ms. Grimm, the deputy chancellor, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Rep. Michael Grimm (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) on a tour of the school yesterday morning, said he was happy to see the DOE taking such an initiative.
"This directive is a major policy change," he said. "This unfortunate circumstance at PS 36 may actually have a positive outcome."
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has been pressuring the city to inspect and replace ballasts that could contain PCBs in about 740 city public schools.
DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz has said the city is taking the issue "seriously" but that federal funding would be necessary "or this could have devastating consequences on our education budget."
HAMBURG, Jan 12, 2011 (dpa - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Jimmy Wales is constantly on the go. Most of the year he travels round the globe. His mission? To make all human knowledge accessible to everyone.
"Wikipedia is going to be increasingly global in the future," the 44-year-old American says. "We will have enormous growth in the developing world." It was 10 years ago, in January 2001, that he launched the online encyclopedia. Now, ten years later, it offers 17 million entries in more than 260 languages.
Wales was born in 1966 in Alabama. His father was a grocery store manager and his mother an educator. Even as a boy he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and "spent lots of hours" reading the Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia.
His earliest education was at home from his own mother, who ran a small private school on the Montessori method. Later Jimbo, as friends call him, got a master's degree in finance and worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm for several years.
His driving passion is computers. Since the earliest days of personal computing he has been an Internet addict and even wrote computer codes as a hobby, according to his own biographical entry on Wikipedia.
In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a men's web portal featuring entertainment and adult content. This website provided the initial funding for the peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia in 2000.
Thanks to the Wiki software, which enables each user immediate access -- as author or as editor -- Wikipedia was founded the following year.
Today Wikipedia resembles pretty much what he originally envisioned, he told the German Press Agency dpa in an interview.
"But of course it's a lot larger and more popular than I had ever imagined," he said.
So can we say that Wikipedia has made the world different and has made Wales a rich man? "I hope that the world has become a little better." And as for the financial side. "The pages are non-commercial and they will stay that way," Wales explained. But his for-profit Internet company Wikia is doing well and shows a profit.
"That may make me rich!" he said.
Wales is a self-avowed "Objectivist to the core", Objectivism being an individualist philosophy developed by writer Ayn Rand. And he is an avid chess player.
He is separated from his second wife, with whom he has a daughter. Although 10-year-old Kira consults Wikipedia on occasion, her father favours traditional education.
"Anybody who says you don't need to know anything these days, just know where to look it up, is mistaken, in my opinion," he said.
And Wales himself still loves to pore over books just as he did when he was a boy.
"Books are great. They're inexpensive and the batteries never run down," he said.
Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc.’s Android operating system for mobile devices is more vulnerable to hackers and viruses than Apple Inc.’s iPhone platform, according to security-software maker Trend Micro Inc.
“Android is open-source, which means the hacker can also understand the underlying architecture and source code,” Steve Chang, chairman of Trend Micro, the world’s largest provider of security software for corporate servers, said in an interview in Taipei yesterday. “We have to give credit to Apple, because they are very careful about it. It’s impossible for certain types of viruses” to operate on the iPhone, he said.
Google, owner of the world’s most-popular online search engine, offers Android for free and allows developers access to its code for writing software. Apple, whose iOS software trails Android in smartphone market share, requires every application to be approved before being sold in its online store.
“On all computing devices, users necessarily entrust at least some of their information to the developer of the application they’re using,” Mountain View, California-based Google said in an e-mailed statement. “Android has taken steps to inform users of this trust relationship and to limit the amount of trust a user must grant to any given application developer.”
Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile-phone carrier, said yesterday it will begin selling Apple’s handset next month. Verizon’s iPhone may cannibalize about 2 million Android shipments a year, according to Dan Hays, partner at consulting firm PRTM.
‘The Next PC’
Chang said he’s betting Android users will start to buy more security software for mobile devices.
“Smartphones are the next PC, and once they’re adopted by enterprises, data loss will be a very key problem,” he said.
On Jan. 7, Tokyo-based Trend Micro released Mobile Security for Android, software that users can install on a mobile phone to block viruses, malicious programs and unwanted calls. Trend Micro aims for the $3.99 application to help it gain revenue from the more than 250 million phones Gartner Inc. expects will run on Android by 2014.
“Apple has a sandbox concept that isolates the platform, which prevents certain viruses that want to replicate themselves or decompose and recompose to avoid virus scanners,” Chang said.
Apple’s iOS isn’t fully immune to security threats and may be hit with so-called social-engineering attacks, which trick users into authorizing the download or installation of malicious software, Chang said. Trend Micro offers a security application for Apple’s iOS, he said.
Natalie Harrison, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, California- based Apple, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
Market Share
Phones using Android accounted for 26 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter, behind Symbian, used in Nokia Oyj handsets, and ahead of iOS, which had a 17 percent share, researcher Gartner said Nov. 10.
In 2014, 259 million devices, or 29.6 percent of all smartphones, will use Android, trailing 30.2 percent share for Symbian and ahead of 15 percent share for iOS, Gartner predicted in September.
Trend Micro’s 2010 revenue is expected to have dropped 1.3 percent to 95 billion yen ($1.1 billion) and net income is forecast to be 22 percent lower, at 13.7 billion yen, according to the average of eight analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Sony has stepped up its fight over recent PS3 exploits by filing for a restraining order against George "Geohot" Hotz, the "hacking group" fail0verflow and numerous other individual
Alleging that those involved have violated the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the firm is seeking a restraining order asking that all PS3 circumvention tools be taken offline and related computers be impounded.
Engadget points out that this isn't yet a lawsuit in the traditional sense as Sony hasn't filed a copyright infringement claim. The firm, it appears, simply wants the PS3 jailbreak and any information about it to disappear from the web, but that would seem to be only a short-term solution to the problem.
Google Inc.’s Android Market, Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry App World and Nokia Oyj’s Ovi Store added mobile-phone software faster than Apple Inc.’s App Store in the U.S. last year, research company Distimo said.
Android Market had the highest rate of overall growth, reaching 130,000 applications in the U.S. by Dec. 31, or more than six times the number at the end of 2009, Utrecht, Netherlands-based Distimo said in a report. Nokia’s free applications surged 10-fold, helping its total U.S. applications more than triple to 25,000, the third-biggest app lineup after Apple and Android.
Nokia, Android and RIM have wooed software developers with instructional events and new tools in an effort to catch up to Apple, whose iPhone U.S. catalog includes almost 300,000 applications, according to Distimo. Apple’s fastest-growing category was business, while competitors added media and entertainment applications to counter the Cupertino, California- based company’s lead in music and books.
“The high download volumes of free applications appear to attract developers to switch to monetization methods other than paid,” analysts Hendrik Koekkoek and Gert Jan Spriensma wrote in the report.
BlackBerry’s store more than tripled last year to 18,000 apps, according to Distimo. Apple’s iPhone U.S. offerings doubled.
The market share of free applications rose while the price of paid applications fell, the analysts said. Among the top 100 applications, prices declined by an average 9 percent at Android and by 61 percent at Ovi Store. The proportion of applications costing more than $5 fell to 15 percent as of Dec. 31 from 21 percent a year earlier, Distimo said.
