Quick Hits

School Bus Ride "Killed" Asthma Kid: An ill Queens boy with a history of severe asthma attacks was sent home on a city bus by his school's nurse, only to die at a hospital less than an hour later, his family claims in a lawsuit. (New York Post)

Special-needs students still few at New Orleans charters: New Orleans public schools had mixed results in bolstering services for the thousands of children with special needs in the city during the past year, according to educators and recent numbers released by the state. (Times Picayune)

The luckiest generation: pre-boomers: Luck matters a lot in life, and one of the biggest pieces of luck is generational. For Australians alive now, the best time to have been born was the period from the late 1920s through the 1930s. Happiness and contentment are never guaranteed, of course, but the statistics suggest you had a better chance of achieving them if you were born in the decade before World War II than at any other time in the past century. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Huntington Mom Sues School Over Religious Ed. Class: School officials in a northeastern Indiana district deny that a religious education program offered during the school day illegally advances religion, as a federal lawsuit claims. The ACLU sued on behalf of "JS" who attends Horace Mann Elementary School, which offers third- and fourth-grade students a "release time" program for "By the Book Weekday Religious Instruction" through the Associated Churches of Huntington. The Complaint asks a federal judge to shut down the program. (Education Week)

Popular girls may be popular bully targets, study suggests: Boys are not alone in being the tormented. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Violence is a prospect many teens accept: In her 13 years as a seventh-grade teacher in Renton, Esther Rich has collected hours' worth of stories about students who could have been, families that should have been. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Charter schools' problems surfacing: Critics and some lawmakers say the Pa. law that launched the educational experiment needs an overhaul. Last of two parts. When an unusual coalition of Republicans and Philadelphia Democrats led by State Rep. Dwight Evans joined forces to pass a law bringing charter schools to Pennsylvania, they spoke in glowing terms about this "innovative" alternative to troubled public schools. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Pay cut for administrators could save JCPS $200,000: Jefferson County Public Schools could save $200,000 in the coming school year if it cut administrative salaries by 1 percent as some school board members have urged. (The Courier-Journal)

Too much testing cuts into learning: An ever-increasing number of testing requirements has taken the focus off learning and transformed urban schools into test preparation centers. THE GOAL of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 was to make schools more accountable to their neediest students and to the public. (Boston Globe)



Put climate change in the curriculum: Environmental consciousness is sweeping the nation. Politicians, vacation destinations, and college campuses all try to attract people with talk of carbon footprints, carbon offsets, and carbon neutrality. (Boston Globe)

Myths Left Behind: Fairfax County's Graham Road Elementary dispels the notion that achievement gaps are inevitable. The teaching staff at Fairfax County's Graham Road Elementary School doesn't waste time talking about things in their students' lives they can't control. Many of their students come from low-income families; they live in homes that are fragmented or where English is never spoken. (Washington Post)

How Do You Run a Hedge Fund? Colleges Are Showing How: Business schools are increasing efforts to educate students in the skills and knowledge most relevant to running hedge funds. (New York Times)

How Kids Get Hurt: Experts Find Thousands of Childhood Deaths Preventable New reports show parents and policymakers what accidents and injuries are worth worrying about. Each year in the United States about 12,200 people younger than 19 die of unintentional injuries. Around the world, fatal injuries in children total 830,000 a year, a number roughly equal to all the children in Chicago. (USA Today)

Seattle, Minneapolis most literate of big cities (250,000+): Minneapolis and Seattle are the USA's most literate cities, according to an annual study examining the "culture and resources for reading" in the nation's largest metro areas. Cincinnati tied for 10th. Lexington tied for 19th. Louisville tied at 38th. The indicator "Education level" placed Lexington 12th; Louisville 26th and Cincinnati tied at 35th. (USA Today)

Student earning her PhD in beer - in the lab: Monique Haakensen is not just another university student who claims to have spent her academic years occupied by beer. (Toronto Star)

Teacher Accused Of Tying Students To Chairs: A Connecticut special education teacher has pleaded not guilty to charges she abused autistic children. However, parents of Campbell's alleged victims had a lot to say about the charges brought against the teacher. "This was putting children in a closet in the dark, holding them in the closet, holding the door, not letting them out," said spokeswoman for the alleged victims' families, Lisa Nkonoki. "Waterboarding if you will -- taking the child, putting water up their nostrils and face so they couldn't breath." Nkonoki said that Campbell also strapped the children to chairs and yelled in their ears. (WFSB-TV)

Georgia Black Colleges Merger Idea Stirs Resistance: Public colleges created during segregation to provide blacks an education denied to them by white institutions are at the center of a budget battle brewing in Georgia. Facing a $2 billion shortfall, a Republican state senator has proposed merging two of the historically black schools with nearby predominantly white colleges to save money and, in the process he says, erase a vestige of Jim Crow-era segregation. (BlackNews.com)

Ruling: Magnets can admit by race: Magnet programs in Los Angeles public schools can continue to use race and ethnicity as a factor in student admission, according to a recent court decision. (The Daily Breeze, Los Angeles)

California: Law School Lure: No Tuition : A law school opening next fall in Southern California is offering a big incentive to top students who might be thinking twice about the cost of a legal education during the recession: free tuition for three years. The offer is part of a strategy by Erwin Chemerinsky, a renowned constitutional law scholar and dean of the new school at the University of California, Irvine, to attract Ivy League-caliber students to the first new public law school in the state in 40 years. (NY Times)