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Birmingham News – City in debt: Mobile’s liability worries officials
Birmingham News – U.S. probes Alabama’s funding for court interpreters
Birmingham News – Two satellite Jefferson County courthouses to reopen with smaller staffs
Press-Register – Charter schools They can be popular, but are they better?
Press-Register – Democrat Artur Davis leans right on some issues
Press-Register – Jailhouse recordings loom large in case
Press-Register – Even with a recession, we have it good
Press-Register – Gifted students’ funding being challenged
Press-Register – Thankful that season is ending
Press-Register – What if you wait?
Press-Register – Why fight Baldwin over toll road path?
Huntsville Times – Atlanta, time to act for water
Montgomery Advertiser – Southern states create alliance to win tanker deal
Montgomery Advertiser – Baldwin County may refuse stimulus funds
Montgomery Advertiser – Report: Gaps in Alabama’s maternity services
Montgomery Advertiser – Jordan family’s fundraiser a way to give back to community
Montgomery Advertiser – Activist fights for kids to have better lives, know their rights
Montgomery Advertiser – Law needs room for compassion
Montgomery Advertiser – River Region United Way caught in crunch
Tuscaloosa News – Tax inequity suit in federal court
Tuscaloosa News – Obama faces very important speech Tuesday
Florence TimesDaily – Hispanic entrepreneurs target English-speaking consumers
Florence TimesDaily – Are charter schools innovative or a distraction?
Anniston Star – A GOP senator’s view: It’s bad medicine
Anniston Star – Bob Davis: Voices from U.S.’s past policies
Anniston Star – H. Brandt Ayers: Obama in ‘Red’ China
Decatur Daily РA humbug on Christmas clich̩s
Gadsden Times – Program is key to successful adoption, foster planning
Opelika-Auburn News – Legislators among those who got free Iron Bowl tickets
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–Pushouts–
Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise.
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Birmingham News–130 Alabama high schools score poorly on reading, stumble on bedrock of education
Glenda Jo Orel, director of the Birmingham-based nonprofit World of Opportunity, helps high school dropouts get their GEDs. She said many teachers in area schools give up on these students and, “once they are old enough to drop out, ask them to leave school.”
“We had 90 16-year-olds come to us in a six-week period because they’d been kicked out of school,” she said. “They wait until they’re 16 and then ask them to leave because they bring the test scores down for the entire school.”
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–Dropout Nation–
Sarah Miller, 28, was victim of those old ways. An intelligent but rebellious teenager with a turbulent home life, Sarah began falling behind in attendance and classwork her freshman year. Like many other 15-year-olds, she had a talent for making poor decisions. She and her friends would often skip out of school after lunch and cruise up and down Broadway. Teachers rarely stopped them, but school authorities knew what she and her friends were up to. One morning Sarah went to the school office to discuss getting back on track but got a surprise. One of the administrators asked her point-blank, “Why don’t you just quit school?” “I was just a kid,” says Sarah with a laugh. “It was like they said the magic words. So I told them, ‘O.K.!’ And I left.”
Sarah never set foot in a high school again. She got her GED, but now she’s too afraid to try community college, she says, because she doesn’t want to look stupid. Although she has a house she owns with her husband and a fine job serving coffee, biscuits and small talk at Ole McDonald’s Cafe in nearby Acton, Ind., Sarah is not without regret. “It would have been nice to have someone pushing me to stay,” she says. “Who knows how things would have turned out?”
Researchers call students like Sarah “pushouts,” not dropouts. Shelbyville High’s new principal, Tom Zobel, says he’s familiar with the mind-set.
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-Pookie
I continue to be fascinated by the tactics in the Democratic race. Davis, for better or for worse, is running a campaign geared almost exclusively to the general. Sparks, for better or for worse, is running a campaign geared almost exclusively toward the primary. One question, though, does Sparks seriously think that he could survive a general with a no comment on abortion, gay marriage, and immigration? We all know how Alabama is…
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