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News & Views - Apr, 2002 Issue (page
3)
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GATES FOCUSING ON BORED HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
(March 19, 2002) "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting up $40 million to help start
70 high schools that will try to keep disadvantaged students in school by giving them college-level work in their junior and senior
years and enabling them to earn two-year associate degrees while they earn high school diplomas." Since boredom with school is
a common symptom of students placed in emotional growth and therapeutic boarding schools and programs, this initiative might do something
on a preventive level for students with problems. [more...]
COLLEGE BOARD TO REVISE SAT
(March 22, 2002) According to The Wall Street Journal, The College Board is planning to revamp the main
SAT test taken by generations of college-bound students, acknowledging that it is doing so partly in response to criticism
from the University of California and others that the test does not reflect enough of what is actually learned in the classroom.
The changes would take effect with the high school class graduating in 2006, but College Board trustees have just taken the first
step by asking staff for recommendations for revising the three-hour verbal and math test.
RESEARCH SHOWS TEENS SLEEP-DEPRIVED
(April 1, 2002) Barbara Kingsley, of the Orange County Register reports new research showing that teens
“need nine to 10 hours of sleep every night, but average just seven, oftentimes less than that. Mary Carskadon, of the Sleep
Research Lab at Brown Medical School in Providence, R.I. explains teenager’s “brains become reconfigured…making
it easier to delay going to sleep.” Researchers have found “sleep-deprived adolescents are more likely to feel depressed, rise quicker
to anger and show symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They also don’t learn as well.”
NEW SOFTWARE CAN RECORD ALL OUTGOING MESSAGES
(April 6, 2002) Xpress Press, of Southampton, PA reports that completely invisible software that records
every email or instant message sent. The website, www.Software4Parents.com.
has recently been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, on The Montel Williams Show,
and many other national newspapers. According to Joshua Finer, President of Software4Parents.com, 215-396-7334 or 801-327-6808,
“one of the most recent Internet predator cases occurred over this past New Years, where Alicia Kozakiewicz was somehow lured
from her Pittsburgh home and later found tied to an Internet Predator's bed in Herndon, Virginia. It was reported that she
first made contact with this predator via Instant Messages.”
ATLANTIC MONTHLY FEATURES “THE APOCALYPSE
OF ADOLESCENCE”
(March, 2002) Ron Powers’ article, “The Apocalypse of Adolescence” appears in the March 2002 edition of the
Atlantic Monthly, describing “acts of lethal violence committed by
“ordinary” teenagers from “ordinary” communities. He states, “terrorist promptings eerily similar to the bloody messages being delivered
by certain of our young” have shown the “need for America to rethink many of the assumptions about its youth that it once took
for granted.”
PARENT HELP NEEDED
(April 8, 2002) Secretary of Education Rod Paige, writes that public school improvement as promised by the new,
No Child Left Behind Legislation cannot happen without the active and involved help of parents. [more...]
TEENS SENTENCED FOR SLAYING
(April 5, 2002) Two popular and apparently well-behaved teens who, "bored with Chelsea," Vermont,
killed a Dartmouth College couple in a random murder for money. They were sentenced in North Haverhill, N.H., the New
York Times reported.
VOUCHER QUESTIONS "COOKED?"
(March 12, 2002) Stanford professor and political scientist, Terry Moe, "accused the influential Phi
Delta Kappa education association of 'cooking the questions' in its closely watched annual survey of attitudes toward school vouchers,
so it could produce an anti-voucher result." The story appeared in Education Next, published by the Hoover Institute,
and was reported by the Washington
Post.
TEEN KILLS MOM TO AVOID MILITARY SCHOOL
(March 22, 2002) Court TV
reported the trial of a Colorado 16-year-old who killed his mother while she was planning to enroll him at a military school. "Once
a model student, [he] had fallen in with the wrong crowd whose activities included skipping school, drinking, smoking marijuana and
listening to punk rock music."
1,400 DEATHS EACH YEAR BLAMED ON COLLEGE
DRINKING
(April 10, 2002) The Spokesman-Review reports that according to a task force of the National Institute on
Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, “college drinking contributes to the deaths of 1,400 a year… 500,000 injuries and results in at
least 70,000 cases of date rape or sexual assault…Members stressed a need for colleges and communities to work together to fight what
they called the “culture of drinking” at U.S. colleges.”
SCIENCE TO ACHIEVE RESULTS (STAR) FELLOWSHIPS
ELIMINATED
(April 13, 2002) The
New York Times reports the Bush administration is eliminating a respected fellowship program for graduate research
in the environmental sciences. The Environmental Protection Agency program called Science to Achieve Results (STAR)
provides $10 million a year in fellowships to students pursuing graduate degrees in environmental science, policy and engineering.
"This is the only federal program that is specifically designed to support the top students going into environmental science"
and related fields, said David Blockstein, a senior scientist with the National Council for Science and the Environment,
an environmental science advocacy group in Washington.
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