October 18, 2008 MyCentralJersey.com vSingle-gender classrooms can provide better learning environments for some students. No reasonable educator would dispute that. That understanding is the motivation behind Hillsborough school officials’ consideration of introducing single-gender classrooms to the public schools.
July 20, 2008 By EMILY BAZELON The New York Times In June of last year, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, declared the racial-integration efforts of two school districts unconstitutional. Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could no longer assign students to schools based on their race, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote [...]
March 2, 2008 By ELIZABETH WEIL The New York Times On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, [...]
BY ELIZABETH BIRGE The Star-Ledger Staff Sixty years ago, black and white students headed off to school under a new state Constitution that assured they would attend class side by side. The same could not be said for their teachers.
Friday, February 01, 2008 BY KATHLEEN O’BRIEN Star-Ledger Staff The school’s two wings were mirror images: the north wing for white children, the south for blacks. The playground was divided by a fence, and students alternated use of the auditorium so their paths never crossed. In a small town, race trumped logic in drawing district [...]
December 2, 2007 By ERICA HARBATKIN STAFF WRITER The Home News Tribune Online Local school districts are working to combat racial disproportionality in special education with an early focus on literacy and behavioral issues in typical classrooms. As the federal government cracks down on districts with disproportionate numbers of black and Hispanic pupils in special [...]
Supreme Court Ruling Sways Milton Battle; Off to Private School By JOSEPH PEREIRA October 11, 2007; Page A1 The Wall Street Journal MILTON, Mass. — Last spring, town officials in this affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary-school assignments for 38 streets — and sparked outrage. Some white families had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly [...]
BY JOHN MOONEY Star-Ledger Staff 21 N.J. districts told to use U.S. funds to fix numbers State and federal regulators are cracking down on New Jersey school districts with large or disproportionate numbers of minority students in special education classes, concerned that some are being placed inappropriately. The heightened attention is an attempt to address [...]