Can a public law school exclude a Christian student group from recognition because the group’s rules forbid gays and non-Christians as members in violation of the school’s anti-discrimination code?

The U.S. Supreme Court will weigh constitutional questions around universities and religious rights when it hears arguments next Monday (April 19) in a case centered on the University of California’s law school in San Francisco.

The case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, pits a campus chapter of a Christian legal group against the Hastings College of the Law and its 20-year-old nondiscrimination policy.

“Our main argument is that Christian student groups shouldn’t be forced to deny their faith in order to receive equal treatment on campus,” said Gregory Baylor, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is helping represent the CLS chapter before the high court.

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Last year more than 100 foreign delegations and governments visited Helsinki, hoping to learn the secret of their schools’ success.

In 2006, Finland’s pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD’s exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea.

This isn’t a one-off: in previous PISA tests Finland also came out top.

The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.

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…Krzyzewski likes to think of himself as more than just a coach to his players. He takes pride in the high graduation rate of his players and keeps in contact with them even after they graduate.

And while Krzyzewski’s own personal faith plays a role in how he coaches, he is very careful not to impose his beliefs on his players.

“Not every kid I coach is Catholic. They use a different street to get there than the Catholic streets sometimes. But there is a core set of values and principles that you try to teach although you don’t teach it as religion like honesty and acceptance of responsibility, just being a good person. Faith is about living the good life and helping one another, which is teamwork,” he says.

Many of his former players, such as Grant Hill of the Orlando Magic, hold their former coach in very high regard. When interviewed about Krzyzewski by Time magazine, Hill said Coach K was a lot like a parent to the players. “There’s six inches between patting on the back and patting on the butt. And as a parent, he did both and did it well, “Hill said.

And Krzyzewski has experience at being a parent. He and Mickie have three daughters: Debbie Savarino, Lindy Frasher and Jamie Spatola. They also have four grandchildren:Joey, Michael, Carlyn and Emilia Savarino. In June 2004, Coach K and Mickie celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary by renewing their vows in Duke’s chapel.

This story from 2006 is well worth the time–read it all.

Schools will close, sports and arts programs will be dropped and class size will increase “astronomically” as student numbers increase while fewer teachers can be paid.

That’s the dire scenario Lowcountry public schools face by 2013 if the state sees the billion-dollar revenue shortfalls that are expected and continues cutting funds for education, the chairman of the Berkeley County School Board said.

“We’re essentially out of business,” Doug Cooper told members of the Greater Summerville-Dorchester County Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday. A whole generation of students could be lost and need remedial education as adults, he said.

“We’re going to have more and more students and less and less money. We just can’t ride this out. Education in this state is not a line item in the budget. It is our state,” Cooper said.

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Public schools will continue to avoid labelling children failures in school reports which grade students A to E, but principals believe it is time to abandon false praise and give students a more realistic impression of their abilities.

Jim McAlpine, president of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, said schools should praise students who ”achieve great things”.

”If they don’t achieve as much as they should, there is no point giving them false praise,” he said. ”They need to know they have to achieve to get the rewards.”

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Getting a degree in down times can be a liability for some who can’t find jobs and have massive loans.

The conventional wisdom that getting a degree helps your career is not quite panning out for Shana Berenzweig.

The 33-year-old quit her job at the Texas Medical Association to get a master’s in public administration at New York University. She worked part time, graduated nearly two years ago and moved back to Austin, Texas. So far, she hasn’t been able to find a job.

“It’s very scary to be in this position,” says Berenzweig, who is trying to make payments on her six-figure school loans with some assistance from her parents and by cobbling together babysitting gigs.

Caught this one on the morning run, it does a good job at getting inside this tough job market. Listen to or read it all–KSH.

After more than a year when the spotlight remained on the doctor’s office and the hospital room, attention switches this week to the classrooms of America. On Monday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce the first-round winners of Race to the Top, the $4 billion competition he set up to reward the states with the most ambitious plans for improving their public schools.

When I asked Duncan last week what he hoped people would say about this unprecedented contest, he responded: “So many were skeptical when we announced this a year ago as part of the stimulus package. I hope they realize now that a very high bar has been set.”

Because the winning plans are so good? I asked. “So good, and so few,” he said.

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Add an entire school day to the chopping block. State lawmakers want tomove financially struggling schools to four day weeks. They say it willsave money, and it won’t affect classroom time.

Thesuperintendent of one local school district believes the plan couldwork. CBS 2’s Dorothy Tucker paid them a visit.

“I think it’ssomething we should take a look at,” said Dr. Kamala Buckner,Superintendent of Thornton Township High Schools District 205.

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Here is the paradox. We are living in what is possibly the most secular age since Homo sapiens first set foot on Earth, and Europe is its most secular continent. Yet faith schools are the growth industry of our time. More and more people want them, and are prepared to go to great lengths to get their children admitted. This applies to parents who are not themselves religious. What is going on?

The simple answer is that faith schools tend to have academic success above the average: so, at any rate, the league tables suggest. But why should this be so, if faith inhibits critical thought and discourages independence of mind? This is a question worth serious reflection.

My tentative suggestion is that faith schools tend to have a strong ethos that emphasises respect for authority, the virtues of hard work, discipline and a sense of duty, a commitment to high ideals, a willingness to learn, a sense of social responsibility, a preference for earned self-respect rather than unearned self-esteem, and the idea of an objective moral order that transcends subjective personal preference.

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In spite of high-profile efforts to improve the reading skills of the USA’s poorest schoolchildren over the past several years, their reading abilities barely improved last year compared with 2007, results of a federally administered test show.

Reading scores essentially didn’t budge in 2009, both for students overall and minority students, according to results issued Wednesday on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Fourth-graders’ scores were unchanged at 221 points on a 500-point scale, and those of eighth-graders rose just one point, from 263 to 264.

Likewise, achievement gaps between white, African-American and Hispanic students changed only slightly since 2007, though in fourth grade, the difference between white and African-American students’ scores has tightened six points since 1992. Overall, though, average scores in both grades have risen just four points since then.

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Should a student religious group at a public university be allowed to bar a certain group of students from membership ”” gay students, to be precise ”” without losing its official student-group status, and the funding and other benefits that go with it?

Today, the answer to that constitutionally loaded question depends on which federal appellate court you ask. In a case involving the Christian Legal Society at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez), the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the school was entirely within its rights when it denied recognition to the Christian Legal Society over its unwillingness to accept as members gay students or any others who did not share the group’s beliefs. The 7th Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in a similar case at Southern Illinois University’s law school.

Clarity is presumably on the way, as the U.S. Supreme Court has taken on the Hastings case and will hear arguments April 19. Let’s hope the country comes out of it with a clearer understanding of what’s in and what’s out when it comes to the membership policies of religious student groups. And let’s hope that the high court sheds some much needed light on the larger issues evoked by the law school case:

Does religious freedom include the right to discriminate on the basis of gender, race or sexuality? Do authorities have the right to foist their values on religious groups through carrots and sticks such as meeting-space privileges and the threat of withholding funds? And, as more conservatives are asking these days, shouldn’t that oft-proclaimed liberal principle of “tolerance” also be invoked to the benefit of tradition-minded Christians?

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But whether banishing children from schools really makes them safer or serves the community well is increasingly questioned by social scientists and educators. And now the punishment is before the courts in what has become a stark legal test of the approach. Lawyers for the girls ”” who are black ”” say that denying them a semester’s schooling was an unjustified violation of their constitutional right to an education.

The case will be argued on Monday in the North Carolina Supreme Court and has drawn the attention of civil rights, legal aid and education groups around the country.

At issue is the routine use of suspensions not just for weapons or drugs but also for profanity, defiant behavior, pushing matches and other acts that used to be handled with a visit to the principal’s office or detention. Such lesser violations now account for most of the 3.3 million annual suspensions of public school students. That total includes a sharp racial imbalance: poor black students are suspended at three times the rate of whites, a disparity not fully explained by differences in income or behavior.

On March 8, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented “schools that seem to suspend and discipline only young African-American boys” as he pledged stronger efforts to ensure racial equality in schooling.

A growing body of research, scholars say, suggests that heavy use of suspensions does less to pacify schools than to push already troubled students toward academic failure and dropping out ”” and sometimes into what critics have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

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Cornell University staff are monitoring bridges over river gorges on the campus and checking on students after three fell to their deaths in the past month.

The head of the US college also took out an ad in the campus paper urging students: “If you learn anything at Cornell, please learn to ask for help.”

The first of the deaths has been ruled a suicide. The others, which happened last week, are being investigated.

Three other students at Cornell have killed themselves this academic year.

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By some measures, the success of the Xavier men’s basketball team rests not with a sharpshooting guard or a ball-hawking forward. Rather, it rests largely with a 5-foot-4, white-haired 77-year-old nun not afraid to rap on dormitory doors or to call players before dawn to ask about missed classes or late assignments.

Xavier, a Jesuit university in Cincinnati, is entering the N.C.A.A. tournament seeded sixth in the West Region with a 24-8 record. But Sister Rose Ann Fleming is a perfect 77-0. Since she became the academic adviser for Xavier athletics in 1985, every men’s basketball player who has played as a senior has left with a diploma.

“Sometimes, she’ll schedule an appointment or an academic meeting right in the middle of practice,” said Xavier Coach Chris Mack, whose team will play Minnesota in the first round on Friday. “I’ll say, ”˜Sister, we have practice at 4.’ She’ll say, ”˜No, this is important.’ ”

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By some measures, the success of the Xavier men’s basketball team rests not with a sharpshooting guard or a ball-hawking forward. Rather, it rests largely with a 5-foot-4, white-haired 77-year-old nun not afraid to rap on dormitory doors or to call players before dawn to ask about missed classes or late assignments.

Xavier, a Jesuit university in Cincinnati, is entering the N.C.A.A. tournament seeded sixth in the West Region with a 24-8 record. But Sister Rose Ann Fleming is a perfect 77-0. Since she became the academic adviser for Xavier athletics in 1985, every men’s basketball player who has played as a senior has left with a diploma.

“Sometimes, she’ll schedule an appointment or an academic meeting right in the middle of practice,” said Xavier Coach Chris Mack, whose team will play Minnesota in the first round on Friday. “I’ll say, ”˜Sister, we have practice at 4.’ She’ll say, ”˜No, this is important.’ ”

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The Pledge of Allegiance, with its inclusion of the words “under God,” is constitutional, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday (March 11), reversing a previous ruling.

The 2-1 ruling answers a challenge by California atheist Michael Newdow, who argued that the use of the pledge in a Northern California school district””where children of atheists had to listen to others recite it””violated the First Amendment’s clause prohibiting the establishment of religion.

The “students are being coerced to participate in a patriotic exercise, not a religious exercise,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday. “The Pledge is not a prayer and its recitation is not a religious exercise.”

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The Pledge of Allegiance, with its inclusion of the words “under God,” is constitutional, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday (March 11), reversing a previous ruling.

The 2-1 ruling answers a challenge by California atheist Michael Newdow, who argued that the use of the pledge in a Northern California school district””where children of atheists had to listen to others recite it””violated the First Amendment’s clause prohibiting the establishment of religion.

The “students are being coerced to participate in a patriotic exercise, not a religious exercise,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday. “The Pledge is not a prayer and its recitation is not a religious exercise.”

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At Broadway Elementary School here, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.

Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.

They were bored. They had tired feet. They were no good at running.

“I don’t like to play,” protested Esmeilyn Almendarez, 11.

“Why do I have to go through this every day with you?” replied Ms. Parker, waving her back in line. “There’s no choice.”

Broadway Elementary brought in Ms. Parker in January out of exasperation with students who, left to their own devices, used to run into one another, squabble over balls and jump-ropes or monopolize the blacktop while exiling their classmates to the sidelines. Since she started, disciplinary referrals at recess have dropped by three-quarters, to an average of three a week. And injuries are no longer a daily occurrence.

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At Broadway Elementary School here, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.

Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.

They were bored. They had tired feet. They were no good at running.

“I don’t like to play,” protested Esmeilyn Almendarez, 11.

“Why do I have to go through this every day with you?” replied Ms. Parker, waving her back in line. “There’s no choice.”

Broadway Elementary brought in Ms. Parker in January out of exasperation with students who, left to their own devices, used to run into one another, squabble over balls and jump-ropes or monopolize the blacktop while exiling their classmates to the sidelines. Since she started, disciplinary referrals at recess have dropped by three-quarters, to an average of three a week. And injuries are no longer a daily occurrence.

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One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

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One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

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When they heard I was going to report in Haiti after the massive earthquake, fifth-graders from Amylynn Robinson’s class asked if I could deliver some messages to any children I’d meet. Their letters included drawings of flowers, hearts and rainbows. And they began simply:

“Hello Haiti, nice to meet you.”

“Dear Buddy … ”

“Hi there, I’m a child as well.”

“Dear friend, I am your friend. I wrote this letter to tell you I care about you.”

The children wrote about their school, Balboa Magnet Elementary, a public school in Northridge, Calif., in Northern Los Angeles County, which was the epicenter of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994. Although these 10-year-olds were not alive then, many say they’ve heard stories about the damage in California. So they were sympathetic to kids coping with the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti…..

This is just a fantastic piece that I caught on the morning run. You really need to do the audio as it is far superior when you hear the children’s voices (about 7 1/3 minutes). And check out which song one of the Haitian children chose to send back to the children in California! Listen to it all–KSH.

When they heard I was going to report in Haiti after the massive earthquake, fifth-graders from Amylynn Robinson’s class asked if I could deliver some messages to any children I’d meet. Their letters included drawings of flowers, hearts and rainbows. And they began simply:

“Hello Haiti, nice to meet you.”

“Dear Buddy … ”

“Hi there, I’m a child as well.”

“Dear friend, I am your friend. I wrote this letter to tell you I care about you.”

The children wrote about their school, Balboa Magnet Elementary, a public school in Northridge, Calif., in Northern Los Angeles County, which was the epicenter of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994. Although these 10-year-olds were not alive then, many say they’ve heard stories about the damage in California. So they were sympathetic to kids coping with the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti…..

This is just a fantastic piece that I caught on the morning run. You really need to do the audio as it is far superior when you hear the children’s voices (about 7 1/3 minutes). And check out which song one of the Haitian children chose to send back to the children in California! Listen to it all–KSH.