A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose, and to identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue and stage directions. Seventh graders would study, among other math concepts, proportional relationships, operations with rational numbers and solutions for linear equations.

The new standards are likely to touch off a vast effort to rewrite textbooks, train teachers and produce appropriate tests, if a critical mass of states adopts them in coming months, as seems likely. But there could be opposition in some states, like Massachusetts, which already has high standards that advocates may want to keep.

“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who has been an advocate for national standards for nearly two decades. “Now we have the possibility that for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.”

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A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose, and to identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue and stage directions. Seventh graders would study, among other math concepts, proportional relationships, operations with rational numbers and solutions for linear equations.

The new standards are likely to touch off a vast effort to rewrite textbooks, train teachers and produce appropriate tests, if a critical mass of states adopts them in coming months, as seems likely. But there could be opposition in some states, like Massachusetts, which already has high standards that advocates may want to keep.

“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who has been an advocate for national standards for nearly two decades. “Now we have the possibility that for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.”

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As religion is the corner-stone on which alone we have attempted to rear the fabric of morality, the degree of attention which it has received in the instruction and discipline of the Institute, forms another topic in our report. And here while the retrospect affords cause for congratulation that much has been done, it still leaves room for regret that much also has been left undone. It would be an affectation of modesty, however, to disclaim the consciousness that in all our plans and operations, there has been a uniform and earnest endeavor to sustain our religious professions. Accordingly, pains have been taken to give interest to the services of the chapel, and the decorum with which these have been attended by the students has been peculiarly gratifying. The regular and private reading of the Holy Scriptures has been a prescribed, duty and provision made for it in the daily routine of business. Portions of the inspired volume have been explained, after having been committed to memory, weekly; as also the Catechism and Services of the Episcopal Church. The observance of the Lord’s day has been enforced, on the one hand, with a moderation which perceives the danger of rendering its duties tedious and irksome; yet on the other, with a strictness which would guard against the opposite and more common error, of allowing it to relax into a mere holiday for indulgence and amusement. With this view, the tasks of a sacred character required on Sundays have been light, while alluring and persuasive methods have been varied and multiplied, to induce a profitable employment of the time not appropriated to devotional exercises. We thus have succeeded, to an encouraging extent, in preserving the appropriate quiet of the day, and in using it as a means of spiritual edification, without investing it with the gloom and repulsiveness which not unfrequently counteract the beneficent design of the institution; a point which every one practically acquainted with the government of the young, will acknowledge to be as difficult as any other within the sphere of Christian education. In like manner we have been careful to render all the associations of Religion agreeable. Aware, too, that in moral culture, it is the indirect influence which the young disciple is exposed, in the tone and manner of things and in the every day habits of those around him, that operates to the formation of his sentiments and character more powerfully than any repetition of precepts or formal exhibition of example, we have endeavored that religion should be viewed as the source of contentment and self-government to its possessors, and not at variance with the declaration that its ways are “ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.” Pious sensibility has been tenderly cherished whenever it has appeared, and in awakening it, much has been done in the way of private and familiar conversation.

—William Augustus Muhlenberg, Christian Education (1831)

College graduates are more likely to consider the Ten Commandments irrelevant, and reject the Bible as the word of God, than those with no college degree, according to a recent study.

A “distinct shift” occurs after college regarding beliefs and opinion, said Richard Brake, director of university studies at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

The ISI surveyed 2,508 Americans on questions intended to measure the impact of a college degree on people’s beliefs. The Wilmington, Del.-based ISI has administered the survey for the past three years.

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…any time the word “bomb” comes up at all ”” in a lesson on a war in history, in a novel in literature class ”” kids start laughing and pointing at …[my nephew].

It’s a problem that’s affecting his slang.

“Everybody’s favorite phrase is ‘That’s the bomb.’ You know, like ‘That video game’s the bomb.’ But I can’t say that because kids will make fun of me.”

What’s a parent to do?

“Do the teachers know this is going on?” I asked.

“Sure, they see it and they hear it. But they’d rather not get involved. Mostly, they just pretend that it’s not there.”

“I’ve told him I can come to his school and talk to the principal, the teachers, the kids, whoever,” said his father, an immigrant from India who works as an engineer and moved to this particular suburb for the good schools and seeming openness to diversity.

My nephew reacted like I would have when I was 14 ”” as if he’d rather be run over by a truck than have his father come to school to talk about what a great religion Islam is….

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“This is not a criminal proceeding,” Weinstein says. “We are talking about a code of conduct, which, I want to emphasize, both students and their parents sign before they begin any extracurricular activity, and they’ve all agreed to it.”

The code of conduct specifically prohibits students from consuming alcohol or drugs away from school.

Tenth-grader Justin Janowski says he doesn’t like the policy and thinks parents should be the ones making decisions about how to punish their kids outside of school. But he grudgingly admits the policy is effective.

“I mean, when I was a wrestler and played football like that’s one thing I didn’t want to do was get kicked off the team for getting bad grades. Or I don’t know, get caught smoking cigarettes outside of school, so I didn’t do it,” says Janowksi. “I stayed good.”

Janowski attends high school in a nearby district with the same policy. In the past decade, following the Columbine shooting, schools have suspended students for all sorts of misdeeds away from campus ”” vandalism, minor drug possession or cyber-bullying. Courts have tended to uphold these policies as long as officials can show some connection to school safety. But beyond the legal issues, there is also rigorous debate about whether “zero-tolerance” policies are effective.

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The cuts are also being felt in economically depressed areas like Richmond, near San Francisco, where unemployment is 17.6 percent and violent crime and poverty are common.

“Kids come to school hungry; some are homeless,” said Mary Flanagan, 55, a third-grade teacher from Richmond. “How can we deal with problems like that with as many as 38, 40 kids in a class?”

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On a Winter day five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager ”” desperate, in some cases ”” for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.

Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions.

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My high school, Mumford, has more than 2,000 students. This year, the administrative staff was replaced, we gained some new teachers, and we are losing others. Eight teachers are retiring this year amid the chaos within the school and the system.

As of Jan. 29, two teachers had already retired. And on that day, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, 19 teachers out of 91 were absent. A school counselor told me that the Board of Education would not send that many substitutes to Mumford, and that counselors had to cover for them. Students who did not have teachers that day were sent to the auditorium.

There, students were divided up by classes. Some students listened to music. Others talked to each other or tried to talk on cell phones. Counselors watched to make sure students remained seated. The air roared with conversation. Some students decided not to go to the auditorium and either played around in the hallways or left school.

I was one of the students in the auditorium. I tried to do work for my other classes, but with the noise swirling around me, I couldn’t get anything done. It was a waste of my time. And it is worse for students who have teachers for longer periods of time. Without teachers, school becomes simply a social gathering and a waste of educational time.

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(Warning–the content may not be suitable for some blog readers–KSH).

On a morning in April 2006, Eva was in her kitchen baking cookies. She was going to send them to Margaux, who was finishing her freshman year. Then the phone rang.

Eva remembers the call: “I had never heard such a desperate, just a truly desperate sound in her voice. She was just sobbing hysterically. And she kept saying ‘Mom, Mom, Mom. Mom, Mom,’ over and over. And finally I said, ‘Margaux, please, tell me what’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ And she said, she said: ‘I’ve been raped.’ ”

Margaux says, “I just remember, I was laying in my bed in my dorm. I had been out of control all week and crying and just laying in bed crying. But it was like a wailing, loud cry. The girl next door would come by my room and be like, ‘Are you OK?’ I’m not a big crier, so when I do cry, my parents know something’s really wrong.”

Margaux’s story is fairly typical for the many women who are sexually assaulted on college campuses. And what’s also common is the failure of even the best-intentioned colleges and universities to investigate a criminal matter like rape ”” and then punish it.

I caught this on the morning run. I would rather not think about it also, but it is an issue that has to be faced. I highly recommend the audio (not far under 8 minutes) as it is far more powerful (and detailed) than the written piece. Read or listen to it all.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against the U.S. Agency for International Development for not providing information about “religiously infused” abstinence programs the agency has funded.

The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday (Feb. 18), follows a report last July from USAID’s inspector general that found “some USAID funds were used for religious activities” during 2006 and 2007.

According to its complaint, the ACLU twice filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act seeking documents related to programs that promoted sexual abstinence. USAID acknowledged receiving the requests but never responded by sending the requested documents.

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Witold J. Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, says regardless of the applicability of wiretapping statutes, there’s still a constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

“There’s no confusion about whether the 4th Amendment applies here,” he says. “We haven’t had any cases where law enforcement was stupid enough to put a camera into a home without a warrant.”

Regardless of the legal outcome, Walczak predicts that other districts will be discouraged from remotely operating surveillance cameras, “given the firestorem that hit Lower Merion.”

There’s no way of telling whether schools or companies are using webcams to monitor their employees. The technology is certainly available. And it’s clear that many corporations use computers to keep track of employee activity — by reading their e-mails, for instance, or tracking which Web sites they visit.

“The fact that this has come to light is really important, because it shows there can be abuse,” says Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer group based in San Diego.

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Authorities in India’s majority-Christian Meghalaya state have confiscated all copies of a text book that contains a picture of Jesus holding a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

The controversial picture was discovered in a cursive writing book that was being used at a private school in the capital city of Shillong. It depicted the picture of Jesus on the page for the letter “I,” to represent “Idol.”

State education minister Ampareen Lyngdoh condemned the illustration.

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In the pantheon of unpopular moves by school superintendents, perhaps none rivals what John Covington wants to do.

Faced with declining enrollment and a $50 million budget shortfall, the Kansas City, Mo., schools chief wants the school board to close as many as 31 of the city’s 61 schools and lay off one-fourth of its employees ”” including 285 teachers.

Covington wants it done by the time school starts in fall. A vote could come in March.

“The bottom line is the quality of education we’re offering children in Kansas City is not good enough,” he says. “One reason it’s not good enough is that we’ve tried to spread our resources over far too many schools.”

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There are videos showing off card tricks, horsemanship, jump rope and stencils ”” and lots of rap songs, including one by a young woman who performed two weeks after oral surgery, with her mouth still rubber-banded shut.

There is also Rhaina Cohen’s video, working off the saying “You never truly know someone until you have walked a mile in her shoes,” and featuring the blue sandals from her bat mitzvah, the white sneakers she bought cheaply in Britain, and the black heels in which she “stood next to Hillary Clinton.”

It is reading season at the Tufts University admissions office, time to plow through thousands of essays and transcripts and recommendations ”” and this year, for the first time, short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application.

About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.

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… here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

It’s not even clear that society is better led. Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?

Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then?

The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower.

Why has this happened?

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A century ago, Herbert Croly published “The Promise of American Life,” a book — still in print — that was prophetic about today’s progressives. Contemplating with distaste America’s “unregenerate citizens,” he said that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities.” Therefore, Croly said, national life should be a “school” taught by the government: “The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?” Unregenerate Americans would be “saved many costly perversions” if “the official schoolmasters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate.”

Subordination is dependency seen from above. Today, it is seen approvingly by progressives imposing, from above, their dependency agenda.

There is no school choice here; no voucher will enable Americans to escape from enveloping dependency on this “government as school.” The dependency agenda is progressive education for children of all ages, meaning all ages treated as children.

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The diocese revoked the affiliation because the school’s board of trustees includes some of St. Paul’s major financial backers who have influence in the school’s direction.

The switch to what the diocese calls a patron-controlled model “disregards generally accepted practices for a school of this kind.”

Ten of 17 board members resigned over the issue, including Craig Anderson, bishop and representative of the diocese, and Jonathan Weldon, priest-in-charge of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

“Because this new direction is inconsistent with the identity, heritage and core values of the current school and because opposing the financial backers presents unacceptable financial risks to the school, we must resign our trusteeship,” stated a resignation letter signed by all 10 members.

Sadler disagrees with their view, saying the board will still be independent and include parent and teacher representatives, as well as others. There will be a change to the board’s bylaws, however, removing the bishop designee and priest.

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The Lower Merion School District in suburban Philadelphia last year issued an Apple laptop to each of its 1,800 high-school students. Superintendent Christopher McGinley told parents the goal was “to provide students with 21st-century learning environments both at home and in school”.

What he did not tell them was that each laptop was equipped with security software that allowed the school district to activate the computer’s webcam and view the students at any time, opening a virtual window into their lives.

This unnerving feature was revealed last week when a student and his parents filed a class action lawsuit against the school district, alleging its actions amount to “spying” and violate federal laws and the Fourth Amendment.

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Oregon is poised to become the 48th state to permit teachers to wear headscarves and other religious dress in school, ending an 87-year ban that was originally intended to keep Catholic nuns out of public schools.

The 51-8 vote by the state’s House of Representatives is the first decision toward repealing Oregon’s ban on religious garb. If passed, Nebraska and Pennsylvania would be the only remaining states to prohibit religious clothing.

If approved, the Oregon law would take effect in 2011. Before that, the state’s education and labor agencies would hammer out rules designed to protect students from religious coercion while allowing observant Muslim women, Sikhs and Orthodox Jewish men to teach in Oregon classrooms.

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It doesn’t take a degree from Harvard to see that in today’s world, a person needs to know something about religion. The conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage””all these relate, if indirectly, to what rival groups believe about God and scripture. Any resolution of these conflicts will have to come from people who understand how religious belief and practice influence our world: why, in particular, believers see some things as worth fighting and dying for. On the Harvard campus””where the next generation of aspiring leaders is currently beginning the spring term””the importance of religion goes without saying. “Kids need to know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia,” is something you hear a lot.

But in practice, the Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion. It cannot agree on who should teach it, how it should be taught, and how much value to give it compared with economics, biology, literature, and all the other subjects considered vital to an undergraduate education. This question of how much religion to teach led to a bitter fight when the faculty last discussed curriculum reform, in 2006. Louis Menand, the Pulitzer Prize”“winning literary critic and English professor, together with a small group of colleagues tasked with revising Harvard’s core curriculum, made the case that undergraduate students should be required to take at least one course in a category called Reason and Faith. These would explore big issues in religion: intelligent design, debates within and around Islam, and a history of American faith, for example. Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist, led the case against a religion requirement. He argued that the primary goal of a Harvard education is the pursuit of truth through rational inquiry, and that religion has no place in that.

In the end, Menand & Co. backed down, and the matter never made it to a vote. A more brutal fight was put off for another day. But that’s a pity””for Harvard, its students, and the rest of us who need leaders better informed about faith and the motivations of the faithful. Harvard may or may not be the pinnacle of higher learning in the world, but because it is Harvard, it reflects””for better or worse””the priorities of the nation’s intellectual set. To decline to grapple head-on with the role of religion in a liberal-arts education, even as debates over faith and reason rage on blogs, and as publishers churn out books defending and attacking religious belief, is at best timid and at worst self-defeating.

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Tod W. Burke likes to use examples from current events to illustrate points in his courses. On Thursday, the criminal justice professor at Radford University discussed with students the arrest of a Tennessee teacher who has been charged with the attempted murder, in school, of his principal and assistant principal.

It was “only a matter of time,” he told his students, until a shooting at a college would involve a professor as shooter, not victim.

Burke, who was a police officer before becoming an academic and who writes about workplace violence, said his sadly prescient point wasn’t that professors are more likely than others to be killers ”” he doesn’t believe that to be the case. But he said the issues associated with workplace violence can’t be ruled out in an academic environment. “We tend to forget as college professors that we are in a workplace, even if our institutions are very different from an assembly line or another kind of business,” he said.

That take on the shooting of three biology professors at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, apparently by Amy Bishop, another faculty member, is similar to those of a number of experts on campus security and workplace violence.

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The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.

The notion quickly gained some traction among supporters who agreed with the Republican’s assessment that many seniors frittered away their final year of high school, but faced vehement opposition from other quarters, including in his hometown of West Jordan.

“My parents are against it,” Williams said. “All the teachers at the school are against it. I’m against it.”

Buttars has since toned down the idea, suggesting instead that senior year become optional for students who complete their required credits early. He estimated the move could save up to $60 million, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The proposal comes as the state faces a $700-million shortfall and reflects the creativity — or desperation — of lawmakers.

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A new study on the faith of Catholic college students produced a Rorschach moment in today’s church that was neatly typified by contrasting headlines in the Catholic media:

“Catholic colleges weakening students’ faith, new study finds,” declared the conservative-leaning Catholic World News.

“Study: Catholics at Catholic colleges less likely to stray from church,” went the headline from Catholic News Service, the media outlet of the American bishops.

So which is it? Are Catholic colleges undermining the faith? Or are they an effective if leaky levee against the growing tide of secularism? The study, “Catholicism on Campus,” was released on Jan. 31 by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), at Georgetown University, which compiled the data from national surveys of more than 14,000 students at nearly 150 U.S. colleges and universities. Students were surveyed as freshmen in 2004 and then in 2007 as juniors.

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Among the many findings:

¶Coach Kevin Broadus successfully lobbied for a player’s grade to be changed.

¶Independent study classes were created exclusively for basketball players.

¶An assistant coach and a player openly discussed cash payments and academic cheating.

¶Coaches tried to keep arrests of players quiet, and gave players advice on what to tell the police while being questioned.

Binghamton is not alone in encountering problems with men’s basketball, as the report noted; if anything, its troubles reflect the struggles that many universities face in balancing academics and athletics.

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As colleges nationwide review freshman applications over the next several weeks, many will face lopsided numbers of male and female candidates. Some colleges maintain a gender balance, but national data in recent years show a 57%-43% split favoring women, both in enrollments and graduation rates. Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail and a former USA TODAY editorial writer, talks to reporter Mary Beth Marklein about how we got there, why we should care, and what should be done about it.

Q: Why do boys fail, and how do we turn that around?

A: The reforms launched by the nation’s governors more than 20 years ago to get more students college-ready had an unintended consequence: Most girls adjusted nicely to the intensified verbal skills demanded in the early grades; most boys didn’t. We have to figure out a way to keep boys on track with reading and writing skills. Boys are failing because the world has gotten more verbal and they haven’t.

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Another ladies’ night, not by choice.

After midnight on a rainy night last week in Chapel Hill, N.C., a large group of sorority women at the University of North Carolina squeezed into the corner booth of a gritty basement bar. Bathed in a neon glow, they splashed beer from pitchers, traded jokes and belted out lyrics to a Taylor Swift heartache anthem thundering overhead. As a night out, it had everything ”” except guys.

“This is so typical, like all nights, 10 out of 10,” said Kate Andrew, a senior from Albemarle, N.C. The experience has grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, “because there are no guys.”

North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.

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Al Qaeda is like a virus. When it appears en masse, it indicates something is wrong with a country’s immune system. And something is wrong with Yemen’s. A weak central government in Sana rules over a patchwork of rural tribes, using an ad hoc system of patronage, co-optation, corruption and force. Vast areas of the countryside remain outside government control, particularly in the south and east, where 300 to 500 Qaeda fighters have found sanctuary. This “Yemeni Way” has managed to hold the country together and glacially nudge it forward, despite separatist movements in the North and the South. But that old way and pace of doing things can no longer keep pace with the negative trends.

Consider a few numbers: Yemen’s population growth rate is close to 3.5 percent, one of the highest in the world, with 50 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people under the age of 15 and 75 percent under 29. Unemployment is 35 to 40 percent, in part because Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states booted out a million Yemeni workers after Yemen backed Saddam Hussein in the 1990 gulf war.

Thanks to bad planning and population growth, Yemen could be the first country to run out of water in 10 to 15 years. Already many Yemenis experience interrupted water service, like electricity blackouts, which they also have constantly. In the countryside today, women sometimes walk up to four hours a day to find a working well. The water table has fallen so low in Sana that you need oil-drilling equipment to find it. This isn’t helped by the Yemeni tradition of chewing qat, a mild hallucinogenic leaf drug, the cultivation of which consumes 40 percent of Yemen’s water supply each year.

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With a battered economy and volatile financial markets taking their tolls on donors’ pocketbooks, private giving to American colleges dropped sharply in 2009, according to findings of the annual Voluntary Support of Education survey, which were released on Wednesday. Donations were down $3.75-billion from the previous year””a decline of 11.9 percent, the steepest in the survey’s 50-year history.

Colleges brought in an estimated $27.85-billion in gifts in the 2009 fiscal year, according to the survey, which included 1,027 institutions and was conducted by the Council for Aid to Education. The year before, colleges raised $31.6-billion, which was the highest total ever reported in the survey. In 2009, alumni participation dropped to a record low, and the size of the average alumni gift was down, too.

The survey’s findings were grim but not unexpected. During the period of the survey””July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009””college fund raisers had reported “hitting a wall” with donors who had either lost significant portions of their wealth or were nervous that they would.

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