For now, the controversy continues, as does the pressure on local politicians. Michael Frey is on the Board of Supervisors. He voted for the school’s expansion and says he still gets criticized for it. One man approached him at his local supermarket on a Sunday morning. In an aggressive tone, he said he couldn’t believe Frey could consider himself a conservative after voting the way he did.

“I said, ‘I don’t believe anybody who wants local government to be reading texts and making decisions on schools based on what they teach is a conservative,’ ” Frey replied. “To me, that is one of the biggest intrusions you could possibly imagine.”

The State Department agrees. Conservative Christian groups that have lobbied for the school to be closed say that because it’s funded by the Saudi government, the State Department should intervene. But the State Department says ISA is a private school, not a foreign mission, and it has no role in accrediting or managing the school.

Read or listen to it all from Weekend edition this past Sunday.

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can convince a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for the nation’s embattled efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

In the first carefully designed study to evaluate the controversial approach to sex ed, researchers found that only about a third of 6th and 7th graders who went through sessions focused on abstinence started having sex in the next two years. In contrast, nearly half of students who got other classes, including those that included information about contraception, became sexually active.

“I think we’ve written off abstinence-only education without looking closely at the nature of the evidence,” said John B. Jemmott III, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the federally funded study. “Our study shows this could be one approach that could be used.”

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Regardless, getting angry isn’t the answer, said [Dr. Reed] Tuckson, who cautions against demonizing heavy people.

“Not only is getting angry mean-spirited and antithetical to the kind of society we want to live in, but it’s also counterproductive,” Tuckson said. “We need to convert our concern into positive action and find ways to support individuals to make better choices.”

He believes that reducing the incidence of obesity and its related health costs will require changes on four levels:
* Individuals need to be more accountable for their choices — and that includes what they put in their bodies.

* Families must be responsible for what they feed their children, with parents acting as role models for healthful diet and exercise habits and schools providing proper choices.

* Community institutions, including the workplace, must take a more active role in what foods are served and offer a healthy culture, wellness programs and financial incentives to encourage more healthful behaviors.

* Better research is needed so we can know what works and doesn’t. “Healthcare decisions are made by individuals but in the context of families and the community,” Tuckson said. “That context has to change.”

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A U.S. immigration judge has granted political asylum to a Christian family from Germany that wants to home-school its children.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which defended the family, announced the Tuesday (Jan. 26) decision by Judge Lawrence Burman in Memphis, Tenn.

“This decision finally recognizes that German home-schoolers are a specific social group that is being persecuted by a Western democracy,” said Mike Donnelly, an attorney and director of international relations for the Purcellville, Va.-based association.

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Politicians, including Obama, had been highlighting the dilapidated Dillon County school for more than a year by the time of Obama’s February 2009 speech. He and several other presidential candidates visited the school during the run-up to the 2008 election. And Obama first brought national media attention to the students’ plight in August 2007, when he winced as a high-pitched train whistle interrupted lessons during his visit.

All but $4 million of the federal money the county is receiving is a loan, which the area will pay back using revenue from a 1-cent sales tax levied in 2007, Rogers said. Some of the money will be used to refurbish existing facilities and build a new early childhood development center. But about $25 million will go toward building a new J.V. Martin Junior High School.

The school is in a rural swath along Interstate 95 in the state’s northeastern corner known as the Corridor of Shame, after a 2005 documentary about conditions in schools there. The school itself is a hodgepodge of buildings; the original part, a former church, dates to 1896, and the latest section was added in 1955. The auditorium, built in 1917, was condemned in 2008 by the state fire marshal.

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Every few weeks I see a new study showing a link between exercise and improved cognitive performance.

The most recent from an article in the New York Times showing how strength training improves the cognitive performance of older women.

A quick sampling of the studies like this, this and this are adding to the growing body of evidence that exercise has benefits beyond the heart and waist line.

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A handful of top universities around the nation have recorded banner years in freshman applications, including a 42 percent increase at the University of Chicago, a 19 percent rise at Princeton and a 17 percent increase at the University of Pennsylvania. The number of applications to Chicago has doubled since 2006, and the number to Harvard topped 30,000 for the first time.

“It’s a migration of high school seniors to strong institutions, strong brands,” said John Latting, dean of undergraduate admissions at Hopkins. “Either they are prepared to pay, or they are confident that the aid is out there for them.”

Some admissions experts say the increase simply means each senior is applying to more schools. Each new group of seniors applies to a larger number of schools, “with the hope of hitting the merit-money jackpot,” said Sally Rubenstone, senior adviser at the Web site College Confidential. “Acceptance rates plummet, which, in turn, terrifies the next crop of seniors, who then apply to an even longer list of schools.”

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Last week’s earthquake has devastated Haiti, and prompted a massive relief effort. In a smaller but almost equally intense way, the disaster has pervaded every part of the school day for the 510 students ”” 80 percent of them Haitian ”” at SS. Joachim and Anne, the Roman Catholic elementary school in Queens Village, Queens, a hub of New York’s Haitian community.

They pray. They scrounge up donations. The quake informs class discussions about politics, about helping the poor, about the afterlife. And when the children are not talking about it, their teachers suspect, they are thinking about it.

As classmates played with cubes on Wednesday, learning to add, Michael Constant, 6, squirmed in his seat. His mother had just left for Haiti that morning to bury his father.

As 250,000 Haitian-Americans in the New York area mourn, children bear their own burdens. Many feel as much at home in Haiti as in New York. They struggle to picture the houses where they spent summers now in rubble, grandparents and cousins dead, missing, homeless. For others, Haiti exists in tales parents tell ”” a place they long to visit and now wonder if they will ever see.

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Most people in this quiet all-American town describe themselves as devoutly Christian, but even here they are deeply divided over what should happen to John Freshwater.

Mr. Freshwater, an eighth-grade public school science teacher, is accused of burning a cross onto the arms of at least two students and teaching creationism, charges he says have been fabricated because he refused an order by his principal to remove a Bible from his desk.

After an investigation, school officials notified Mr. Freshwater in June 2008 of their intent to fire him, but he asked for a pre-termination hearing, which has lasted more than a year and cost the school board more than a half-million dollars.

The hearing is finally scheduled to end Friday, and a verdict on Mr. Freshwater’s fate is expected some months later. But the town — home to about 15,000 people, more than 30 churches and an evangelical university — remains split.

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Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.

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Anote of gratitude is due Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe for ordering the immediate firing of Matthew Kim after a tortuous seven-year saga. This wasn’t the first time that Yaffe tried to inject common sense into the absurdly difficult and expensive task of ridding classrooms of teachers who don’t belong there. His previous decision to allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire Kim, issued in July, was ignored by the panel that has authority over contested teacher dismissals.

The Kim fiasco is a reminder of just how many thousands of dollars and costly lawyers and innumerable court appearances are currently required to fire incompetent or otherwise troublesome teachers. And, adding insult to injury, Kim has been paid his full salary and benefits since 2003 while doing no work for the district.

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Americans err if we believe that it’s only a black responsibility to right the social wrongs of racial inequality. It’s a white responsibility, too ”” and a Christian responsibility. Why Christians? It’s not that other faiths can’t do their part as well, but Christians ”” by sheer number and religious tradition ”” could be our best hope.

History shows that the teachings of Christianity hold an undeniable power to inspire positive social movements and call Americans to conscience, as they did during King’s time. Many Christians will be the first to tell you they should be held to a higher standard ”” because their religion insists on it.

Let’s improve educational and economic opportunities for African-Americans. Let’s acknowledge and root out the racism that mocks the American ideal. Let’s reject the harmful message of the prosperity gospel and reclaim the best of the nation’s black church tradition, with Christians ”” white as well as black ”” leading the charge for the dispossessed.

As the distinguished columnist Roger Cohen recently reminded, it is on the matter of race where one finds the greatest gulf between American behavior and American ideals. Will history find the same gap between Christian behavior and Christian ideals?

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When I look at America from…[Taipei, Taiwan], I worry. China is now our main economic partner and competitor. Sure, China has big problems. Nevertheless, I hope Americans see China’s rise as the 21st-century equivalent of Russia launching the Sputnik satellite ”” a challenge to which we responded with a huge national effort that revived our education, infrastructure and science and propelled us for 50 years. Unfortunately, the Cheneyites want to make fighting Al Qaeda our Sputnik. Others want us to worry about some loopy remark Senator Harry Reid made about the shade of Obama’s skin.

Well, what is our national project going to be? Racing China, chasing Al Qaeda or parsing Harry? Of course, to a degree, we need to both race China and confront Al Qaeda ”” but which will define us?

“Our response to Sputnik made us better educated, more productive, more technologically advanced and more ingenious,” said the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “Our investments in science and education spread throughout American society, producing the Internet, more students studying math and people genuinely wanting to build the nation.”

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At a time when too many of Britain’s schools suffer from abysmal standards of management, teaching and discipline, it seems incredible that the Government should devote resources to harassing some of the most successful state schools in the country. The establishments in questions are faith schools, and while Tony Blair was prime minister they were largely left alone (hardly surprisingly, since Mr Blair educated his own children at one of them). But since 2007 the Government has resorted to the sort of political bullying of “elitist” schools associated with the Wilson and Callaghan administrations.

As we report today, in the last six months more than 30 faith schools, most of them Church of England or Roman Catholic, have been investigated by the Office for the Schools Adjudicators, England’s admissions watchdog. The main purpose: to make sure they do not quiz prospective parents about their faith, since this could constitute “selection”. To cite one example: Cardinal Vaughan School in west London, an excellent and diverse Catholic comprehensive, is effectively forbidden from giving preference to children from committed Catholic families because this might produce a “middle-class” bias. Matters have not been helped by politically correct Catholic education advisers and, as a result, the freedom of a faith school to define itself by its ethos has been weakened.

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The Trustees today elected John M. McCardell Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College, following a national search that began in February 2009.

McCardell’s appointment is effective July 1. He succeeds Joel Cunningham, who will retire June 30, 2010, after 10 years as Vice Chancellor.

“John McCardell’s record of achievement as a scholar, as the chief executive of one of America’s finest liberal arts colleges, and as a respected national figure in the public discussion about higher education and student life extends the work of his predecessors and the pursuit of the vision of Sewanee’s founders: to establish a national university located in the South,” said the Rt. Rev. J. Neil Alexander, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, Chancellor of the University and Chair of the Board of Trustees.

“He is an inspirational leader who will strengthen Sewanee’s historic commitment to excellence in the liberal arts and service to the Episcopal Church. We are delighted that he has answered this call to service.”

Read it all and check out the video as well.

When a student dies, even the most bustling school can feel like a mausoleum.

Grief professionals come in, information assemblies are held and young people are encouraged to discuss their emotions in groups or one-on-one meetings with counselors.

But asking students to relive or recollect a tragedy could hurt more than help, according to a new commentary published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Psychological debriefing could actually contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder rather than stave it off, researchers from Dalhousie University write.

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When the family budget started feeling the recession’s pinch last year, Angela Allyn and her photographer husband, Matt Dinnerstein, pulled their three kids out of Chicago-area private schools and enrolled them in Evanston, Ill., public schools.

It has been a challenging transition: Maya, 16, now a high school sophomore, “doesn’t like crowds ”” and her high school is as big as a small college,” her mother says. Though Maya is learning a lot in the “amazing” science program, she’s also hoping to leave the crowds behind by doubling up on coursework, graduating by the end of junior year “and then going and doing interesting things,” Allyn says. Her younger children face their own challenges, from bullying to sheer boredom.

The transition also has been an education for Maya’s parents, who say they had “no choice” in the struggling economy but to switch to public schools.

They’re saving about $20,000 a year in tuition, but like many former private-school families, they’re coming face-to-face with larger class sizes and the public school bureaucracy as they push to get services for their children.

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America’s teachers’ colleges are facing some pressure to reinvent themselves.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been leading the assault, with a series of speeches calling for better teacher training. Duncan says it’s crucial that education schools revamp their curricula so they can help replace a wave of baby boomers who will soon retire from teaching.

One university is trying to rebuild its teacher-training program from the ground up.

At the University of Michigan School of Education, Dean Deborah Ball and her faculty have taken apart their training program and reassembled it, trying to figure out what skills teachers really need.

“We expect people to be reliably able to carry out that work. We don’t seem to have that same level of expectation or requirement around teaching,” Ball says.

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When Daniel Ottalini entered the University of Maryland in 2004, his family had an array of choices to cover the cost — cheap student loans, a second mortgage at low rates, credit cards with high limits and their own soaring investments.

By the time his younger brother, Russell, started at the University of Pittsburgh this fall, the financial crisis had left the family with fewer options. Russell has had to juggle several jobs in school, and the money he could borrow came with a much higher interest rate that could climb even further over time.

The upheaval in financial markets did not just eliminate generous lending for home buyers; it also ended an era of easy credit for students and their families facing the soaring cost of a college degree.

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On the first day of her introductory religion class at Merrimack College just north of Boston, professor Rebecca Sachs Norris put her students to work at having some fun.

She assigned teams of three or four students to play some of the many religious board games that fill her office shelves. Weeks later, they had to present their classmates with what they gleaned from each game.

As one team discussed BuddhaWheel, a game that teaches about Buddhism, Norris, chair of Merrimack’s religious and theological studies department, asked, “Can you win this game?

“One of them said, `Well, yes, but it takes a very, very long time! You just keep getting born over and over and over again.’

“I said, `Exactly, that’s it!’, and they learned it in a way that is very different.”

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Halftime show at the homecoming for Anacostia High School, a big time for any high school kid. But something was missing here: parents. The school has more than 900 students, but only a few of the mothers showed up, and there was hardly a father to be seen. Listen to the personal resumes of some of the students and former students.

JACOB JOHNSON: When I was eight years old I joined a gang, and I’ve been in a gang ever since, and I”˜ve done things that have threatened my life and other’s lives, you know what I’m saying?

SEVERSON: What kind of trouble were you getting into?

PAUL SPIRES: Fights. Drugs.

SEVERSON: Gangs?

SPIRES: Gangs. Girls left and right.

AYANA SMITH: All the females in my family got pregnant really young. Thirteen, fourteen, twelve.

SEVERSON: In fact, one girl in nine will get pregnant while attending Anacostia High School. Less than half the freshman class will graduate. Drugs and violence. Broken families.

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On Dec. 8, some of America’s brightest contemporary intellectuals gathered at the New School to discuss the tenuous relationship between “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual.” Sponsored by Brooklyn-based literary magazine n+1, the panel featured The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell and James Wood and The Nation’s former associate literary editor Christine Smallwood. While these thinkers all grew up in close proximity to evangelicalism, there was one conspicuous absence from the conversation: an intellectual who still professes the Christian faith. The discussion was predictably thoughtful, though evangelical belief was treated as something necessarily dispensed with on the way to becoming a public scholar.

This feeling of intellectual distance from grass-roots Christianity is not new. It’s been almost 30 years since Charles Malik, a former president of the United Nations General Assembly and a devout Christian, gave a speech at Wheaton College called “The Two Tasks.” To the audience assembled for the dedication of Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center, he said: “The greatest danger besetting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism.” This idea was picked up by historian Mark A. Noll 14 years later in his 1994 book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” The “scandal” of the title, he said, was “that there is not much of an evangelical mind,” despite what he sees as a biblical mandate to better understand creation. Mr. Noll asserts that this lack is reinforced by the historical experience of evangelicals in America, whose churches and ministries have gained more adherents at the cost of fostering anti-intellectualism and bad theology.

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Intensive reading programs can produce measurable changes in the structure of a child’s brain, according to a study in the journal Neuron. The study found that several different programs improved the integrity of fibers that carry information from one part of the brain to another.

“That helped areas of the brain work together,” says Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Coordination is important because reading involves a lot of different parts of the brain, Just says.

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By the time the phone rang at 5:30 one morning two years ago, Will Johnson was already intimately acquainted with tradition in college sports. He had stood proud at Harvard Stadium and battled the enemy in the Yale Bowl. He had played in the Game.

But the voice Johnson heard through his sleepy haze was telling him that he still had plenty to learn about tradition.

Johnson was being offered the chance to play in an older rivalry, one between universities that make Harvard and Yale look like expansion teams: Oxford and Cambridge. He could not turn it down, even if it meant moving to a country he hardly knew and playing a sport he had only just met.

On Thursday, Johnson will pull on his navy blue Oxford rugby jersey to face Cambridge in the Varsity Match, which stands alongside the Boat Race in the two universities’ annual tussle for bragging rights. He called it a one-game season.

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The American model remains an impressive growth engine, even allowing for the debt-fueled bubble. The U.S. economy grew by 63 percent between 1991 and 2009, compared with 35 percent for France, 22 percent for Germany and 16 percent for Japan over the same period. In 1975, the U.S. accounted for 26.3 percent of world G.D.P. Today, after the rise of the Asian tigers, the U.S. actually accounts for a slightly higher share of world output: 26.7 percent.

The U.S. has its problems, but Americans would be crazy to trade their problems with those of any other large nation.

Moreover, there’s a straightforward way to revive innovation. In an unfairly neglected white paper on the subject, President Obama’s National Economic Council argued that the U.S. should not be in the industrial policy business. Governments that try to pick winners “too often end up wasting resources and stifling rather than promoting innovation.” But there are several things the government can do to improve the economic ecology. If you begin with that framework, you can quickly come up with a bipartisan innovation agenda.

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Chancellor, Bishop Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo, Oyo State, Most Rev. Peter Akinola, has said the situation in the country indicates that the vision, sacrifice and labour of “our past heroes are now virtually in vain.”

He berated the nation’s leaders for sending their children to foreign schools with tax payers money after grounding the educational system.

Akinola argued that between 1990 and 2002, the federal budgetary allocation to the education sector only existed on paper, judging by the disparity between published figures and disbursments.

Akinola, who is also the Primate, Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), spoke at the university’s maiden convocation on Monday. He spoke shortly after his investiture as the chancellor of the university by the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Olajire Olaniran.

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“No matter where they’ve attended school,” the reader is assured in Becoming a Master Student, the most widely used text intended to orient incoming freshmen, “liberally educated people can state what they’re willing to bet their lives on.” But this otherwise helpful book fails to give students direction on how to discover such confidence.

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Notre Dame fired head football coach Charlie Weis on Monday after a string of disappointing seasons that was capped by an agonizing four-game losing streak.

Athletic director Jack Swarbrick announced the decision, saying in a news release: “We have great expectations for our football program, and we have not been able to meet those expectations.”

Swarbrick said he recommended to university president the Rev. John Jenkins on Sunday night that Weis be let go with six years left on his contract. Weis leaves his alma mater with a 35-27 record in five seasons, among the worst of any Fighting Irish coach.

Assistant head coach Rob Ianello will step in for Weis until a new coach is hired.

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The rise of College Sports Inc. didn’t happen by accident. Administrators at many universities have allowed athletic departments to operate independently, like stand-alone entertainment divisions. They have separate budgets, negotiate their own TV deals and, in some cases, employ hundreds of coaches and staff. And as long as they continue to collect ever-larger sums from ticket sales, boosters and television, who is going to tell them to spend less?

Another key element fueling the arms race is the increasingly indefensible tax treatment of sports revenues. Decades ago ”” before the lucrative television contracts, Internet marketing, Nike sponsorships and luxury boxes ”” Congress essentially exempted colleges from paying taxes on their sports income. The legislators’ reasoning now appears shockingly quaint: that participation in college sports builds character and is an important component of the larger college experience.

Many booster clubs are recognized as charities under the federal tax code. At Florida and Georgia, to name just two universities, the athletic departments are set up as charities.

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