Education

According to the executive director of the National Coalition of Girls' Schools, brain science is revealing insights about how people think, learn and view the world and that there are differences in how information is processed by the male and female brain. Is an all-girls education a valuable option or is it merely sex segregation?

For this school year, the Dallas (TX) public school district made a controversial decision to revise classroom grading rules in an effort to create a uniform grading policy.

The family circumstances of the GOP VP nominee have raised the issue of sex education and whether it should focus on abstinence or be more comprehensive.

Why isn't education a bigger political issue in the presidential campaign?

A USA Today Op-Ed piece took the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to task over its study entitled Where the Girls Are, which infers that "boy troubles" in education are a myth and, if not, the gap between male and female students is limited to poor and minority children. The paper took the view:

The facts show that gender gaps start to emerge in elementary school and widen in middle school. As for the contention that the gaps are a function of race and income, not gender, that

The USA Today Op-Ed section recently tackled a debate on school choice.

A USA Today Op-Ed piece addresses what it calls tolerance for mediocrity by U.S. colleges:

Below the top ranks, there are reasons to suspect more tolerance for mediocrity than an assault on it. A 2006 study sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts found shockingly low literacy among students at four-year colleges, with only half testing at a proficient level.

According to research conducted by the National Education Association, the ranks of male teachers are dwindling:

…over the last two decades, the ratio of males to females in teaching has steadily declined. The number of male teachers now stands at a 40-year low. The percentage of male teachers in elementary schools has fallen regularly since 1981 - that year, it reached an all-time high of 18 percent. Today, a scant 9 percent of elementary school teachers are men.

In his commentary “Betrayal of the Civil Rights Struggle,” Walter Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, asks, “What happened?” He was referencing the level of violence in today’s schools:

Philadelphia had 14 schools labeled as "persistently dangerous" and Baltimore had six.

A USA Today Op-Ed piece addresses the issue of sex education for teens, indicating that while abstinence-only may work for some, it doesn’t work for all: With all of this talk about abstinence, here's the truth: Abstinence-only education is not the panacea for teenage sex. Consider some facts: * Three-fourths of U.S. teens have premarital sex by age 20, and 58% have it before age 18, according to a study published this year in Public Health Reports, the journal of the U.S.