$170,000 on two school buses called the ”Success Expresses” which help students and parents learn about preparing for college.

big gaps in spending per student between rich and poor school districts. The newspaper found that around 80% of the poorer school districts did not spend more than the $8,765 per pupil average for elementary districts in 2005.

going to allow some students to skip a grade level something the school district rarely likes to do.

is dropping in the Mesa and South East Valley parts of Arizona.

on how schools should properly use time is out. The Washington Post also has an article up on this topic as well.

The report starts out with a little history on school time and says that in the 1800’s that the school year was as long as 250 days in some US cities before settling down on a schedule of 170-180 by the 1960’s.

The report does get into other studies on this topic and what they have said with each study giving out different views on the subject.

The report looks at math ranking of other international counties and the amount of instruction time per year they have. US ranks 24th with 799 instructional hours while Finland at number one has 861 hours per year. Korea locks in at number 2 with over 1000 instructional hours per year.

Figure 2 is very interesting. It show off that low income students with no summer school have a learning loss while middle income students with no summer school have no learning loss based on research done by John Hopkins University.

They look at topics such as Year-Round schools and Block scheduling. They also look at for profit Edison schools which had a longer school year, but dropped it for having longer school days. Kipp Schools also gets a look at as well.

They do give out some recommendations like collect data and pay attention to plans that already exist. I liked the recommendations they give out.

I found this report to be a great read.

turned to eBay to auction off a year’s worth of tuition, room and board. The bidding is up to around 4,500 says the article. The regular price for this prize is around 23 grand.