A year after Virginia overhauled its textbook approval process in an effort to cleanse classrooms of error-ridden books, one publisher is refusing to submit its scholarship to the state Department
There won’t be any more straight-A students next year in Fairfax County elementary schools. Thanks to a bold change in grading policy, there won’t be any more A’s at all — or, for that matter, B’s, C’s or D’s.
The letter grades stamped on report cards across America, long symbols of academic success or failure, are vanishing from many schools in the Washington area and beyond.
Virginia’s ambitious program to compensate teachers based on
performance has encountered its first hurdle: Only 6 percent of eligible
schools have elected to participate.
Several prominent Virginia superintendents are pushing the state to give
standardized tests months earlier in the school year, a shift they say
would reduce the impact of testing on classes and free teachers to offer
more meaningful lessons.
When Virginia officials decided every student should take a
course on personal finance and economics, their goal was to ensure that
high school graduates have practical skills in the wake of the global financial crisis.But some Nor
Officials in Fairfax and Loudoun counties said they probably would
reject the money even though McDonnell (R) was offering it at a time of
strained budgets.
As Northern Virginia became home to more immigrant families in recent
decades, Fairfax County officials say they started programs to teach
English as a second language at every school — about 200 of them. Except
one.
In her fight to keep her daughter's Fairfax County school from closing, Elizabeth Schultz found a new tool in an old law, filing more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests to bolster the case for Clifton Elementary. Schultz knows that the filings can be costly. Her last request for a trove of school officials' e-mails came with a shocking price tag: $624,000. She revised the request before it was processed.
State officials had no historian review the textbook "Our Virginia" before it was distributed to fourth-graders last month with a passage saying - wrongly, according to most scholars - that thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
kevin sieff