Education News

DALLAS (Reuters) - More than 200,000 children were hit as punishment in U.S. schools last year and in the South more blacks than whites are struck, two human rights groups said in a report released on Wednesday.

GREENVILLE, S.C. - A Montana woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to stealing the identity of a missing South Carolina woman to attend an Ivy League school in what her lawyer called a bid to escape a painful past.

WASHINGTON - Federal agencies are distributing 182,000 public alert radios to schools across the country.

College presidents from about 100 of the nation's best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.

WASHINGTON - Hard times and higher fuel prices will follow kids back to school this fall.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Faced with soaring diesel fuel costs, school districts are forcing students to use the old-fashioned way to get to class: on their own two feet.

Statistics on U.S. schools. Numbers with an "(x)" are projections.

CONCORD, N.H. - New Hampshire securities regulators on Thursday accused banking giant UBS of defrauding the state's leading issuer of student loans.

For years, college students and their parents have relied heavily on credit cards, home equity, and private loans to pay for school, according to a recent survey provided exclusively to BusinessWeek. But those sources of cash are drying up. On Aug. 6, Wachovia joined the more than 150 financial firms that have fled the private student-loan business. And Morgan Stanley froze home-equity lines for some clients.

The slight decline in this year's average ACT scores wasn't much of a surprise to the creators of the college admissions test. That's because a record 1.42 million students--or 43 percent of all 2008 graduates--took the test, a 9 percentage point increase from last year. The pool of test takers included students from three states-Colorado, Illinois, and Michigan--that make the ACT mandatory for all graduating students, including those who are not collegebound. Out of a possible 36, the average score on this year's ACT test was 21.1, down slightly from 21.2 last year. ...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California may need to increase its spending on education by more than $3 billion to implement a new algebra requirement urged by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state's top school official said on Tuesday.

LULA, Ga. - A suspect was shot to death and a sheriff's deputy injured after an hour-long standoff near an elementary school in north Georgia Monday, authorities said.

THE BACKDROP: Retailers are pulling out all the stops to entice shoppers into their stores during a difficult back-to-school season, as consumers cut back amid rising food and gas prices, declining home values and a shaky job market.

NEW YORK - Retailers preparing for a difficult back-to-school season are getting creative in their attempts to entice shoppers into the stores — aggressively introducing new products, slashing prices and amping up marketing in the battle for parents' bucks.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Former President Clinton is honoring 43 schools for their anti-obesity efforts, including one that banished candy from its building and another that offers a student fitness club.

MADISON, Wis. - Some of the nation's worst sex offenders will no longer be eligible to receive generous educational financial aid packages while they are confined in treatment centers under a bill approved by Congress.

ORLANDO, Fla. - John McCain, the father of private school students, criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama on Friday for choosing private over public school for his kids.

SEBOKENG, South Africa (Reuters) - A South African court on Friday postponed until October the trial of a former dormitory matron of U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey's girls academy charged with abusing minors.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Legislation that seeks to protect college students from lending abuses while boosting student aid was approved by Congress on Thursday.

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - The planned fence along the U.S.-Mexican border will no longer cut off a large chunk of a South Texas university, according to an agreement that the school and the federal government presented to a judge Thursday.

SAN JOSE (AFP) - Less than 10 percent of English teachers in Costa Rica's public schools and colleges have a good command of the language, according to the Ministry of Public Education, citing its own study Wednesday.

SEBOKENG, South Africa - A former dormitory matron at Oprah Winfrey's school for poor South African girls pleaded innocent Tuesday to charges that she indecently assaulted and otherwise abused six teenagers and a fellow matron at the academy.

Following is a list of the top 20 "stone-cold sober schools," according to Princeton Review's survey of 120,000 college students.

CHICAGO - Community leaders on Monday called on students from poorer parts of Chicago to protest inequalities in school funding by skipping the first day of classes.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - The University of Florida can raise a glass to another national title — best party school in the country. The Gators, known for wild celebrations following national championships in football and basketball, wrested the party title away from West Virginia University and beat out the University of Mississippi and Penn State University, in the Princeton Review survey of 120,000 students released Monday.

Following is a list of the top party schools in the nation, according to Princeton Review's survey of 120,000 students.

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. - Police say 54 people suffered minor injuries when two school buses collided on Interstate 95 in New York's Westchester County.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facing a crippling increase in fuel costs, some rural U.S. schools are mulling a solution born of the '70s oil crisis: a four-day week.

DALLAS - The nation's largest steroids testing program caught only two Texas high school athletes taking unauthorized substances out of more than 10,000 students who were tested, according to results issued Wednesday.