“These practices were essentially stigmatized,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who first noted the returning trend in a March report, and who has studied the grouping debate. “It’s kind of gone underground, it’s become less controversial.”

 The resurgence of ability grouping comes as New York City grapples with the state of its gifted and talented programs — a form of tracking in some public schools in which certain students, selected through testing, take accelerated classes together.

 These programs, which serve about 3 percent of the elementary school population, are dominated by white and Asian students.

 Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker who is running for mayor, has proposed expanding the number of gifted classes while broadening the criteria for admission in hopes of increasing diversity. (The city’s Education Department has opposed the proposal, saying that using criteria other than tests would dilute the classes.)

 Teachers and principals who use grouping say that the practice has become indispensable, helping them cope with widely varying levels of ability and achievement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/education/grouping-students-by-ability-regains-favor-with-educators.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

In the civil religions of the modern world, the future functions as a surrogate for heaven and hell alike,  the place where the wicked will finally get the walloping they deserve and the good will be granted the promised benefits that the present never quite gets around to providing them. What Nietzsche called the death of God—in less colorful language, the fading out of living religious belief as a significant force in public life—left people across the Western world flailing for something to backstop the sense of moral order in the cosmos they once derived from religious faith.

The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about. By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies. Each society emerges out of chaos as a decentralized feudal society, with a warrior aristocracy and an epic poetry so similar that an enterprising bard could have recited the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall without anyone present sensing the least incongruity.  Each then experiences corresponding shifts in social organization:  the meadhalls and their equivalents give way to castles, the castles to fortified towns, the towns to cities, and then a few of the cities outgrow all the others and become the centers in which the last stages of the society’s creative life are worked out.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-scheduled-death-of-god.html

Buena Vista schools have been closed for five days already, and on Monday, the district's website stated that the school would be closed until further notice. For good reason, this decision has parents, and the community, up in arms.

The problem in Buena Vista is that the school district, educating approximately 450 kids, is out of money. All the teachers have been laid off and a financial emergency has been declared. The district has suffered from declining enrollment, which, in turn, has led to a loss of $3 million in state funding since 2010.

In an effort to keep schools open, teachers said they would work without pay. This is not possible under Michigan law so educators have been left in limbo. To make matters worse, the staff has also lost their health insurance.

http://news.yahoo.com/michigan-district-fires-teachers-closes-every-school-012040117.html