National Briefing | Education: Former Ohio State President Returns to West Virginia

E. Gordon Gee, 69, who resigned from his second stint as president of Ohio State University in July after a series of embarrassing gaffes, will start off one more second-time-about job next month, as interim president of West Virginia University. Dr. Gee, who has also been president of Brown, Vanderbilt and the University of Colorado, previously served as president of West Virginia University from 1981 to 1985, when he was a single of the nation’s youngest university presidents. Dr. Gee will serve until finally a new president is named, and be paid, on an annual basis, $ 450,000. 

National Briefing | Education: Former Ohio State President Returns to West Virginia

Is President Obama’s Universal Pre-K Vision Effective?

New research on pre-k packages has raised doubts about the effectiveness of President Obama’s Preschool for All, which was announced in the president’s state of the union handle in February. Lately, legislation was introduced in the Senate and Property to produce federally funded universal pre-k for four-12 months-olds. The information of the new legislation are largely constant with Preschool for All, Grover J. Russ Whitehurst writes in Brookings Institution.

According to Whitehurst, supporters of Preschool for All have turned a blind eye to the mixed and conflicting nature of research findings on the impact of pre-k for four-12 months-olds. They are highlighting good long term outcomes of two boutique packages from forty-50 many years ago that served a couple of hundred children.

Also, proponents appeal to current research with severe methodological flaws that purports to show that district preschool programs in areas this kind of as Tulsa and the Abbott districts in New Jersey are successful, Whitehurst mentioned, noting that they have ignored the results from the Nationwide Head Commence Influence Study, which discovered no differences in elementary college outcomes amongst young children who had vs. had not attended Head Start as 4-yr-olds.

In addition, proponents ignore analysis displaying negative impacts on children who get youngster care supported by means of the federal youngster growth block grant system, as effectively as evidence that the universal pre-k packages in Georgia and Oklahoma, which are closest to what the Obama administration has proposed, have had, at ideal, only small impacts on later academic achievement, according to Whitehurst.

Here I want to draw your consideration to a newly launched examine of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K Plan (TN-VPK). TN‐VPK is a complete day pre-k system for four‐year‐olds from minimal-cash flow households. It has high quality requirements that are higher and in trying to keep with people proposed by the Obama administration underneath Preschool for All, such as the requirement of a licensed teacher in each and every classroom, no more than ten kids per adult, and an authorized and proper curriculum.

The review was performed by a team of researchers at Vanderbilt. The examine, which began in 2009, is a randomized trial involving about 3,000 four-12 months-olds whose mothers and fathers had applied for their admission to oversubscribed TN-VPK plans. A lottery was utilised to decide on individuals to whom an provide of admission was made. Individuals winning the lottery constitute the intervention group. These losing the lottery constitute the manage group.

The researchers identified that participants in the TN-VPK had been significantly less very likely to have been retained in kindergarten than non-participants (4% to six%). In contrast, young children served by TN-VPK have been a lot more likely to have obtained college-based particular training services than children in the manage group, in accordance to Whitehurst.

There have been no statistically considerable differences between the two groups on absences from college or disciplinary actions.

The researchers hold out hope that the good discovering on kindergarten retentions implies that the TN-VPK had a constructive result on children’s social/emotional growth, which will lead to prolonged phrase good outcomes like individuals that were discovered in the famous Perry Preschool Undertaking, Whitehurst explained.

This would seem to me to be grasping at straws, given the lack of any distinctions amongst participants and non-participants in teacher rated social/emotional outcomes, and given other investigation displaying no association among kindergarten retentions and later school overall performance, Whitehurst stated.

Is President Obama’s Universal Pre-K Vision Effective?

Notre Dame to remember President John F. Kennedy

President John F. Kennedy is presented the 1961 Laetare Medal in the Oval Workplace. Attending the presentation (L-R): unidentified man Father Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., vice president of Notre Dame Rep. John Brademas, Indiana Kennedy Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of Notre Dame and two unidentified males.

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the University of Notre Dame will ring bells and supply Mass in his memory.

The bells of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart will toll in tribute to the president at two p.m. EST Friday (Nov. 22), the time of his death on Nov. 22, 1963. Masses at the Basilica at 11:30 a.m. and five:15 p.m. will be presented for justice and peace and will incorporate an intercession for him.

Notre Dame also will understand the anniversary prior to the Irish football game Saturday (Nov. 23) against Brigham Young University when the flag will be presented by G. Robert Blakey, one particular of the nation’s top authorities on the tragic events 50 many years ago. Blakey was the chief legal counsel and employees director for the U.S. Residence Select Committee on Assassinations and helped draft the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Data Assortment Act of 1992. A graduate of the University, Blakey was elevated to emeritus status a year ago following educating for far more than 35 many years in the University’s Law College.

Kennedy received Notre Dame’s highest honor, the Laetare Medal, in a White Property ceremony two many years to the day prior to his assassination. He received an honorary degree from the University in 1950.

Notre Dame to remember President John F. Kennedy