Top Rank Schools

In a letter today, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights again emphasized that schools and universities must be sure that any technological device they use must be accessible to students with disabilities.

Less than a year ago, the OCR and the Department of Justice’s civil rights division sent colleges and universities a “Dear Colleague” letter that warned that using electronic book readers that lack a function that reads all words aloud for students with vision problems could be considered discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. That letter came on the heels of settlements over ebook readers between the Department of Justice and several universities, including Princeton, Pace University in New York, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

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Tens of thousands of pupils taking Latin, maths and physics tests this week were presented with impossible questions or printing mistakes – sparking claims that the credibility of the exams system was under threat.

The latest errors emerged just weeks after Ofqual, the qualifications watchdog, ordered all exam boards to carry out emergency checks on papers being sat throughout June to eradicate further mistakes.

Today, an exam board at the centre of one of the blunders pledged it would sack staff responsible.

The National Union of Students has already written to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, demanding an urgent investigation into the incidents.

It is believed at least 10 exams have now been affected by blunders this summer. <

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An article featured on Edweek this week by Jeffrey Henig and S. Paul Reville, “Why Attention Will Return to Non-School Factors” provides a great summary of issues surrounding education that public school advocates have been trying to direct attention to for years. However, the optimism that the public will inevitably invest in these issues may be overly rosy—though I certainly hope their prediction pans out.

The authors point out that “when thinking about their own families, parents take it as a given that non-school factors . . . affect whether their children will thrive.” Likewise, analysts studying patterns of education achievement “take it as a given that socioeconomic status, concentrations of poverty, and school and residential mobility are dominating predictors that must be statistically controlled for before one can accurately register weaker and less reliable effects of teachers and schools.” The authors add: “[t]hat there are exceptions to the rule—that children and schools in poor neighborhoods succeed against all odds—does not gainsay the core reality that the odds are steep.”

Despite these realities that indicate people certainly consider non-school factors to be greatly significant, the authors point out that often times in education reform circles, many fear “[a]ttention to non-school factors . . . as an excuse to let

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Last week I took the Securing Networks with ASA Foundation (642-524) exam and passed with a score of 954/1000. It has been 3 years since the last time I took a Cisco exam because I had to renew my CCNA/CCNP/CCSP certifications which were going to expire this coming March. The good thing about recertification is that you can pass any current 642-XXX professional level exam in order to renew ALL of your Professional Level certifications, no matter if the exam is related with security or routing and switching. Therefore by passing the 642-524 exam I have renewed both my CCNP and CCSP for 3 more years. This particular exam will be offered up to 4/8/11 and then will be replaced by the new 642-617 FIREWALL v1.0 exam.

I have noticed that the exam was more difficult from the past and that Cisco has taken measures for more accurate evaluation of the knowledge possessed by the exam takers. There were some “real world” scenarios in the exam which showed an ASDM Graphical User Interface which you could click on it and navigate inside the ASDM just like a real one. The Read more…

Charter school named among top 10

Inglewood. An Inglewood school is one of the top 10 independent charter campuses among more than 800 statewide, according to a report released last week by USC.

The USC School Performance Dashboard, put out by the university’s Center on Educational Governance, is a comprehensive report on the performance of charter schools. In its fifth year, the report ranks schools on 12 indicators, including financial resources and investment, school quality, student performance and academic productivity.

Wilder’s Preparatory Academy Charter was highlighted as the 10th of 10 top charter schools, as measured by the highest combined ratings. It was the only school singled out from Los Angeles County, which has the greatest concentration of charter schools in the country.

The largely African-American school is a K-8 campus that opened in 2003. The school is on North La Brea Avenue.

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The USC study is at .

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