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North Carolina school officials are telling all 115 school districts to perform special inspections after a Charlotte school bus burst into flames seconds after children escaped.

The state Department of Public Instruction says an investigation of the fire two weeks ago found that the wires on the bus had worn, possibly causing an electric short-circuit and the fire.

Officials think the problem may exist on other Thomas Built Buses received by schools in 1998 and 1999.

State school officials say while Thomas Built Buses is completing a more detailed report on the Charlotte bus fire, local transportation officials should inspect their school buses delivered about 13 years ago for similar wiring issues.

Nearly 14,000 school buses transport North Carolina’s 1.5 million public school students.

From my colleague Leslie Postal at the Orlando Sentinel:

Florida has been granted a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law, which will free it from the constraints of complicated school accountability rules and allow it to use its school grading system as the sole judge of public education.

A state official confirmed this morning that Florida is one of the states granted a waiver and that an announcement by the White House is expected later today.

Read the rest of the developing story here.

What do you think? Is this good news for the state’s schools? Do all of the changes to our accountability system make it more or less meaningful?

Credit: Charles Fox

The 120,000-plus members of the University and College Union receive their ballot papers this week to elect their general secretary – but how will their choice affect how the union works on pay, pensions and conditions, and its relations with the wider sector?

There are only two candidates: Sally Hunt, the incumbent, and Mark Campbell, a senior lecturer in computing at London Metropolitan University backed by the UCU Left.

The UCU Left is an increasingly influential presence on the national executive committee, the body responsible for conducting UCU business outside its annual congress.

The election comes in the midst of transformative change in higher education fees and funding, the potential expansion of for-profit provision, two simultaneous UCU campaigns of industrial action over pensions, and the prospect of continuing low pay settlements.

The UCU’s internal politics and Ms Hunt’s plans to reduce the size and power of the NEC may seem dry – but they are key to the union’s future direction.

Last year, the union’s treasurer and two fellow NEC members accused “SWP/UCU Left” of “seeking to take over our union” and commandeer its resources.

Mr Campbell said the UCU Left “consists in the majority” of people who are not SWP members, arguing that the idea of a takeover shows a “misunderstanding of how trade unions work” as democratic organisations with elected lay members.

This political division was again exposed in the conflict over the UCU’s strategy on the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, which covers post-1992 university scholars.

Ms Hunt’s recommendation to ballot members on whether or not to accept the government’s “final offer”, which included a better accrual rate than its starting offer, was rejected by a majority on the NEC.

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An online course for women in science, engineering and technology jobs (SET) that helps them return to work after a break has been praised by one of its organisers. Run by the UKRC and Open University, the course aimed to address the issue of the large number of women who fail to return to their career and stem the gender gap in the industry. While many participants returned to their SET career, author of a report into the course, Clem Herman from the Open University, said that many soft outcomes also came about from the project, such as increased confidence and self esteem.

This week we offer an oxymoron of sorts: extreme humility. We suppose that one candidate could be more humble than the next, but one could never refer to oneself as “extremely humble,” because doing so would undermine the very claim to humility.

Our philosophy at mbaMission is that candidates should let their experiences captivate the admissions committees. Sometimes we find that instead, candidates attempt to emphasize their actions with “extreme” adjectives and adverbs—an approach we strongly advise against.

In these two sentences, the writer uses the descriptors remarkably, dramatically, wildly and tremendous to make his impression. We find that a more effective approach is to eliminate these “extreme” descriptions and let the experiences do the “talking.”

In this second example, we do not need to be told that the results were “tremendous,” because the $1M speaks for itself; we do not need to be told that the marketing campaign was “wildly creative,” because this is implied in the nature of guerilla marketing. In addition to truly showing a

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