Education Notebook

For-Profit Schools Claim Academic Success

THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 7—The Edison Project, whose ambitious plan to become the first national for-profit school system has released a report saying its students are gaining ground on state and national tests significantly faster than students in other schools, reported the Times.

Reporter Tamar Lewin described the data as “a hodgepodge, some following a group of students from fall to spring, or grade to grade, while others compare one year's third graders with the next year's.”

Edison has been at the center of the debate over school choice and privatization since the maverick entrepreneur Chris Whittle founded it in the early 1990s.

Good News Down Under

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, March 31— Australian Catholic schools are more popular than ever, and they are getting more students to stay through the completion of high school, according to the Sydney daily.

The newspaper reports the latest figures compiled by the Catholic Education Commission show that enrollments for New South Wales have steadily grown over the past five years to 239,610 in 1998, 2,645 more than in 1997. Retention rates to 12th grade in the 622 Catholic schools in the state have risen from 55% in 1987 to 74.6 last year.

Staff writer Nadia Jamal also reports that better retention, lower class sizes, and the decline in the number of religious order teachers have led to a rapid rise in the number of lay teachers, who now make up 98% of all Catholic schools.

Campus Awakening Over Sweatshops

TIME, April 12—Jodie Morse reports in Time that, “One cause seems to have galvanized students as nothing else in more than a decade.” That issue is overseas sweatshops, which often employ clothing makers for under a dollar a day.

The target of student wrath over the last several months has been their own campus bookstores, which routinely offer clothing lines made in the Third World countries under licensing agreements.

The universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, among others, have vowed to push licensing companies to disclose locations of textile factories and then guarantee certain wages and conditions for workers.