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EDUCATION REPORT - July 18, 2002: School Choice Program
By Jerilyn Watson
This is the VOA Special English Education Report.
The United States has about ninety-thousand public schools. The Department
of Education reported this month that nine percent of these schools
have failed to meet learning requirements. Education Department officials
say they had not expected so many schools to perform poorly.
States identified more than eight-thousand schools
as failing to provide a good education. They did so after students in
these schools did not perform well on tests for two years. Many of the
failing schools are in poor areas of big cities.
There are about forty-seven-million students
in public schools in the United States. Most of these students must
attend the school closest to their homes. Now, a law approved earlier
this year provides a new choice.
President Bush signed the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act in January. The act says children in failing public schools
can choose to attend better schools in their local school area. The
school systems must help pay transportation costs for students who choose
to attend other schools.
The law also calls for all students in grades
three through eight to be tested each year in reading and mathematics.
Department of Education officials praise the law as especially helpful
to poor families who live in areas with failing schools.
The law is to take effect in the fall when the
new school year begins. Some states, however, are having difficulty
deciding how and when to enact it. Massachusetts, for example, says
it will not know until next winter which schools it should identify
as failing. That is when the state will receive the results of the most
recent student tests.
Other school systems have already put the law
into effect. Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, has completed
the process. Ten of its schools were judged as failing. About six-thousand
children attend these schools. More than half of the students come from
poor families.
School officials communicated with the families
of all students at the ten schools. They wrote letters to the parents
in several languages. However, only about one-hundred children have
changed schools. And, almost none of them are from poor families.
A guidance official in Montgomery County says
she believes the law is a good idea. But she says she hopes it can be
used to help more poor children in the future.
This VOA Special English Education Report was
written by Jerilyn Watson.
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