MCAS scores fall shy of target

MCAS scores fall shy of target
For the first time since testing began, more than half of Massachusetts schools are out of compliance with federal achievement standards, education officials said yesterday, a finding that raises warning flags for local educators but also sparks questions about whether the national benchmarks are too high.

Home-schooling mother sets sights on superintendent job

A home-schooling parent and small business owner says she's running to be South Carolina's education superintendent.

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“An Inside Look At College Costs”

This is a ponderable piece on the current financial situation colleges and universities have found themselves in. Who benefits from the money coming into a school? Hint: It’s probably not the faculty or the students. Here’s an excerpt: An interesting point to consider comes from the U.S. Department of Education, which surveyed [...]

This is a ponderable piece on the current financial situation colleges and universities have found themselves in. Who benefits from the money coming into a school? Hint: It’s probably not the faculty or the students.

Here’s an excerpt:

An interesting point to consider comes from the U.S. Department of Education, which surveyed nearly 3,000 colleges and reported, “Colleges have added managers and support personnel at a steady, vigorous clip over the past 20 years, new research shows, far outpacing the growth in student enrollment and instructors.”



Not only are the numbers of administrative personnel growing rapidly, the salaries and benefits they command are taking a large amount out of the universities’ revenues. The same cannot be said of faculty members. As an example, at Eastern Michigan University, our faculty salaries and benefits are less than 25% of the total expenses. The school has experienced a decline in instruction expenses in recent years, meaning that the core academic operations – teaching and research – are now a smaller piece of the pie. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Translating the World's Information with Google Translator

This is an informative article from the Google Blog about using the Google Translator Toolkit. Of course translation services are vital components to facilitate the world-wide sharing of educational resources. ____JH
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At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.

For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit's bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system "learns" from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world's Internet population.


Besides Wikipedia, we've also integrated with Knol, and we support common document types including Word and HTML. For translation professionals, we provide advanced features such as terminology and translation memory management.

For more information, check out our introductory video below. And if you're a professional translator or just a linguaphile, try Google Translator Toolkit for easier and faster translations. Be sure and let us know what you think.


Posted by Michael Galvez and Sanjay Bhansali, Google Translator Toolkit team

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