U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan has joined U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota in introducing legislation to crack down on kids who don’t show up for school.

The senators, both Democrats, want to establish a national truancy resource center and a federal grant program for schools, reports Barb Barrett. The competitive grant program would allow schools to work with community groups to discourage truancy, especially in middle school.

The senators say middle school truancy is a strong indicator of drop-out rates in high school.

The grant program’s cost has not been established yet, said Hagan spokesman David Hoffman.

But Klobuchar said she hopes to include it in Congress’ reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Hagan, of Greensboro, is a member of the Senate education committee, which would handle the reauthorization.

The state's head of public school testing has been named to a committee that will weigh in on the next version of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Lou Fabrizio, director of accountability policy and communications at the state Department of Public Instruction, is on a national task force that will present ideas to Congress in September as it rewrites the law on school accountability, reports Lynn Bonner.

The task force was appointed by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Rep. Julia Howard
Mocksville Republican
Eleventh Term

What two things would you cut in the state budget? She would stop spending on statewide primary school testing that does not fulfill the federal No Child Left Behind requirements. "If we did a stay on those state tests that is $40 million that we could save (over two years) and probably with no harm to anyone." She also said that the state could save money in production and mailing costs by allowing hunters to get licenses electronically.

Are there any taxes you would be in favor of increasing? "I can't think of any."

— Dan Kane

Former Gov. Jim Hunt says we can take him off the list of potential education secretaries in Barack Obama's administration.

Hunt says he'll advise Obama on education, but he has no interest in going to Washington, reports Lynn Bonner.

Hunt's name has appeared on several lists of potential education secretaries, including in Time and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Hunt called Dome on his way back from a three-day stay in Seattle, where he attended a Gates Foundation meeting on education. Obama education advisors attended, including the leaders of Obama’s education advisory board.

"I just spent several days with the top Obama people," Hunt said. "Many encouraged me to do it. I told them I would not go to Washington."

Still, Hunt said he expects to work closely with the U.S. education department from his base in North Carolina.

More after the jump.

   Comments (0)

Kay Hagan wants to increase federal spending on education.

The Democratic candidate for Senate unveiled her education plan Wednesday, calling for more money for No Child Left Behind, increasing spending on early childhood education and boosting tax credits for college.

She said she would pay for her education proposals by freezing the estate tax at its 2009 level, saying that will provide $175 billion over 10 years.

The tax is on a schedule to be repealed in 2010, though it could return the following year if Congress doesn't make the repeal permanent.

Hagan held a roundtable talk in Charlotte Wednesday with members of the historically black college community. (AP) 

Elizabeth Dole and Kay Hagan agree that No Child Left Behind is flawed.

But they disagree on what to do about the federal legislation, which measures the educational standards of public schools across the country.

Dole said she would support reauthorization of the bill as long as changes were made. She specifically said that it should hold principals and administrators "to a higher standard" and avoid schools "teaching to the test."

Saying that teachers are her heroes, Dole said she would also ask their opinion.

Hagan said that the legislation lacks "common sense," telling the story of a sixth-grader named Annabelle in Guilford County who suffers from severe cerebral palsy. She said that the student, who has a permanent feeding tube, is tested by the same standards as her peers.

Hagan said that the legislation was well intended, but has been underfunded by $70 billion, and she said she would not vote to reauthorize it.

"Reforms without resources are like schools without teachers," she said. "They just don't work."

North Carolina has the 12th highest dropout rate, a new report says.

The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center report found that 67 percent of state public school students graduated from high school with a regular diploma in 2005 — below the national average of 70.6 percent.

Only Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Delaware, Georgia, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico and Nevada had higher dropout rates based on the report's calculations.

The rate was calculated using the Cumulative Promotion Index, which tracks whether a student graduates from ninth, tenth, 11th and 12th grades.

For its own calculation of dropout rates under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, North Carolina uses the Cohort Rate, or the percent of students from an entering ninth grade class graduate within four years. Sixteen other states use a similar formula.

Under that calculation, the class of 2005 had a 95 percent graduation rate. The 28-point difference with the Cumulative Promotion Index was the second-largest gap in state-reported rates versus the number calculated by the research center.

Update: Agency say researchers misstated the state's own calculated graduation rate.

ELON -- Former President Bill Clinton spoke for nearly 45 minutes this afternoon to a crowd of several hundred curious college students and longtime fans at Elon University in Alamance County.

Clinton urged students to throw North Carolina to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the May 6 primary, saying she would be best for college students, reports Barb Barrett.

As proof, he mentioned her work on student loan legislation, her quest to create thousands of new jobs by making American energy independent.

"She will give the young people in this audience their future back, and I hope you agree," Clinton said.

He also slammed the federal No Child Left Behind program and said his wife would best be able to end the war in Iraq and provide health care to returning troops.

Read more after the jump.

   Comments (1)

Robert Peterson considers himself an old-fashioned blogger.

A life sciences researcher in Chapel Hill, Peterson started out blogging for The Daily Kos, where he first learned about BlueNC in 2005 when he saw a piece crossposted by James Protzman. 

"At the time, I thought it was this well-established Web site," he said. "It wasn't until some time later that I found out that I was user No. 14."

Peterson, 37, started out writing about health care, something he knew about from a stint as vice president of Health Care for All's North Carolina chapter. As a volunteer for John Edwards, he also wrote a lot about that campaign.

When that ended, Peterson became interested in the race for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor.

He says that the main contributors to BlueNC agree on a few basic principles: They support increasing health care coverage for the uninsured; they think No Child Left Behind should be changed or scrapped; and they opposed the proposed landing field in Eastern North Carolina.

The one area where they disagree: Which candidates to support.

Larry Kissell says No Child Left Behind is hurting the classroom.

He speaks both as a Democratic Congressional candidate in the Eighth District and as a social studies teacher at East Montgomery High in Biscoe since 2001.

At a stop in Raleigh last week, Kissell told Dome that the federal education law has penalizes schools with diverse student populations, discourages potential teachers and focuses too much on "high-stakes testing."

"As a teacher, it comes down almost to one day how you and your children have been successful," he said.

He also said the testing regimen does not account for how much a student has grown.

"You may take a young person who comes in knowing very little and you may get them very close to what they needed to know, but they don't take that into consdieration," he said. "It's 100 percent — either you succeed or you failed."