American Morning
School gives kids cell phones as a teaching tool
By CNN correspondent Deborah Feyerick with senior producer Dana Garrett
(CNN) – When seventh grader Cayleb Coyne wants to send a text in class, he slips his cell phone into his backpack and pretends to be looking for a piece of paper. Texting between classes has an added benefit. "It's harder to get caught in the hallways then it is in the class," says the soft spoken boy.
Coyne, who says he sends about 300 texts a day, has had his cell phone confiscated six times in six months. He's not the only one despite constant reminders from his principal at Haverstraw Middle School, Avis Collier Shelby. "Your cell phones are supposed to be where? Yes, in your locker. Not in class!" she announces over the schools public address system.
And yet class is exactly where they end up. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, even in schools that ban cell phone use nearly 60% of all students admit texting-during-class – a growing problem facing schools across the country.
What to do? Michael Rich, a media expert and pediatrician who calls himself a "mediatrician" and counsels parents about teens and technology on his blog askthemediatriacian.com says, "I don't think we're going to stop the tsunami," he says. "Pandora's Box is open here. The technologies are here. What we need to do is to take control of them instead of letting them control us" – which is exactly what educators at the Haverstraw Middle School are attempting.
"You can't put the genie back in the bottle," says Principal Shelby, who is overseeing a pilot program that has distributed 75 cell phones to students in the fifth grade. Texting and calling has been disabled and Internet sites are filtered. The phones are used for things like note taking and research.
Detroit: Save our schools
(CNN) – In Detroit, an S.O.S. – Save Our Schools. Officials are rolling out a $1 billion plan that would shut down 45 public schools, consolidating some and demolishing others.
They're trying to fix three growing problems: a huge drop in enrollment, a massive debt and some of the highest dropout rates in the country. But it's not all bad news in the city's classrooms. Our Allan Chernoff went to Detroit to look at a group of schools that are getting things right.
Duncan: 'No Child' lowered school standards
(CNN) – President Obama plans to change the way we evaluate the performance of our nation's public schools. That means the "No Child Left Behind Act" is in for an overhaul.
Today, the White House will send a new set of guidelines to Congress. Education Secretary Arne Duncan joined us on Monday's American Morning, along with CNN education contributor Steve Perry.
Educating America: Cheating on papers is a booming Web business
By Bob Ruff and Carol Costello
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/09/04/bestessays.jpg caption="Online sites known as paper mills offer students term papers, reports, or essays – for a fee."]
Outsourcing is a dirty little word among many Americans. When companies use cheap labor overseas to make products or perform services it often means those jobs are lost in the United States.
Next up on the outsourcing list? Take a deep breath and read on. America is outsourcing its brains.
According to the Center for Academic Integrity, in the last school year nearly a third of the faculty at its 360 college and high school member institutions reported students downloading term papers, reports or essays written by someone else from online sites known as paper mills.
We counted more than 250 sites selling papers online, so CNN'S Carol Costello went online to buy a term paper from one of them. She asked for a "Premium Quality" paper on Jayson Blair, the former reporter fired by the New York Times for making up stories. Three, double-spaced pages with 5 references (the references added to the cost), totaled $80.97.
The company said it would take a few days.
Watch: Students outsource homework 
Costello talked to one writer from an Asian country, who wished to remain anonymous. He says, based on his experience, more than 90% of online term paper buying comes from the United States. "There's a huge demand for academic papers in the United States," he told her. "It's unethical, but you know I come from a Third World country. It's good pay. The temptation was really great."
Much of the time it's an English speaking writer from another country who is writing those term papers. DomainTools tracks Internet traffic to Web sites by nation. Essaywriters.net is one of the most established sites soliciting writers to write these papers. DomainTools says most of the visitors to essaywriters.net are non-Americans.
Educating America: The big business of the SAT
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/09/01/college.board.art.jpg caption="The College Board says all revenues from its products are reinvested into improved or additional services that support its mission."]
By Carol Costello and Bob Ruff
During the 1950s, "What's My Line" was a popular television show featuring celebrity panelists trying to guess the occupation or identity of a real person. The panelists were given a hint and then asked the person a series of questions.
Imagine this. Had the panelists been asked to guess the name of an American organization based on the following hints, how many would have guessed correctly? And how many would have guessed that it's a nonprofit organization?
- Its business is education.
- Its president makes roughly $900,000 in salary, benefits, and perks.
- 12 of its executives make more than $300,000 in salary and benefits.
- Total yearly revenues hover near $600 million.
- Students are its main consumers and it charges them $45 each time they use the featured product.
- If a student wants the product faster, he gets charged more.
- If a student wants detailed information on the product, he gets charged more.
- And if if the student wants to buy by phone, that's extra too.
If you've followed our "American Morning" series this week you may have already guessed that we're talking about the College Board, which owns the SAT – a test required for entry into the nation's most competitive colleges. Critics say that that with its highly-paid executives and big business outlook, the College Board doesn't look or act very much like a nonprofit educational institution that earns tax benefits from the IRS.
Fairtest is a consumer watchdog group that opposes most standardized tests. It has criticized the SAT as a test that isn't fair to students who can't afford college prep classes designed to "beat" the test. The group also says the College Board is placing more emphasis on making money than fulfilling its mission – to connect students "to college success and opportunity with a commitment to equity and access."
Educating America: Scrap the SAT?
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/08/31/costello.sats.cnn.art.jpg caption="Critics of the SAT say it penalizes minorities because the test itself is stacked against lower income children, who are unable to pay for test preparation programs."]
By Carol Costello and Bob Ruff
What on Earth would motivate six teenagers to spend their summer vacation locked in a tiny, nondescript room with a teacher endlessly going over vocabulary words and math problems that require the use of the Pythagorean Theorem?
(A) Their parents sent them to summer school.
(B) Angst.
(C) They like studying in the summer.
(D) They’re cramming for the SAT exam.
If you answered (B) and (D), you’d be right.
For decades, taking the SAT has stood as the sine qua non for entry into the vast majority of American colleges and universities. Taking the test continues to strike fear into high school students, especially as the date of their SAT exam approaches.
The teenagers we visited had this to say:
McKenna Baskett, St. Louis, Missouri: “I’m so nervous! ... I’m a really bad test taker and they’re really hard questions, so I just hope I can get through it.”
Pratick Parija, Jersey City, NJ: “The test is long. ... And you have to complete it and think through, so that’s what scares me a little.”
Jason Huang of New York City was philosophical: “You can’t be nervous for everything. That’s just [a] life lesson. You just got to take it, deal with it.”
McKenna, Pratick, and Jason are just a few of the many high school students taking an SAT preparation course from the Princeton Review, one of several companies offering courses throughout the nation. This one costs a little more than $600. But wealthy students, or at least their parents, are coughing up more than $7,000 for intense private tutoring so that their child can get into the just the right college.
Critics of the SAT say that all this angst is pointless. Fairtest, a nonprofit group that says it supports “fair and open testing,” believes that the SAT is biased and doesn’t do a good job of predicting college success.
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