Education

DETROIT (AP) - The chancellor of Michigan's new Education Achievement Authority says his office has posted nine leadership positions that need to be filled before the start of the 2012-13 academic year.

John Covington met Tuesday with the authority's executive committee to review what he has done since taking the job last month.

The authority will oversee Michigan's Education Achievement System, announced in June by Gov. Rick Snyder.

The system will include the bottom 5 percent of public schools in Detroit. A few dozen Detroit Public Schools are expected to fall under the new system. It will expand statewide the following year.

Covington says his leadership team will include a deputy chancellor for Instructional Support and Educational Accountability, a deputy for Business and Fiscal affairs and a chief officer for Human Capital.

Nearly two months into the school year, more than a quarter of Detroit Public Schools are reporting overcrowding issues in some classrooms.

That’s according to an annual survey by the Detroit Federation of Teachers. The union’s contract caps class size at 35 students.

Some schools reported classrooms with more than 50 students. Some also reported lacking supplies like textbooks.

Instructor Kwee Yan  teaches Advanced Energy Solutions at the Joint Institute in Shanghai.  

He gives a lecture on the energy density of different fuels that's indistinguishable from a lecture that an engineering student might hear in Ann Arbor. 

"Some people say we are addicted to hydrocarbons, we are addicted to oil.  There are some technical reasons for that," says Kwee Yan, to a classroom of mostly male engineering students, just as in the U.S.

DETROIT (AP) - Michigan State University says a Libya-funded diplomatic and educational program for professionals from the North African nation halted this spring is restarting and participants will move to American University in Washington, D.C.

Michigan State spokesman Kent Cassella says the university learned this week - just before news of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's death - that Libya's National Economic Development Board would relaunch the two-year Visiting International Professionals Program.

Cassella says Michigan State also learned the program would consolidate all students to American University.

Cassella says Michigan State officials and the 19 remaining students are disappointed to lose the program that once included 35. Some returned to Libya and those who remained were provided
housing and other help from the university and community.

Messages were left Friday with American University.

DETROIT (AP) - The Detroit Public Schools district has exceeded targeted fall enrollment by 137 students.

The district says in a release that 65,971 Kindergarten through 12th graders have enrolled.

Enrollment figures are based on the number of full-time students in the district at the end of the state's 10-day counting period. They do not include 3,000 students in pre-Kindergarten programs and about 4,000 in district-authorized charter schools.

Detroit officials expect the enrollment number to increase during a remaining 20-day period allowed for counting students absent, but excused on Count Day.

Detroit had been losing students at a rapid pace, plummeting from 104,000 in 2007.

The district ended last school year with about 74,000 students. Officials say the drop over the summer has been the smallest "real-number and percentage" decline since 2006.

We’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out how to fix our schools, which don’t seem to be working. Some people think the best solution is to essentially abandon the public schools, and turn things over to various sets of for-profit charter schools.

Others are dubious about that, even though it is clear that the public schools aren‘t working for a lot of kids.

Well, I was someplace earlier this week where they are trying something different, and it may be worth thinking about here. I was in Toledo, Ohio, just a long fly ball from the Michigan border.

A new study suggests posting the names and addresses of sex offenders online increases the chance the offenders will commit new crimes.

According to the study by the University of Michigan Law School and Columbia Business School, posting sex offenders' information online makes life so difficult for the offenders they may commit new crimes because they no longer consider prison a threat.

U of M law professor J.J. Prescott co-authored the study. He says offenders are likely to re-offend when they have nothing to lose.

“We got to give them something to lose if they’re going to commit another offense. I mean, as it stands right now, they’re already pariahs in their community, they can’t get a job, it’s very difficult for them to live, prison doesn’t sound so bad," Prescott says.

The Sex Offender Registration Act of 1994 requires Michigan State Police to post the names and addresses of sex offenders online.

Allison Lyons