ESL News Article: Schools on Shoestring Budgets

This article by Manny Fernandez of the New York Times discusses what schools in the USA are like after heavy budget cuts. You can read an excerpt here:

For Hutto and the 1,264 other public school districts in Texas, this has been the year of doing without. Texas lawmakers cut public education financing by roughly $5.4 billion to balance the state’s two-year budget during the last legislative session, with the cuts taking effect this school year and next.
The budget reductions that districts large and small have had to make have transformed school life in a host of ways — increasing class sizes, reducing services and supplies and thinning the ranks of teachers, custodians, librarians and others, school administrators said.

The rest of the article is available here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/us/for-texas-schools-a-year-of-doing-without.html?_r=1&ref=education

University Report Finds Positive Academic Results for Arkansas Virtual Academy

This article is from Market Watch The Wall Street Journal

A recent University of Arkansas evaluation of the Arkansas Virtual Academy (ARVA) found that students attending the online public charter school perform very well compared to nearly identical students in other Arkansas public schools.

The study found "very positive trends for ARVA" and highlighted five conclusions:

ARVA students outperformed their comparison peers in math.

ARVA students outperformed their comparison peers in literacy.

The positive trends were apparent in nearly all grade cohorts.