Secretary allows reprieve on test-based teacher ratings
Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced Thursday that states could delay the use of test results in teacher-performance ratings by another year, an acknowledgment, in effect, of the enormous pressures mounting on the nation’s teachers because of new academic standards and more rigorous standardized testing.
Book Publishers Face Digital Piracy Problems
Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”
Lessing, Who Inspired a Generation Of Feminists, Wins Literature Nobel
Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her time, Thursday won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.