Jan
6
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN At Indiantown Middle School in rural Martin County, many children who grew up in poverty, speaking Spanish or Kanjobal, an unwritten Mayan dialect, are earning better writing scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test than some schools in affluent communities such as Wellington and Boca Raton. In a perfect, egalitarian world, that [...]
Dec
16
This project was done almost entirely on night and weekends, sometimes until well past midnight, while my colleague William M. Hartnett and I were both beat reporters in The Palm Beach Post’s Martin County bureau. STORY LINKS Main story: Study: FCAT more a measure of wealth than performance Sidebar: Analysis measures score-wealth relationship Sidebar: Humble [...]
Jan
2
Why learn penmanship?
Filed Under education, single stories | Comments Off
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Every fall, the third-graders at Crystal Lake Elementary School in Martin County and public schools across Florida begin a rite of passage familiar to their parents and grandparents: Carefully, methodically, often a little wobbly at first, they train their hands in the smooth strokes of cursive handwriting, [...]