• Obama proposes $1 billion math and science teaching corps

    The Obama administration has unveiled plans to create an elite corps of master teachers. The administration hopes Congress will help their $1 billion idea to boost the achievement of U.S. students in science, technology, engineering and math, become a reality. NBC's Kristen Welker reports.    

    By NBC News staff

    The Obama administration announced Wednesday morning plans to develop a national science, technology, engineering and math teaching corps – pending a $1 billion commitment from Congress.

    The STEM Master Teacher Corps, as it would be called formally, would start with selected 50 teachers and expand to 10,000 in four years, according to a statement from the White House. In exchange for modeling STEM education and mentoring their peers, those teachers would receive a $20,000 annual bonus.

    "If America is going to compete for the jobs and industries of tomorrow, we need to make sure our children are getting the best education possible,” President Obama said in a statement.

    The president intends to give $100 million of the existing Teacher Incentive Fund to school districts to develop plans to "identify, develop and leverage highly effective STEM teachers," the statement said. The application for this money is July 27 and 30 school districts have said they are interested.

    STEM Master Teacher Corps would be located at 50 sites around the country. Obama says he wants to prepare 100,000 more STEM teachers in the next decade.

    Democrats tried to secure funding for a similar program last year, but the proposal didn’t reach either the House or Senate floors.

    Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he hopes politics won’t interfere.

    "This initiative has nothing to do with politics," Duncan said, according to The Associated Press. "It's absolutely in our country's best long-term economic interest to do a much better job in this area."

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  • Florida teacher suspended for making students wear 'cone of shame'

    By Isolde Raftery, msnbc.com

    A Florida high school teacher was suspended for allegedly making her students wear a wide-brimmed, plastic dog collar as a form of discipline, the Tampa Bay Times reported.


    In a stern letter sent to Zephyrhills High School science teacher Laurie Bailey-Cutkomp, Superintendent  Heather Fiorentino wrote that she would recommend Bailey-Cutkomp be fired.

    "I am very concerned that you used this collar to punish and embarrass students in front of their peers," Fiorentino wrote.

    Bailey-Cutkomp allegedly gave students the option of wearing the collar or sitting at the tardy table if they arrived late to class. Eight students ended up wearing the collar, the superintendent said.

    Read Superintendent Fiorentino's letter

    Fiorentino described the cone as a “collar used to prevent animals who have had surgery from licking their wounds” and said the collar was inspired by the popular Pixar movie, “Up,” in which a pudgy golden retriever named Dug is forced to wear a “cone of shame.”

    Bailey-Cutkomp had shown the movie to her class on the days before and after spring break, Fiorentino wrote. Bailey-Cutkomp had told administrators she did so because attendance is typically low on those days and she did not want her students to fall behind.

    Dug, a golden retriever mix from the Pixar movie, "Up," was forced by other dogs to wear a dog collar, which he called "the cone of shame."

    When students expressed interest about the cone of shame after seeing the movie, Bailey-Cutkomp, who has a veterinary background, explained that its proper name is an Elizabethan collar. (The name is a nod to Elizabethan times, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England, when the monarch and her subjects wore fashionable “ruffs,” or puffy, lacy collars around their necks.)

    Administrators found out about the cone of shame after students posted photos of each other wearing the dog collar to Facebook.

    “When asked how you selected students to wear the collar,” Fiorentino wrote in her letter, “you explained that you initially used it to redirect student behavior.”

    Bailey-Cutkomp did not immediately reply to a message requesting comment sent to her work e-mail.

    Related story: Cops say girl, 12, made to wear diaper in public after 'F'

    Bailey-Cutkomp’s use of the dog cone is a variation of the dunce cap, which was a large piece of paper fashioned into a cone and placed on a child’s head. Children who had greater difficulty learning or paying attention were most often deemed the dunces.

    Typically, the child was then made to stand in the corner of the classroom as a form of humiliation.

    The dunce cap went out of fashion in the 20th century, according to wisegeek.com, and modern educators find there are few, if any, benefits to public humiliation.

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  • Big names shine spotlight on education

    Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and more on Education Nation

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    Race, gender and social status won't make or break success, but a quality education will.

    At least that's the view of some big names in Hollywood, music and sports who took the time to participate in NBC's Education Nation summit.

    Actress Cheryl Hines, musician John Legend and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell were among the celebrities, teachers and policy-makers attending the wide-ranging two-day event at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to advocate for improving the quality of education in America.

    Hines and Goodell, who talked with NBC's Kate Snow, both spoke about involving community members in supporting student achievement.

    "We have 180 million fans that watch football. That's great, but it comes with a lot of responsibility," Goodell said. He told msnbc.com he would love to see more football players follow in the footsteps of Randall McDaniel, who became a second-grade teacher after playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Buccaneers linebacker Derrick Brooks, who founded a charter school in 2007 that he became actively involved in following his retirement.

    He also highlighted the role of exercise in learning, citing the NFL's new "Play 60" campaign, which encourages kids to do at least 60 minutes of activity daily.

    "Our effort tells kids, 'You can do whatever you want as long as you're active,'" he said. The campaign was launched in response to studies showing children who get exercise perform better on exams and have higher attendance, he said.

    To help children attain an hour of physical activity a day, the NFL works with local districts to finance P.E. teachers and equipment for schools that otherwise would have to eliminate gym classes.

    "There's clearly a need to improve our education," said Goodell, a father of 9-year-old twins who attend public school. "We all have to do more."

    More is exactly what "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star Cheryl Hines hopes her new show, "School Pride," will inspire viewers to do. The reality TV show, which premieres Oct. 15 on NBC, will visit different cities around the country and work with parents, students and teachers to fix schools in disrepair.

    "They're scraping gum and cleaning toilets, believe it or not," Hines said. "We want a school that we're proud of; we don't want our teachers to have to teach in a classroom where rain is coming in."

    Hines says "School Pride" offers a realistic view of how underfunded education is.

    "It's inexcusable that we have schools that are falling apart; it sends a terrible message to the kids," Hines said. She said she had visited schools that had rats running across the classroom tiles, and history books so outdated they only covered events prior to 1974.

    "Some of these schools, you drive by or you see the test scores, and you feel like nobody cares," she said. "But I truly don't think that's the case."

    Later Tuesday, six-time Grammy Award winner John Legend from The Roots discussed work he's been doing with Harlem Village Academy, a top-performing charter school in New York.

    Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and more on Education Nation

    "Students are coming in in 4th grade reading at a 1st grade level, and graduating 8th grade with 100 percent proficiency," Legend told panel moderator Brian Williams of NBC. "What are the barriers to making all our schools that great?"

  • Texas urges fix of 'pro-Islamic' textbook bias

    The Texas State Board of Education on Friday narrowly approved a resolution calling on publishers to correct a "pro-Islamic/anti-Christian bias" in history textbooks.

    The 7-6 vote followed a spirited debate on the nonbinding resolution proposed by the board's conservative majority aiming to correct what Dave Welch, head of the Texas Pastor Council, testified amounted to "whitewashing" of some negative aspects of Islam in the texts.

    "We're asking you to look at this very carefully," he told the board in testifying for the resolution. "… There are problems, there are imbalances."

    But Kathy Miller, president of the liberal Texas Freedom Network, said afterward that the resolution was politically motivated.

    "Board members rejected numerous opportunities today to pass a resolution that called on publishers to treat all religions with balance and accuracy in their textbooks," she said in a statement. "It is hard not to conclude that the members who voted for this resolution were solely interested in playing on fear and bigotry in order to pit Christians against Muslims."

    It's not clear whether the resolution will prompt textbook publishers to make immediate changes to sections devoted to Christianity and Islam.

    Texas wields considerable clout in the textbook publishing world as the largest "adoption state" in the U.S., where a central body approves public school textbooks rather than individual districts.

    But as msnbc.com's Kari Huus reported earlier this week, "All board members will be up for election in 2012, and implementation of any new textbook standard would come only after that. Budgetary constraints may slow it down further. In the interim, there is discussion of requiring textbook companies to create supplements to address the new standards."

    You can learn more about the resolution and the underlying debate in her story.