| The Fergus Falls Daily Journal
After a lukewarm report card from the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in late August, Fergus Falls administrators have developed a plan to improve the school district's grades. Each year, the MDE uses test results from the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) to rate reading and math proficiencies in state schools. Schools must show they are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) by meeting a certain set of benchmarks, with the task of meeting the federal No Child Left Behind goal of 100 percent student proficiency by the 2013-2014 school year. AYP is calculated by subgroups, including students in special education, English language learners, ethnic groups and students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. A school district must make AYP among all subgroups to make AYP as a whole.
Q&A: Gilmore Keeps It Real
SAN FRANCISCO Strategic consultant James H. Gilmore helped spawn global interest in experience-based marketing and design in 1999 as co-author of The Experience Economy. His latest book, written with Joseph Pine, is Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), which contends that people crave genuine and authentic product experiences in a world that is increasingly commercialized and fake. As co-founder of 11-year-old Strategic Horizons, Gilmore, 48, a former Procter & Gamble manager, has worked with Marriott, Omaha Steaks and other marketers. Here he explains how artificial Christmas trees are more authentic than the living version and why companies should ditch experiential marketing and develop an honest sense of place. .
Let's talk real issues
As the pre-pre-campaign campaigning winds down to caucus crunches and early primaries, the critical campaign issues should finally get real attention. Campaign managers, consultants and the proliferation of frothing pundits have missed the boat. The views of the American citizens matter, and those concerns are forcing their way to the surface. Candidates who avoid them will fail. Being a footnote in history isn't on their agenda. The problem is, the meat and potatoes issues concerning Americans today, aren't on their agenda either. They'll soon face the reality that the American people will elect our next president. Their concerns need the attention not those of academic utopians, gutter-mentality politicians pandering to the lowest denominator, and certainly not one-world internationalists who tout the key to the future of mankind.
Family clings to hope for missing Ill. teen
An investigator is looking at new leads in the disappearance of an Illinois teen whose possessions were found in and around the Baraboo River last month. Friends and family of the high school senior cling to hope that he is still alive, and some are speculating he may have faked his own death. "It doesn't appear that he's in the river," said Penni Clobridge, director of investigations with ETS Investigative Services in Wilmette, Ill. Though she is still waiting for details from police documents, Clobridge said local authorities told her they received tips from two people who think they saw 18-year-old Lee Cutler while driving by the Highway 33 wayside east of Baraboo on the weekend of his disappearance. Clobridge said one person reported seeing a light brown Pontiac Bonneville parked at the wayside with Cutler's gray Toyota Corolla.
2007 Survey of Attitudes and Behaviour in relation to the Environment
A full report of the results from the 2007 Survey of Attitudes and Behaviours in relation to the Environment is released today. It gives a representative picture of what people in England think, and how they behave, across a range of issues relevant to the environment, including transport and recycling. The results presented here follow from previous Environmental surveys run by Defra and its predecessors in 1986, 1989, 1993, 1996-7 and 2001. The results for the 2007 survey were produced from data collected from a representative sample of 3,618 individuals in England during spring 2007. The data were collected on behalf of Defra by the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) during computer assisted interviews. Structure of the report This full report, completed for Defra by BMRB, follows National Statistics releases of headline survey results released on 14 August 2007, and results of questions on wellbeing on 27 July 2007.
SNP 'needs another £1bn' to meet pledges
MAJOR manifesto commitments by the SNP government cannot be met unless £1 billion extra is found for Scotland's local authorities, the finance secretary John Swinney was warned last night. Mr Swinney has already faced a series of tough choices in the run-up to the administration's first budget on Wednesday, caught between a tight financial settlement from the Treasury and his party's ambitious spending plans. .
Wolfpack has turned season around with solid teamwork
RALEIGH - This is pretty incredible, really. Six games into the season, N.C. State was a pretty bad football team with a really bad record. It was 1-5, its only victory coming against lower-level Wofford, and the biggest stars continued to go out with season-ending injuries. Four weeks later, State will come to Winston-Salem on Saturday afternoon to play Wake Forest riding a four-game winning streak, its overall record at 5-5, its ACC record at 3-3. The Wolfpack has beaten East Carolina on the road, Virginia at home, Miami on the road and rival North Carolina at home in the time since, and has played itself into position to become bowl-eligible with a win on Saturday or next week against Maryland. It won't win the Atlantic Division or make its way to Jacksonville for the ACC championship game, but no other team in the ACC can boast a four-game winning streak at the moment.
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