April 25, 2002
News Makers
ON THE MIDDLE ROAD: Educators in the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District in suburban San Diego are reinventing the way middle schools operate. Instead of maintaining large schools with up to 1,200 students, each of the district’s four middle schools will be broken into four smaller schools. They will use the same facilities, but students and teachers will be somewhat quarantined from their peers in the other “schools.” They’ll even have different names for each school of 300 students and 10 teachers. Their motivation, of course, is to improve the way middle schoolers are taught.
UW Dean of Education Patricia Wasley told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the district had reason to be concerned about middle school education. “I think in many ways there are grave concerns about what happens to students in middle schools in this country,” she said. Wasley’s research, she told the Union-Tribune, indicates that kids feel a greater sense of accountability when they know the teachers they’re working with — something that’s more likely to happen in a small-school setting. “I think the impetus for us to think seriously about creating smaller middle schools is huge.”
EARLIER DETECTION: A recently reported-on study suggests that genetic testing to determine a woman’s risk of developing cancer is paying off with early diagnoses and treatment, according to an article in Newsday. Doctors quoted in the story say many women in the study found tumors earlier than they would have because genetic screening had alerted them to the fact they ran higher than average risk of developing cancer. Other women opted for prophylactic removal of breasts and preventative removal of the ovaries. And some of those patients were glad they did — four cases of previously undetected cancer were found during surgery.
Those results didn’t surprise the UW’s Mary-Claire King, a professor of genetics, who told Newsday the results “are consistent with studies from various parts of the country and from Europe, which show that women who are tested and who undergo prophylactic surgery are not uncommonly discovered to have hidden tumors.” Tumors that “could have become life-threatening if not taken out.”
A DIFFERENT RELIGION: A recent USA Today story about “unchurched America” noted that 14 percent of Americans consider themselves affiliated with no religion, up from 8 percent in 1990. Many people treat Sunday, for example, as just another Saturday. But the UW’s Rodney Stark told the newspaper that it’s often a different kind of spirituality rather than a complete rejection of religion. “People aren’t really saying, ‘I have no religion.’ They are saying, ‘None of the above,’ ” said the sociology professor. “People who believe in God — and they do — who pray — and they do — are not secular, they are just unchurched. They’ve never been to church and, in many cases, their parents didn’t go either.”
Newsmakers is a periodic column reporting on coverage of the University of Washington by national press services.
