2001 - Education

Education

President Bush's nominee for secretary of education wins Senate approval in January despite questions about his record as superintendent of Houston's school district. Mississippi-born educator Roderick "Rod" Paige, 67, was appointed superintendent in 1994, angering many Hispanics whose children represent a majority in the district's failing public schools. Paige reached out to the Latino population with construction, new playing fields, and other programs, clamped down on school violence and automatic promotion, used business models to reward effective teachers, and has been credited with raising test scores and reducing drop-out rates (but see 2002).

Cliffs Notes creator Clifton Hillegass suffers a stroke in late April and dies at his Lincoln, Neb., home May 5 at age 83.

Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf unveils a law in June designed to check extremism in Muslim religious schools whose students are taught to believe that jihad is part of life. Funded by religious fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, the madrasas have been linked to terrorism. The United States and other countries have encouraged Musharraf to take action against them, his law would provide funding of teachers and textbooks for a voluntary expansion of instruction in areas such as mathemamtics, science, and English, but Islamic leaders accuse Musharraf of buckling under pressure from the Bush administration, and a Brussels-based nonprofit organization specializing in conflict resolution describes Musharraf's proposals as "cosmetic measures" aimed at appeasing the White House (see 2003).

Saudi Arabian money pours into schools that indoctrinate students with anti-Western ideology throughout the Muslim world. Neither the United States nor any other Western nation takes any action to discourage proliferation of the madrasas, whose students are given extreme and militant interpretations of the Koran, encouraged to hate non-believers in Islam, but provided with little education that will help them in the modern world. While Arabs represent 5 percent of the world's population they produce only 1.1 percent of the world's books, and while they publish more than three times the average number of religious books they produce few artistic or literary works (see 2002).

Some 350,000 Canadian college students begin classes in the fall with loans averaging $25,000, up from $8,690 in 1991 (see Canadian Student Loans Program, 1964). Tuitions have climbed by 125 percent in 10 years.