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What We're Reading | August 17, 2012

Following last week’s reporting that almost half of Texas schools received failing grades on their federal report cards, Dallas Morning News...

Following last week’s reporting that almost half of Texas schools received failing grades on their federal report cards, Dallas Morning News reporter Bill McKenzie pointed out that all of the Dallas high schools on the list landed there because of a failure to meet math requirements. He also spent time researching the relationship between performance in Dallas feeder middle schools to high schools, and found students’ poor performance in middle school in turn feeds poor performance in high school. More than twenty Dallas middle schools showed a problem with math, and in fact, according to the Texas Business and Education Coalition, 48,000 Texas eighth graders failed their TAKS math exam after three attempts and of those, 40,000 students still moved on to their freshman year of high school. McKenzie cites the Bush Institute’s Middle School Matters work for flagging the problem as a serious concern. (Dallas Morning News) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concluded a nine-country tour of Africa this week that focused primarily on U.S. efforts to combat HIV/AIDS. The Secretary visited South Africa, where the HIV burden is the highest in the world, and she paid a visit to Uganda, the only country in sub-Saharan Africa where the infection rate is trending upward. (Voice of America) A handful of wounded veterans will participate this weekend in the first Leadville Trail 100 mountain-bike race. Over 2,000 cyclists, including veterans of the W100k Juan Carlos Hernandez, Ken Butler, David Haines and Marc Hoffmeister, are expected to participate in this Colorado race. (Leadville Herald)