Wisconsin woes, promoting Christianity in school, why student should fail, UNC program cuts, child poverty, humanistic medicine, chocolate fraud, and more: Required Readings, 05.31.15

Best education headline of the week: What the heck is going on with Wisconsin public education? Among the plans raising eyebrows: efforts to trim teacher training requirements that would put high school graduates in the classroom and a giveaway to private schools via vouchers.

A Colorado teacher has filed a lawsuit against the school district in which he taught because of leaders’ promotion of Christianity and local churches. You can read the full legal complaint here.

Learning from their mistakes: Why Failure Is Crucial for a Student’s Success

Last week the North Carolina Board of Governors voted to discontinue 46 degree programs from across the UNC System. Among them are human biology (at the Chapel Hill flagship campus) and various education programs. Some suggest that politics is behind some of the goings-on in the Tarheel State.

Newly released data show that 1 of 5 American school-aged children lives below the federal poverty line.

You don’t have to be a bio or chem major to attend the Mount Sinai school of medicine in New York. Its HuMed program reserves future med school spots to “undergraduate students studying humanities and social sciences at top liberal arts colleges and research universities” after their sophomore year in an effort to develop more compassionate and humanistic physicians.

Relevant to issues of information fluency and the trustworthiness of the science literature as well as mainstream scientific reporting: Why a Journalist Scammed the Media into Spreading Bad Chocolate Science.

Rhode Island has approved a new nonprofit college dedicated to helping adults finish incomplete bachelor’s degrees. More than 110,000 adults in Rhode Island have college credits but not enough for a degree.

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