Voa education report - Few US Schools Now Named for People, Especially Presidents

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is the VOA Special English Education Report. Public schools New York, America's biggest city, commonly have numbers for . But this is unusual. In the United States, the of naming a school often involves parents and the as well as elected school leaders. Researchers say school can show civic values and also shape them. For , naming a school after a historic person becomes a to teach students about that person's importance in history. new study examines the naming of American public schools. study is from the Manhattan Institute, an organization that public policy research. The study shows that fewer and schools are being named after people. Instead, more schools being named after the local area or natural features hills, trees or animals. The researchers say these changes questions about the civic duty of public education. They at seven states with twenty percent of all public students in the country. They found similar results in state: new schools are less likely to be named people. This is true especially with presidents. For example, Arizona, public schools in the past twenty years were fifty times more likely to be named after such as landforms or plants. In Florida, out of almost thousand public schools, the report says five honor George , the nation's first president. Eleven honor the manatee, an sea animal found in that state. In fact, the says that today, a majority of all public school nationwide do not have a single school named after president. School officials say they try to choose names will not offend anyone. For example, a few years , the city of New Orleans banned the naming of school after a person who owned slaves. Other school have rules against naming new schools after any person, or dead. The researchers say naming a school after person can lead to important debates about democratic values. call for more research to identify the causes and of the changes in school names. The causes may changes in American culture as well as in the control of school systems. One area worth exploring, they , is the link between trends in school names and results for public schools on measures of civic education. that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Steinbach. I'm Joan Kornblith.

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