Education

No Tolerance for Preteen Doodlers in New York City

by Alex DiBranco

category: Student Rights And Welfare

Published February 08, 2010 @ 09:31PM PT

Yes, I certainly think doodling on a school desk with a Magic Marker is serious crime worthy of calling the cops over and having a 12-year-old led off in handcuff. Tough on crime all the way.

Over on Change.org's Criminal Justice blog, Te-Ping Chen reports on a dangerous student who posed a severe threat to public safety by writing, "I love my friends Abby and Faith" on her school desk. In lime green, no less! That color will not go with the table at all. Fashion crime.

Somehow, I managed to get through the New York City public school system as a child without ending up in handcuffs. But I admit, I'm just as guilty as this latest perp. In fact, I'm a repeat offender: I've lost track of how many times I drew on a desk as a kid.

New York police have a less-than-amazing record on appropriate responses to childhood antics, like tossing a five-year-old who threw a temper tantrum into handcuffs and then a psych ward. For doing, you know, what five-years-olds do. Perhaps it's related to the fact that 5,000 cops are assigned to NYC schools, and they're bored, or trying to justify the existence of their jobs by picking up some truly dangerous criminals.

The Magic Marker will probably wash off. But the damage done to this student, led away in handcuffs before all her peers? Those scars might be invisible, but they aren't so easy to get rid of.

Photo credit: a.drian

Corporate Advertising: Not the Solution to Funding Woes

by Lisa Ray

categories: Student Rights And Welfare, Teaching Ideas And Resources

Published February 08, 2010 @ 03:14PM PT

Public K-12 schools all over the country are suffering from economic problems, from budget cuts to funding mismanagement. President Obama’s new budget calls for an overhaul of the Department of Education and No Child Left Behind in the hopes of re-imagining how education is funded. But while waiting for the new budget's proposed $3 billion funding increase, cash-strapped school districts are taking matters into their own hands.

The San Diego Unified School District is considering corporate advertising on school lunch tables, banners, and buildings, hoping to bring in $500,000 of revenue. In Washington state, legislators are considering a proposal to allow advertising on and in school buses. And in Chicago’s Maine Township High School, students protested potential teacher layoffs by offering suggestions on how to increase revenue: Place a giant Nike logo on the school roof and allow local businesses to advertise on in-school televisions.

Seems like a common-sense, all-American-apple-pie solution to the problem. After all, kids these days see advertisements 24/7 anyway -- what's the big deal?

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The Best Thing for New Orleans

by Jessica Shiller

category: Charter Schools

Published February 05, 2010 @ 11:31AM PT

Recently Arne Duncan claimed that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to the schools of New Orleans. He has since retracted his offensive comments, claiming that what he meant to say was, "Subsequent to that devastating, devastating tragedy we have seen remarkable progress and that school system has improved so rapidly it’s been amazing to watch.”

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, including its schools. Children and their families suffered through, and are now back at school -- but they face a new school system, one dominated by the private sector. Without adequate funding from the federal and state governments, the city had little choice but to turn over its system to non-profits and for-profit companies. Now, New Orleans has the largest number of charter schools of any city in the country.

In spite of the enthusiasm for the charters, they are riddled with problems (see Leigh Dingerson's chapter of Keeping the Promise: The Debate Over Charter Schools). Many exclude special education students and are physically inaccessible to the majority of students in the city, leaving them to the regular public schools or poorly-functioning charters. Moreover, low-income families spend much of their time getting their homes and neighborhoods back together, and do not have the time to navigate the school choices, leaving the school system with a few strong schools and still many poorly performing schools.

Arne Duncan wants us to see New Orleans as a model. A city largely dedicated to privately-run charter schools. Race to the Top funds require states to support charter growth, even though there is no research confirming that charter schools are better than public schools. Katrina has enabled private operators to take advantage of what Ken Saltman has called "capitalizing on disaster." Katrina wiped out the school system of New Orleans, and created an opportunity for private operators to come in and remake the schools without rebuilding or consulting the communities that the schools would serve. Indeed, these schools were remade as an essentially privately-run system.

Mr. Duncan, I ask you, who is benefiting from this system? The poor, and largely African-American communities of New Orleans are resilient, but still struggling to put their homes and neighborhoods back together. Some families are benefiting from the new schools, most are not. The charter operators, on the other hand, can open up shop easily and get public funds to run their schools. This does not seem like a model of urban school systems. We need high quality schools for all children, not a bunch of private operators who create good schools for some. Mr. Duncan, can you come up with a better model for urban schools?

Photo credit: Times Picayune archive

The Teacher Salary Project: Changing the Way We See Teachers

by Sara Bernard

categories: Great Teachers, Teachers

Published February 04, 2010 @ 07:48PM PT

With all this talk of teacher effectiveness -- and of research that points again and again to classroom teachers being the most significant factor in student achievement -- it makes sense to take a look at how teachers are compensated. Enter the Teacher Salary Project (TSP), a national campaign and feature-length documentary film-in-progress that examines the impact that low teacher salaries have on schools, students, and communities around the country.

The project is based on the success of the book Teachers Have it Easy, published in 2003 by journalist and teacher Daniel Moulthrop, writer Dave Eggers, and co-founder of the student writing center 826 National, Ninive Calegari. “America’s democracy and economic well-being relies on teachers being excellent,” Calegari said recently during a WNYC interview. “We need to say to them, ‘You are important to our democracy, and we want to honor that.'" A legitimate salary, she says, is part of that message.

The film, directed by award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth and produced by Eggers and Calegari, will winnow down a hundred hours of footage into a documentary they plan to premiere on National Teacher Day 2011 (the first week in May). TSP also encourages teachers, students, and community members to submit their own stories to the campaign through video and other media. Some of these will make it into the film, and the rest will add to TSP’s online archive -- all in an effort to generate as much buzz as possible about the importance of the teaching profession.

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Nothing Is More Important Than Keeping Kids Safe in School

by George Miller

category: Student Rights And Welfare

Published February 04, 2010 @ 12:10PM PT

Today, the Committee on Education and Labor considered the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act. Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers and I introduced this bill in December for a simple reason: all children should be safe and protected at school.

Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office told our Committee about a shocking wave of abusive restraint and seclusion in our nation's classrooms. They told us that hundreds of students in this country have been victims of this abuse. In many cases these victims were our smallest and most vulnerable children: children as young as four and five, and many students with disabilities. And in some instances, children died.

We learned that while restraint and seclusion should be considered emergency tactics used as a last resort, far more often these techniques are abused under the guise of discipline or to force compliance. Last year, in California, districts reported more than 14,300 cases of seclusion, restraint and other "emergency" interventions.

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Charting a Fair Course for the Charters

by Sara Bernard

category: Charter Schools

Published February 03, 2010 @ 01:52PM PT

Charter schools have been getting a ton of attention recently. Due to the clear messages the Obama administration is sending in their favor (the Race to the Top budget includes $490 million specifically to expand the charter school system), states are upping their charter school limits to increase the likelihood of grabbing federal dollars. Since Race to the Top is designed to reward states for innovation in education, this is an enormous plug for charter schools; it basically indicates that the Department of Education thinks the flexibility and autonomy given to charters is a straight shot to reform.

Tennessee has upped the charter limits to 90. In Illinois, it's now 120. In Louisiana, they've done away with the limit entirely. In Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick just passed some hefty education legislation that will, among other things, double the number of charter schools in the lowest-performing districts.

And it’s not just states, but also students and parents, who are rooting for the charter system. The Center for Education Reform just released the Annual Survey of America's Charter Schools 2010 which reports that waiting lists for charters are gigantic -- an average of 239 students are waiting to enter each charter across the country, with an estimated 40,000 students on waitlists in the state of Texas alone and 8,000 in the city of Boston.

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NCLB Overhaul to Abandon Bush's "Utopian Goal"

by Rose Garrett

categories: Education Reform, Funding And Cuts

Published February 02, 2010 @ 08:13AM PT

Since its inception eight years ago, the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act has been both panned and praised by educators and policy reformers. Love it or leave it, the Obama administration says NCLB is here to stay. But a major overhaul is in the works that will vastly change the way that NCLB will measure school and student success and distribute resources in the future.

Yesterday, the government revealed the outline of its proposed changes to NCLB, alongside the announcement of its $3.8 trillion budget for the 2011 fiscal year. The most notable change? The new plan would abandon the deadline for every American child to achieve academic proficiency by 2014, which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called a “utopian goal.”

Instead, the overhaul would institute a new measure of success: whether students graduating from high school are “college- and career-ready.” This sounds a whole lot better than setting an arbitrary deadline for mass student “proficiency,” but it still seems awfully vague. Just what does it mean to be career ready? And does that align with standards for college readiness, or do the two represent different sets of expectations? For now, the definition of what it means to be college- and career-ready is up in the air, and with it the basis for the success of the nation's entire education system.

Bush’s NCLB was remarkably good at labeling schools and teachers as failing, but a lot less effective when it came to fixing the problems. The new changes to NCLB aim to tweak how school success is measured and provide more allowances for school progress versus straight-up performance. Likewise, it will modify the system by which federal funding is apportioned to encourage competition, much in the way that Race to the Top, the federal grant program, has states competing for $4 billion in stimulus money.

The standards and accountability drive of the past eight years has identified countless problems in our education system, and created a few of its own. Will Obama’s reforms start providing solutions? It will take time (and passage through Congress) to find out.

Photo credit: woodleywonderworks