Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Sex in the school paper

Published on March 31, 2007 in Culture and Education. 12 Comments By Joanne

In a small town in New Hampshire, everyone’s talking about the “sex issue” of the high school newspaper.

HAMPTON, N.H. (AP) — Some parents are protesting the “sex” edition of the student newspaper at Winnacunnet High School. Several said they were especially offended by a photograph of two women kissing under the headline, “Why men love women who love women,” a quiz question about anal sex, and an interview with an unnamed custodian who said he had found a vibrator in the girls’ shower.

The newspaper’s faculty advisor said the issue was meant to be informative. The principal, who doesn’t review the paper before publication, took unknown “private” action and “pulled copies of the paper that normally would have been sent to middle schools.”

On Critical Mass, Erin O’Connor thinks parents are “aiming their shock in the wrong direction.

There is something peculiar about parents objecting to students seeing a publication created by students, especially when that publication simply acknowledges what the students are already thinking and doing. The problem here — if there is one — is not a smutty newpaper, but the sexual precocity of kids who live in a culture that eroticizes absolutely everything, including children.

When my daughter was co-editor of her high school newspaper, the sex survey was fairly tame but some parents objected strongly to a news story about teens dealing drugs across the street from the school. I thought the stories — include an interview with a local police officer — were informative. The complainers didn’t want to acknowledge an unpleasant reality.

Admittedly, high school editors aren’t always good judges of how to cover a controversial issue. Some faculty advisors provide too little guidance, but it’s more common for advisors to do too much.

It’s my birthday

Published on March 31, 2007 in Uncategorized. 11 Comments By Joanne

Today’s my 55th birthday. I’m not feeling great about it. Two days ago, I noticed a black stringy thing floating hither and yon in my field of vision. An opthamologist confirmed it’s a “floater.” Some people get them as they age. There’s no treatment. “You just get used to it,” said the doctor, who appeared to be on the sunny side of 30. But then I can’t see too well. There’s an unpluckable mote or beam in my left eye, which is the one I use for reading.

The doc also said I’m now legally blind in that eye. I knew it was losing it but it was scary to only be able to read the top line on the eye chart. And it wasn’t an “E” like in the old days. I could have it re-Lasiked to be a middle-distance eye, which was what it was years ago, but I like being able to read without reading glasses. The right eye is handling the distance work.

Fortunately, my husband, who’s a few years older, is showing signs of wear too. We will grow decrepit together.

Update: DilbertBlog has a timely post asking: What’s your permanent age? I was 23 for about 10 years, 32 for about 12 years and now think I should be 40. I probably can keep that fantasy going for another five years.

Teens help homeless kids

Published on March 31, 2007 in Education. Closed By Joanne

Teens from an alternative school for problem students have learned that they can be helpers for even needier kids. The Orange County Register writes:

The kids from Santiago Creek alternative education school want to be needed.

The kids from Project Hope School for homeless children need to be wanted.

Both the big kids and the little kids get what they want and need – from each other.

The Santiago Creek students volunteer as art and science classroom aides to the kids at Project Hope. For many of them, what started out as a way to earn a day off from classroom work has evolved into something that goes beyond community service.

It’s a sweet story.

What works to prevent dropouts

Published on March 30, 2007 in Education. 6 Comments By Joanne

Middle College High School, a program that lets students earn high school credits while attending community college, ineffective at boosting graduation rates, concludes What Works Clearinghouse, which found only one study that meets scientific criteria.

Another dropout prevention program, Twelve Together, produced “potentially positive effects” in keeping students in school but not in helping them progress academically. The program organizes weekly after-school discussion groups for middle and early high school students.

Group discussions are based on student interest, usually focusing on personal, family, and social issues. The program also offers homework assistance, trips to college campuses, and an annual weekend retreat.

Again, What Works found one scientifically valid study of the program.

A place in hell

Published on March 30, 2007 in Education. 11 Comments By Joanne

Colorado’s House Education Committee chairman wrote in an e-mail that there must be a “special place in hell” for charter school supporters. Face the State, a political blog, reprinted the e-mail from Rep. Mike Merrifield, D-El Paso, to Sen. Sue Windels, D-Arvada, chair of the Senate Education Committee.

“There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherizers. They deserve it!” he wrote.

Merrifield called two Colorado Springs school board members “evil twins” for backing a plan to let a high-scoring K-8 charter school, Cesar Chavez, turn a so-so district-run elementary, Hunt, into a charter.

The two state legislators want to let local school boards deny charter applications with no right of appeal to the state’s Charter Schools Institute.

When newspapers picked up the story, Merrifield said his anti-charter views are well-known. But today, he apologized for his language and resigned as chair of the committee.

Princeton brings back the B

Published on March 30, 2007 in College. 7 Comments By Joanne

Princeton is trying to get professors to deflate grades.

Since Princeton took the lead among Ivy League schools to formally adopt a grade-deflation policy three years ago — limiting A’s to an average 35% across departments — students say the pressure to score the scarcer A has intensified. Students say they now eye competitive classmates warily and shy away from classes perceived as difficult.

. . . There is no quota in individual courses, despite what students think, says Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel. Still, the policy has made an A slightly more elusive. In the first two years, A’s, (A-plus, A, A-minus), accounted for 41% of undergrad grades, down from 47% the two previous years.

Other Ivy League schools are watching Princeton with interest, but not emulating its policy.

At Cornell, courses in which A is the median grade have grown in popularity since the university started to post course averages online.

A second look at day-care study

Published on March 30, 2007 in Children. 2 Comments By Joanne

The day-care kids are alright, writes Emily Bazelon on Slate. Taking a closer look at the long-term study of day-care effects, she finds more misbehavior only for children who spent more than a few years in child-care centers.

When I reached the study’s author, Margaret Burchinal, yesterday, she asked if she could explain something she feared had been missed. “I’m not sure we communicated this, but the kids who had one to two years of daycare by age 4½ — which was typical for our sample — had exactly the level of problem behavior you’d expect for kids of their age. Most people use center care for one or two years, and for those kids we’re not seeing anything problematic.”

Children who spend three or four years in day-care centers tend to go to lower-quality centers, Bazelon points out, though the difference is slight.

Autonomy for failing schools

Published on March 30, 2007 in Education. 4 Comments By Joanne

Instead of taking over persistently failing schools, Massachusetts will give autonomy. The Boston Globe reports:

Over the next two years, Boston will try to transform English High.

Enrollment at the nation’s oldest public high school will be cut from 1,200 students to 800. The school day will be expanded by about an hour. And the stakes will rise: Struggling teachers could be transferred to another school, and truants could find a school official knocking on their door.

The state hasn’t had much success with interventions it’s imposed on failing schools, so it decided to give English High and three other schools a chance to engineer their own turnarounds. The four will be “pilot schools,” created in Boston to compete with charter schools.

Pilot schools, like charters, have more freedom than traditional public schools. They can set longer school days, choose their staffs, and determine how they spend their budgets, but are overseen by the school system.

Apparently, the pilot schools won’t get new principals or teachers. A teachers’ union leader quoted in the story is very negative about the English High plan. That doesn’t bode well, but perhaps the threat of eventual state takeover will concentrate minds on change.

Race, class splinter a school

Published on March 30, 2007 in Education. 4 Comments By Joanne

In a gentrifying neighborhood in Seattle, white middle-class parents started to enroll their children in the local K-8 school, which is 75 percent black and primarily low-income. But race and class conflicts have made it hard to integrate Madrona School.

The newer parents helped revive the Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA), started after-school programs and volunteered in classrooms. But in the end, some gave up, saying they didn’t feel welcome, and last fall, several withdrew their children.

The school focuses on raising the basic skills of low-income students. Middle-class white parents want more music art in the curriculum. The PTSA offered to raise money to lower class size and retain a Spanish class, but the principal said the union contract made that too difficult.

The school once had a program for gifted students that was meant to desegregate the school. Most students in gifted classes were white; most in regular classes were black. So, 10 years ago, the district moved the gifted program to another school. Madrona stopped trying to be integrated.

If most students need to master basic reading, writing and math skills, that should be the school’s focus, even if that doesn’t meet the needs or desires of middle-class parents.

“I’m not prepared to pull kids out of math and let them go out to do gardening,” (Principal Karen) Andrews said.

OK. But why make it so hard for volunteer dads to build the garden shed?

I blogged not too long ago about a Washington, D.C. school that faced very similar issues, but I can’t remember enough key words to find the post. Or maybe I’m just losing it.

Update: Some Seattle school board members want to find a new superintendent who will promise to close the achievement gap by ending institutional racism, even though they can’t agree what that means.

Update 2: A white parent who gave up on Madrona School says school district employees complained about whites “taking over” the school and the neighborhood.

Average guy, 1947

Published on March 29, 2007 in Culture. 5 Comments By Joanne

On The Bleat, James Lileks writes about what’s changed in the media and what hasn’t. From a 1947 book on radio news writing comes a profile of the “average listener.”

“His formal education stopped somewhere between the end of grammar school and the second year of high school.”

The average person – or, more accurately, the average radio news consumer – did not finish high school. Interesting.

“In general, he reads slowly, leisurely, and not too widely or deeply.”

But he reads.

“Newspaper reading is an ingrained habit.”

Wow. To repeat: the average radio news consumer is a high-school drop out who’s also a habitual newspaper reader.

My grandfather and his brothers were newspaper reporters in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. They were high school graduates, which was good enough.