A push for diversity has backfired at a posh Seattle private school that happens to be the alma master of Bill Gates. Two black teachers who resigned are suing, claiming a “hostile atmosphere” promoted racial discrimination. The Seattle Weekly tells the story:
In 2003, Lakeside created a mission focus that made “diversity and inclusion” one of three goals, along with the related goal of “global citizenship” and the third goal of academic excellence.
“Diversity and inclusion” doesn’t extend to ideas, apparently. A teacher invited Dinesh D’Souza to speak on campus and then was forced to disinvite him. D’Souza’s conservative views were “judged ‘harmful’ to Lakeside’s ‘current efforts to be an inclusive community,’ according to a letter written by Lakeside Head of School Bernie Noe.”
When another black teacher, Kim Pollack, talked about masters raping slaves, some students took it personally.
“Our teen came home and said, ‘She thinks if you have sex with someone who is in power, you’re being raped,’” recalls Linda Deright, who is white and the wife of Bob Simeone, the diversity committee co-chair.
So the kids argued with Pollock, which she took as a racial insult. One student told her that she was “intellectually raping” the class. An hour later, Pollock walked into the cafeteria and heard Deright’s son talking about the teacher in an unflattering way, according to the recollections of both Pollock and Deright. Pollock says she told the boy: “You’re not the first little white boy to have challenged me — and you won’t be the last.”
Pollock defends the comment as a factual description and “not in the context of a racial put-down.”
A teacher who considers it racism if a student challenges her ideas? Pollack has now quit Lakeside too.
Today’s Harvard applicant has stronger credentials than the Harvard alum who’s doing the interviewing, writes Michael Winerip. An alumni Harvard interviewer, he’s done 40 interviews of local applicants over the last 10 years. Only one student was accepted.
Knowing me and seeing them is like witnessing some major evolutionary change take place in just 35 years, from the Neanderthal Harvard applicant of 1970 to today’s fully evolved Homo sapiens applicant.
There was the girl who, during summer vacation, left her house before 7 each morning to make a two-hour train ride to a major university, where she worked all day doing cutting-edge research for NASA on weightlessness in mice.
When I was in high school, my 10th-grade science project was on plant tropism — a shoebox with soil and bean sprouts bending toward the light.
Winerip’s own children aren’t Harvard material. His most academic offspring earned Dad’s old SAT scores, which aren’t good enough any more.
Thousands of children who live in Mexico cross the border each day to attend U.S. schools, reports the Houston Chronicle. Their parents think U.S. schools are superior.
In El Paso, the Mexico-to-United-States trek to school is so commonplace that border officials opened a special lane just for students at one of the crossings this month. More than 1,200 passed through that lane from Mexico on a recent morning.
. . . there has been some grumbling about spending U.S. tax dollars to educate students living in Mexico, especially this spring as the city’s biggest school district prepares for a bond election. The El Paso Independent School District, which expects to take in 10,000 new students in the next five to eight years, will ask voters next month for permission to borrow $230 million for new schools.
Some border-crossing students are U.S.-born citizens, but schools can’t exclude students who are in the U.S. illegally, the Supreme Court ruled in 1982. Students must produce proof of residency in the district, such as a utility bill or a lease. Often they have a family member on the U.S. side with whom they claim to live.
Some Texas border districts are trying to crack down on out-of-district students, reports the Chronicle. On the other hand, across the state line from El Paso in Columbus, New Mexico, “school officials for years have sent buses to the border checkpoint to pick up students.” That makes no sense to me.
A friend of mine grew up in a Mexican border town in the ’40s and ’50s. He walked across the border every day to go to school on the U.S. side. But his family paid out-of-district tuition.
Education software does too work — if it’s used, writes Gregg Downey of eSchool News. A federal study that found students who used software didn’t learn more than a control group is “half-baked,” Downey argues.
At one point, the study itself reveals this astonishing fact: “For a typical 180-day school year, average daily usage is about 10 minutes for all products combined.”
Hmm … Using math or reading software for 10 minutes a day doesn’t boost test scores.
That leads to another question: Why should schools spend $2 billion a year on technology if it’s only used 10 minutes a day?
A straight-A student in the Chicago suburbs has been charged with “disorderly conduct” for a homework assignment that his teacher found “violently disturbing.” He did not make any threats in the paper, assigned as an exercise in using poetic conventions, nor did he single out anyone or any place as a target for his anger.
The youth’s father said his son was not suspended or expelled but was forced to attend classes elsewhere for now.
Today, Cary-Grove students rallied behind the arrested teen by organizing a petition drive to let him back in their school. They posted on walls quotes from the English teacher in which she had encouraged students to express their emotions through writing.
The police chief says “disorderly conduct” applies because the teacher was disturbed by the assignment. The ACLU disagrees.
The boy’s last name is “Lee.” I wonder if he’s Asian-American. He doesn’t seem to fit the “weird kid” profile if his classmates are petitioning for his return.
Update: Because of the arrest, the Marines have canceled Lee’s enlistment. Here’s a copy of the essay. If Lee is an A student, standards must be low at his high school. He sounds like a kid suffering from acute senioritis. He tried to get a rise from an inexperienced teacher he didn’t like and is paying a high price.
Frustrated by bureaucracy and exhausted by the struggle to control their students, thousands of California teachers quit the classroom, says Cal State’s Teacher Quality Institute. Nearly 22 percent quit in four years or less. At high-poverty schools, 10 percent of teachers leave every year.
… after six years in the trenches — transferred from campus to campus, forbidden from organizing field trips and ordered to teach math only after lunch — (Stephan) Goyne left the profession.
Now he works in real estate and runs a Brazilian jiujitsu studio in Oakland.
“That last year, I had enough of it,” said Goyne. “The biggest skill you’re applying is crowd control. You’re not really having a say in the curriculum or what goes into it.”
Teachers surveyed complained of paperwork, interruptions and “fruitless meetings that take time away from actual instruction.” Many also said their students had driven them out of teaching.
Sabrina Walasek loved teaching middle school science and math in Daly City and Felton, near Santa Cruz. But after six years, the Oakland resident found herself worn out from keeping kids in check .
“The amount of energy spent on discipline and behavior management just got to me after a while,” Walasek said.
Working conditions were more important than pay for teachers who quit.
“They’re almost saying ‘you couldn’t pay me enough to stay at this school,’” (study author Ken) Futernick said. Interestingly enough, teachers surveyed who stayed in the field and felt supported at their campus cited their compensation as adequate, the study says.
Those who left tough schools said they would not come back even if they earned more money, often known as combat pay.
“As long as we think of these schools as combat zones, we’re not going to close the achievement gap,” Futernick said. “We need to turn those schools into learning zones and teaching zones.”
The LA Times did a similar story, leading with mid-career professional with a chemistry doctorate who offered to teach at a high-poverty school desperate for science teachers. He didn’t last two years.
Fed up with student insolence and administrative impotence, he stalked out of Manual Arts High School on March 12 and never went back.
Smart, motivated people — the sort we want teaching — won’t stay in jobs if they can’t make a difference.
Comments are working again! I’m so happy. I’ve been going through feedback withdrawal. Please, comment away.
YouTube has a funny MadTV parody of movies that show a “Nice White Lady” uplifting inner-city students.
Omaha’s low-income children will have a privately funded safety net that will provide everything from high-quality preschools, mentoring and health services to a guarantee of money for college or technical training. Billionaire Warren Buffett’s daughter Susie and other citizens who became very wealthy by investing in Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway have pledged to fund the comprehensive effort.
Every year in the Omaha area, hundreds of kids – mostly the poorest – drop out of school into lives of dead-end jobs, financial struggle and worse.
But what if all those kids had had a preschool program that kept them from entering kindergarten months behind their classmates?
What if they’d had the guidance of mentors and tutors and access to after-school activities?
What if someone had intervened when they skipped classes or got into drugs or gangs?
What if those kids had known that if they made it through school, a scholarship would be waiting — transforming a college education from a lost cause to a guarantee?
How many could have been saved?
We’ll find out.
My father, born and raised in Omaha, turned down a chance to invest with Buffett when he was getting started. “No thanks, Warren,” he said. “I’ve got a family to support. I don’t have any extra money for investing.” Oh, well.
At a Washington-state high school, the dean of students saw one girl kiss another in the commons area. The kiss had been caught by the security camera. He called in the parents of one of the girls, who’d asked him to tell them if she was behaving in an unusual way. They watched the videotape and transferred her to another school; the other girl complained that her privacy had been invaded.
Video cameras at Gig Harbor High School were installed to catch trespassers, fights, harassment – the stuff that threatens safety at the campus of 1,700 students.
The surveillance system has also helped administrators find and discipline students who break rules, such as leaving trash on a lunch table.
But the high school says it will tighten its own rules on security cameras after two female students were filmed kissing and holding hands.
Technically, “public display of affection” is an offense but it usually brings a warning not a call to parents. Still, it’s hard to argue students have a right to privacy on campus.
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