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A lesson in respect

January 26, 2012 By 12 Comments

After the Gunderson High basketball coach suspended five starters for tardiness, back talking and disrespect in late December, the whole team walked out. The San Jose school’s coach, Mike Allen, called up freshmen and sophomores from the JV squad. The team is losing every game by large margins, reports the San Jose Mercury News. That’s not important, says the coach.

Allen said he had given his players “two, three, four chances” to turn around their attitudes and prove their commitment to the team before suspending the five for what was supposed to be the winter break.

Instead, he said, they continued to talk back, disregard his instruction and showboat on the court.

“These kids nowadays feel they are privileged and have a right,” Allen said. “But they fail to realize what being part of a team is about.”

The mutineers blame a “power-hungry” coach.

“We weren’t being that disrespectful,” said Eddie Perez, a senior who walked out with the suspended players. “He wants to run the team his way and doesn’t listen to our own opinions.”

Lesson not learned, apparently.  Good luck in your first job, Eddie. And your second job. And, if you continue to be a slow learner, your third job.

Filed Under: Education, Sports Tagged With: , , , , ,

Shame

January 13, 2012 By

When her 14-year-old son got a few hours of community service for his crimes, a Georgia mother decided shame was the way to get him to behave.

Filed Under: Children, Parenting Tagged With: , ,

A kiss isn’t just a kiss

November 19, 2011 By

A kiss between 12-year-olds isn’t a sex crime, said sheriff’s deputies after the assistant principal of a Florida elementary school reported a “possible sex crime.”

. . . two girls who had a crush on a boy were talking about which of them liked him the most.

One of the girls approached the boy and briefly kissed him.

A teacher on recess duty reported the kiss as “inappropriate.” The assistant principal called the Florida Department of Children and Families, which told her to call the sheriff. Deputies said an unsolicited kiss could be considered a simple assault — if there was a victim. Apparently, the boy didn’t complain.

When my daughter was in early elementary school, a friend dared her to kiss a boy as they lined up to go into the classroom after recess. She kissed him. He punched her. She accepted that as fair. It was over in seconds with no police involvement.

 

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , , ,

Maybe parents aren’t dopes

October 20, 2011 By

Parents strongly prefer schools of choice, even when tests show only modest benefits, writes Rick Hess. Some think parents are “dopes.” Maybe parents know their kids are benefiting in other ways.

Directly relevant here is the intriguing new National Bureau of Economic Research paper School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment (pdf). What economists David Deming, Justine Hastings, Tom Kane, and Doug Staiger find is that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS) open-enrollment initiative, which launched in 2001, yielded surprisingly substantial long-term gains for the participating students. They were able to track the results for nearly 20,000 students after high school graduation, and reported that students who won the lottery to attend a school outside their own neighborhood were more likely “to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor’s degree. They are twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite university.” The researchers found no evidence of “cream skimming,” and noted that lottery winners closed nearly a quarter of the black-white difference in college completion.

Raising test scores aren’t the only way a school can help students, Hess writes.

Maybe parents who express high levels of satisfaction with choice see that their kids are better behaved and more focused, disciplined and academically engaged.

Maybe not. “But it seems as viable as the ‘parents are dopes’ hypothesis.”

Filed Under: Education, Parenting, Testing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why so many hyperactive kids?

October 8, 2011 By

Nine percent of school-age children in America have attention deficit disorder, according to a health professional.   Why so many? Pediatrician Lawrence Diller blames a growing willingness to medicalize childhood misbehavior.  Uncertain about discipline and worried too much about self-esteem, parents turn to professionals, who are quick to prescribe drugs for what may be “minor differences in children’s behavior or performance.”

Children are under more stress at school, Diller adds.

. . . more than 20 years ago kindergartners only had to sing the ABCs and play “ring around the rosie.” Now, they are expected to read and do simple math before the start of first grade.

When both parents are working, children spend a long day trying to meet the “behavioral demands” of structured preschool and  after-school programs, he writes. “Parents are tired, too, when they finally get their kids at the end of the day.”

Via I Speak of Dreams.

Filed Under: Children, Health, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Lots of failure, little effort to learn from it

September 21, 2011 By

John Thompson writes about “no excuses” schools after reading Paul Tough’s New article, What if the Secret to Success is Failure? Tough describes how KIPP co-founder David Levin tries to teach “perseverance and empathy” as well as academic skills.

In inner city schools, there is plenty of failure but rarely is there an effort to cultivate grittiness, resilience, and skills for rebounding from failure.

High-challenge schools have imitated the easiest of Levin’s methods by putting up signs saying “Whatever It Takes!” and “Failure is NOT an Option!” Thompson writes. They forget Levin’s concerns about the “socio-emotional aspects of learning.”

Here’s the model:

First, principals and teachers who supported Levin’s vision would start by calling a faculty meeting and proclaiming an unflinching focus on instruction, as well as a system for providing remediation. . . .  a system of rewards and punishments for students and teachers, along with additional paperwork would be announced.

. . .  at first, these initiatives always worked pretty well, and often they were spectacular successes. After a few weeks, however, the issue for teachers would become the minority of students who failed to comply.

By October, teachers push loudly for consequences. Faculty meetings degenerate into shouting matches. Eventually, complaints about students’ behavior are labeled “excuses.”  If the principal tries to send the worst discipline problems to alternative schools, they’re sent back quickly.

Thompson wonders what could have happened if the system had tried to teach perseverance and empathy.

What if the failure to meet classroom behavioral standards had not been dismissed as the teachers’ failures with classroom management? Think of the difference it would have made if educators in neighborhood schools had the ability to draw a line and enforce standards. Then, the failure of a student to control his or her behavior could have become “a teachable moment.” We could have helped students develop the resilience required to be a good citizen in class.

“Had we been just as serious about teaching students to be students as we were about teaching subject matter, could we have avoided our reform wars?” Thompson asks.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Family culture determines school success

September 4, 2011 By

Responsible, caring parents raise good students, writes Scott Carroll, a teacher turned IT consultant, in the Baltimore Sun. Carroll’s mother didn’t always have money to pay the utility bill or the phone bill, but she managed to pay half-tuition so he could attend a private elementary school. His father didn’t live with the family, but stayed involved in his son’s life.

. . .  you do not need a college degree to know how to insist that your children read books, or at least sit with their faces in a book through some prescribed period of time every day. You do not need a college degree to read to your children persistently. You do not need a college education to know how to require your children to sit at a certain table every school night for a certain prescribed period and at least seem to be completing their assignments. You do not need a college degree to demand of yourself and of your family that standard English, or some earnest attempt thereof, be spoken in the home.

“African-American culture — my culture — has become, progressively, a culture of the athlete, the entertainer, the hustler and the laborer,” Carroll laments.

I had the privilege of teaching for four years in an immaculate building that had just undergone a $27 million restoration, a Baltimore City vocational/technical high school complete with the kind of expensive, computer-aided manufacturing machinery I had seen on campus as an industrial engineering student at Morgan State University and in industry as an industrial engineering intern. Many students showed their appreciation for the very expensive, potentially high-quality education they were being offered for free by setting that building on fire almost weekly, and by cursing freely in the vicinity of and often directly at teachers and administrators alike. When attempts were made at discipline and parents were called in, the parents often exhibited this same behavior while searching for any and every way to blame teachers and the school for their children’s trouble.

An interested, cooperative student will learn in a shack with an old textbook, Carroll writes.

But as long as we continue to send non-studious, socially and intellectually ill-prepared children into our schools — as long as we continue to expect our teachers and our schools, as opposed to our parents and our families, to rear our children — our students and schools will continue to underperform, no matter how much we spend or how many teachers we employ.

“Money is not the problem,” he concludes. “The problem is our lack of a coherent, robust and healthy culture.”

So, what do we do with bad parents’ children?


Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Confessions of a bad teacher

September 1, 2011 By

In Confessions of a bad teacher in Salon, publishing executive John Owens recounts his foray into teaching English at a small New York City school.

Assign spelling words or read a short story in class, and it would take all of my wits to keep the texting, talking, sleeping and wrestling in check. But make it 80 words on “Would you give up your cellphone for one year for $500?” and every student — even those who never did any schoolwork — handed in a paper. When I read these essays to the class in dramatic, radio-announcer fashion, there was silence punctuated by hoots of laughter or roars of agreement or disagreement.

It was almost magic. It was really fun. And I often could squeeze in some spelling, even punctuation. But we weren’t always quiet.

And, according to my personnel file at the New York City Department of Education, I was “unprofessional,” “insubordinate” and “culturally insensitive.”

In other words, I was a bad teacher.

Told to control the class “with the force of your personality,” he told his eighth graders to quiet down or stay after school.  After less than 10 minutes standing in the doorway, the principal intervened. She “reported the incident to the police and the Department of Education as ‘corporal punishment’.”  He survived a disciplinary hearing, thanks to a union representative, but the principal put a letter in his file saying he’d “barricaded” the students in the room, endangering their safety.

Offered a job in publishing, Owens quit in mid-February.

He sees himself as a victim of “Crazy Boss Syndrome” in a system that gives principals the power to crush new teachers.

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Act up in class, end up in court

August 23, 2011 By

Campus police officers — not principals — are enforcing discipline these days, reports the Washington Post.

Texas police issue thousands of misdemeanor tickets for offensive language, class disruption, schoolyard fights and misbehavior on the school bus. A parent must appear with the child in court. Students may be ordered to perform community service or take a behavior-management class. Fines can total $500.

Six in 10 Texas students were suspended or expelled at least once from seventh grade on, according to a new study. Federal officials say suspensions, expulsions and arrests create a “school-to-prison pipeline.”

“That is something that clearly has to stop,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington alongside Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

It’s not just Texas. In many states, principals are turning to the police to enforce order.

Connecticut is rethinking discipline after students faced court charges for drinking soda, running in the hall and dressing improperly.

A Colorado task force is analyzing school ticketing and law enforcement referrals.

Texas schools adopted ticketing in the 1990′s, the Post reports. As more police officers have been assigned to schools, the number of tickets has soared.

In one highly publicized case a middle school student in Austin was ticketed for class disruption after she sprayed herself with perfume when classmates said she smelled.

In Houston one recent day, a 17-year-old was in court after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other. “She was mad at me because I broke up with her,” he said.

Ticketing rates vary from 1 percent of students in Pasadena to 11 percent in Galveston, concluded a report by Texas Appleseed, a public interest law center. Children as young as five have been ticketed.

Not surprisingly, students who’ve been suspended, expelled or ticketed are more likely to drop out of high school and get into trouble as adults. But that raises a chicken-and-egg question: Was it the punishment or the crime?

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

60% of Texas students suspended at least once

July 20, 2011 By

Nearly 60 percent of Texas students were suspended or expelled from at least one class in middle and high school during a six-year study. Blacks and emotionally disabled students were more likely to be disciplined, concludes Breaking School Rules, a study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Public Research Institute of Texas A&M University.

Schools with similar students in terms of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status had very different suspension and expulsion rates.

The study didn’t examine whether schools that suspend fewer students have alternative ways of dealing with disruption, nor did it try to evaluate school safety.

Not surprisingly, students who were disciplined were less likely to graduate and more likely to be arrested. Thirty-one percent of students disciplined one or more times repeated their grade at least once.

 

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,
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