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When public school isn’t free

August 9, 2011 by

Illinois public schools are charging “hefty” fees for textbooks, technology, bus rides and classes, reports the Chicago Tribune. Some districts charge a “registration fee.”

“This is like private school,” said parent Gio Chavez, who walked out of Oak Lawn Community High School’s registration this week shell-shocked. The final tally for her sophomore son’s classes: $665.

The bill started out with a required $275 registration fee but ballooned as a variety of course fees got tacked on, including $25 for Culinary Arts I and II classes (her son Seth wants to be a chef); $15 for a consumer education course required for graduation; $30 for a Woods I class; and $250 for driver education.

Chris Berta spent about $886 on required and optional fees for her high school freshman son and middle-school-age daughter in Naperville Community Unit School District 203.

Most states don’t allow public schools to charge parents, but Illinois courts have upheld the fees, reports the Trib. Low-income parents can ask for a waiver.

District policies vary widely, the Trib reports.

Suburban Naperville charges a general fee of $68 to $81, plus a $29 technology fee, plus charges for P.E. classes.  At the high school level, students pay extra for more than 100 courses ranging from English ($11), a required course, to French I ($24) to nutrition ($45).

School officials say course fees cover “workbooks, paperback novels and other ‘consumable’ materials.”

“Pay to play” has become “pay for regular classes” at a growing number of schools nationwide, reports the Wall Street Journal.

. . .  in Medina (Ohio), the charges imposed on the Dombi family’s four children include $75 in generic school fees, $118.50 for materials used in biology, physics and other academic courses, $263 for Advanced Placement exams and $3,990 to participate in cross-country, track and band. That’s not counting the $2,716.08 the Dombis paid in property taxes specifically earmarked for the schools.

The oldest daughter gave up choir to save $200, but the total for the year was $4,446.50.

 

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

Degree doesn’t help illegal immigrants

July 28, 2011 by

California has passed the “Half Dream Act,” which opens state-run private scholarships to undocumented students who’ve graduated from the state’s high schools. But, even if they earn a college degree, undocumented immigrants end up in the same jobs as their parents, concludes a University of Chicago survey. Without legal immigration status, they typically work in construction, restaurants, cleaning and child care.

Also on Community College Spotlight:  Most community college students are women, but most athletes are male, reports the New York Times. A Florida college has achieved gender equity  by spending to recruit female athletes directly from college and by limiting men’s sports.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Parents, chill

February 8, 2011 by

Hockey Canada’s ads urging parents to think before they scream, nag, bully and whine are featured on Principals Page. Via Ricochet.

Unsportsmanlike parents are a U.S. problem too.  After two basketball rows, Pittsburgh’s Catholic school parents have been warned that out-of-control spectators will be banned from athletic events.

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Silent sports: Parents told not to cheer

November 15, 2010 by

Some youth sports teams have gone silent, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Parents and other spectators aren’t allowed to cheer or holler advice. Coaches think the only way to shut up screamers, trash talkers and self-appointed coaches is to shut up everyone.

On a recent silent-game weekend for an Oakland soccer team, 8-year-old Sophia Abelson was playing while her mom and other relatives watched. But she didn’t hear them cheering — because they’d been asked not to.”I felt less inspired,” says Sophia, who plays on the Rockridge Soccer League’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” team.

Her mother, Bibi Jackson, thought the e-mail she’d received before the game, asking all the adults to keep quiet, was a joke. It said that only players would be allowed to speak — and then only on the field.

Karl Hawkins of San Jose, a soccer parent and coach, doesn’t think it’s possible to turn fans into Trappists: “The people you want to control wouldn’t be able to control themselves.”

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

It’s how you play the game — to win

November 8, 2010 by

Eleven-year-old soccer players should play to win, writes Barry Rubin on Pajamas Media. Under a coach who tells kids that winning doesn’t matter, his son’s team has lost every game.

He never criticizes a player or suggests how a player could do better. My son, bless him, once remarked to me: “How are you going to play better if nobody tells you what you’re doing wrong?” The coach just tells them how well they are playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat, he told them they’d played a great game.

And of course, the league gives trophies to everyone, whether their team finishes in first or last place.

“Sports should prepare children for life, competition, the desire to win, and an understanding that not every individual has the same level of skills,” Rubin believes.

Asked to coach for a day, he put the best players in at forward and goal and kept them in, giving weaker players the chance to play for at least half the game as defenders. He gave the team a pre-game pep talk:

Every week you’ve been told that the important thing is just to have a good time. Well, this week it’s going to be different. The number one goal is to win; the number two goal is to have a good time. But I assure you: if you win, you will have a much better time!

The team took a 1-0 lead.  Told that defense was critical, the weaker plays “performed heroically, holding off repeated attacks on their goal.”

One shouted from the sidelines something I thought showed real character: “Don’t let the good players do all the work!” Instinctively, he recognized that some players are better, but he wanted to bring everyone’s level up rather than down. I’m tempted to say he was going against what he was being taught in school.

They played hard and they won. They were thrilled.

If you don’t care about winning, you’re merely handing triumph to the other side. In a soccer league that might not matter, yet in personal life, your level of achievement and satisfaction is going to depend on giving your best effort.

That works for Western civilization too, Rubin writes.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , , , , ,

Dropping sports, failing students

July 2, 2010 by

On Community College Spotlight: In tough times, community colleges are cutting sports teams. Plus: Are pass rates too low or too high?

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , ,

Soccer: the less-humiliating sport

June 20, 2010 by

With the World Cup on TV, people are talking once again about soccer as the “sport of the future.” Atlantic Wire links to Chuck Klosterman’s soccer takedown in his 2004 book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.  Most children don’t love soccer, Klosterman writes. “They simply hate the alternatives more.”

For 60 percent of the adolescents in any fourth-grade classroom, sports are a humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out four times a game. These are the kids afraid to get fouled in basketball, because it only means they’re now required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air balls.

. . . That is why soccer seems like such a respite from all that mortification; it’s the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected. Even at the highest levels, every soccer match seems to end 1-0 or 2-1. A normal eleven-year-old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions.

. . . To say you love soccer is to say you believe in enforced equality more than you believe in the value of competition and the capacity of the human spirit.

Soccer has a right to exist, Klosterman concedes.  All he asks is to never see it on TV or played in public or supported by public funding — plus a 40,000-year ban on the phrase “Soccer is the sport of the future.”

Via DeTocqueville’s Daughter.

I raised the only child in Palo Alto never to play soccer. Allison said there was too much running involved. I knew it involved me getting up early on Saturday morning. We agreed to skip the whole thing.

I don’t think sports humiliation is a big issue for girls, who are less likely to be forced to play a sport they don’t like. Is it a problem for boys?

Filed Under: Children, Culture Tagged With: ,

Sports high

June 16, 2010 by

At-risk students in Grant High’s Sports Health Academy are motivated to learn college-prep subjects through sports themes, reports the Sacramento Bee. 

“I’m a firm believer if you connect with a kid with something they enjoy doing, then that gives them a reason to come to school,” said (lead teacher Reginald) Harris, the 2010 Twin Rivers Teacher of the Year.

. . . Calculating baseball statistics serves as a math lesson. Researching the goddess Nike is a lesson in Greek mythology. World history scours the globe to point out the origins of different sports.

Harris, who teaches health, said he talks about common sports injuries when identifying muscles, tendons and bones.

The academy, which encourages students to consider careers in sports marketing, sports broadcasting and sports medicine, claims to teach the A-G sequence of college-prep courses required by the University of California and the California State University systems. It receives state funding as a partnership academy, a model that creates small career-themed schools for at-risk students.

I wrote about this years ago when San Jose high schools were starting state-funded electronics academies for students with poor academic and attendance records. Students loved the chance to get to know teachers and to qualify for summer jobs at high-tech companies. They came to school, worked harder and improved. But they weren’t taking A-G courses. The top graduates went on to community college, where most took vocational courses; only a few planned to transfer to a four-year college. The program didn’t promise students more than it could deliver.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: ,

Learning leadership

February 4, 2009 by

Don’t cut sports to save money, urges Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. Students learn leadership and responsibility through extra-curriculars.

He cites education analyst Craig Jerald’s report on “life and career skills,” which are said to include “flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, and leadership and responsibility.”

(Jerald) quotes a 2005 paper by economists Peter Kuhn and Catherine Weinberger for the Journal of Labor Economics: “Controlling for cognitive skills,” they said, “men who occupied leadership positions in high school earn more as adults. The pure leadership-wage effect varies, depending on definitions and time period, from 4 percent to 33 percent.” A Mathematica Policy Research study also shows that although math had the biggest impact of any skill on later earnings, playing sports and having a leadership role in high school also were significant factors.

But perhaps active, healthy students who take leadership roles start with more leadership abilities than their coach-potato classmates.

Kuhn and Weinberger found evidence, Jerald said, “that leadership is not just a natural talent, but one that can be developed by participation in extracurricular activities.”

I’d hate to see sports go, but let’s protect the mock trial team, the robotics club and the theater program too. There are lots of ways to learn life skills.

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