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By Amy Goodman — She was the founding principal of the first Arabic-language public school in the United States, until a campaign of hate forced her out.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Mike Rose — We need to reclaim a broader vision, for we have terribly narrowed our thinking about school.
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After the jump: A comprehensive roundup of why the Democrats suck, the all-white basketball league and how classical music can be used as punishment for schoolchildren.
Posted on Jan 22, 2010
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The British PM has announced a plan to spend the equivalent of nearly half a billion dollars providing free laptops and broadbrand Internet access to 270,000 low-income families. The program will need parliament’s blessing.
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By Louis Freedberg and Hugo Cabrera, California Watch —
Most of California’s largest school districts are increasing class sizes in kindergarten through third grade, eroding the most expensive education reform in the state’s history.
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Flickr / apdk
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A Canadian couple have negotiated something called a Differentiated Homework Plan with their children’s school after learning that there is no guarantee that after-school toil does a lick of good. As a result, young Spencer and Brittany Milley of Calgary will not be judged on anything but their in-class performance. (continued)
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White House / Samantha Appleton
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The first lady entered the White House with no public agenda and with promises to focus on her children, but a year in, she has already made an impact. Her latest project is a mentoring program meant to inspire local girls by giving them access to some of the White House’s powerful women. (continued)
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AP / Rich Pedroncelli
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By Mike Rose — The Obama administration has committed serious money to education reform, but many of the Department of Education’s big ideas are flawed.
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Wikimedia Commons / Subsven
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If things had worked out a little differently, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy was gunned down in 1968, might have become a Wal-Mart or one of Donald Trump’s gaudy creations. Instead, it is now a center of education, home to two elementary schools and, next year, the new Robert F. Kennedy High School.
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The New Press
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By Mike Rose — Business leaders are eager to meddle in education but rarely take responsibility for the root of education’s problem—economic despair and mind-numbing mass media.
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By Joe Conason — How did America surrender its political discourse—not to mention the news cycle—to the most unreasonable and unstable elements of the far right?
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With some parents still reluctant to send their children to school Tuesday for fear that President Obama will indoctrinate them with his scary socialist ideals, the White House has attempted to ease the hysteria by releasing the full text of his speech a day early. Now doubters can do a close textual analysis for objectionable content.
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As American schoolkids clamber back onto buses and funnel into classrooms, the federal government is working on ways to squelch the swine flu virus, which may not be as ferocious as health officials first feared but is proving to be pretty tenacious. President Obama, as well as a familiar red fuzzy friend, are on the case in this clip from The Associated Press.
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wordpress.com
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Because if it’s not in the history books, it didn’t happen. Today’s Orwell Award goes to the Israeli government, whose education minister has decided to remove references to what Palestinians call the “catastrophe”—when Israel defeated five Arab nations in a 1948 war and expelled 700,000 Palestinians—from textbooks given to Arab schoolchildren.
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Flickr / ECohen and White House / Eric Draper
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Yet another report confirms, as The Guardian explains, “that rates of teen pregnancy and STDs are, after more than a decade of decline, once again on the rise.” Thanks to President Bush’s abstinence-only sex education agenda, black, Hispanic and poor women are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies.
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By Lenore Skenazy —
If we have reached the point in society where basic adult concern for children is mistaken for evil, we’re back in Salem, 1692.
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AP photo / Ed Andrieski
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While trying to teach her students about homophobia, Debra Taylor could have done without what appeared to be an illustrative demonstration: The Oklahoma high school teacher was forced to resign in a controversy that grew out of a gay-related project undertaken by her class. Taylor and her students had been working on their own production of “The Laramie Project,” a play and film based on the murder of Matthew Shepard.
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abcnews.com
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The toll in the recent spate of clashes in the decades-long battle between Tamil Tiger rebels and the Sri Lankan government has been officially estimated: 40 civilians are being killed every day, with more than 100 wounded, as artillery shells and gun battles between the two sides devastate the Sri Lankan northeast.
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By Ellen Goodman — What will happen if Michelle Obama makes the personal her political issue? What would a serious work-and-family policy look like?
Posted on Jan 14, 2009
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AP photo / Ashraf Amra
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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak presented a cease-fire proposal Tuesday that would buy time to negotiate a long-term agreement. Israel continued its offensive in Gaza, meanwhile, shelling a United Nations school. At least 30 people, children among them, were killed by the attack, which Israel said was aimed at militants.
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By Ellen Goodman — “Virginity pledges” are one of the ways that government officials measure whether abstinence-only education is “working.” They count the pledges as proof that teens will abstain. It turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof that you lost 10 pounds.
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AP photo / Douglas Healey
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By Chris Hedges — The multiple failures that beset the country can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead on creating hordes of competent systems managers.
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flickr.com/mcoughlin
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By Bill Boyarsky — One of the worst casualties of the Iraq war and the Wall Street failures is the U.S. public school system, which is central to the nation’s economic, intellectual and social health. With financial resources being consumed, education cuts are on the way. Thank you, John McCain and President George W. Bush.
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According to a study by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, plenty of schoolteachers still spank and swat their students, particularly in the South. Researchers found that black, Native American and special-education students were especially vulnerable to corporal punishment.
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flickr.com/terrapin_flyer
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Although this might strike the kids involved as a good deal, it’s a definite sign of the times for the adults: A rural Minnesota school district has decided to strike Mondays from the calendar this fall in order to save money, making classes slightly longer on other days to make up the lost time.
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By Amy Goodman — With no end in sight in Afghanistan and Iraq, military recruiters must be prevented from using desperate and aggressive measures to lure our nation’s young people—the poorest and most vulnerable—into the line of fire.
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By Ellen Goodman — Well now, isn’t that a relief. The infamous “pregnancy pact” at Gloucester High School turns out to be an urban legend.
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Foul play may have caused a fire Monday night or Tuesday morning in a dormitory building in Uganda that killed 19 girls and two adults. The doors to the dorm were reportedly locked from the outside.
Posted on Apr 15, 2008
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ihabitat.com
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The Department of Agriculture has ordered the largest ever beef recall in the U.S., deeming 143 million pounds of beef unfit for human consumption because of inspection violations. The plant responsible for the suspect meat happens to call the U.S. government, including the National School Lunch Program, one of its best customers.
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By Eugene Robinson — I can’t summon any schadenfreude for Winfrey, just sympathy—both for her good intentions and her determination to live up to them. And I pity anyone foolish enough to stand in her way.
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By Ellen Goodman — Pretty soon, we’re going have to amend the favorite mom and dad moniker of the moment. Those much vaunted helicopter parents are turning into black-helicopter parents. The image of parents hovering over their kids is morphing into the darker image of parents spying on their kids.
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nydailynews.com
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A study of 7-to-11-year-old Brits found that the climate crisis and terrorism have added to the usual pressures of school and friendships to drive kids batty. Luckily, schools that engaged world-weary children with lessons and activities related to global catastrophe managed to alleviate some of the tension.
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By Amy Goodman — The Jena Six, teenage victims of good old-fashioned, Deep South racism, have won a crucial battle in their struggle against prejudice.
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wulfweard.blog.co.uk
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While many schools continue to move toward abstinence-only (aka “keep your fingers crossed”) sex education, some communities are fighting for more candid and honest curricula. A Maryland school district, for example, just won the right to teach middle and high schoolers about homosexuality and the proper use of condoms.
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AP Photo/Francis Specker
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By Sharon Scranage — It’s not just kids who get left behind in an educational system that fetishizes data and quantitative measures instead of qualitative progress. Teachers, particularly in lower-income schools, end up punished and humiliated because they are judged to be “underachievers,” according to educator Sharon Scranage.
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A school in Tennessee recently staged a drill with a fake gunman during a week-long field trip that left students terrified and in tears. The sixth-graders were told a teacher dressed in a hooded sweatshirt was a shooter on the loose and that it was not a drill. The school’s principal said the incident “involved poor judgment.”
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In this episode of the outstanding Web documentary series “Hometown Baghdad,” Adel interviews his young brother and cousin, both of whom had just witnessed a gruesome killing. He is convinced the two young Iraqis already show signs of the psychological trauma that comes from growing up in a war zone.
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A federal judge has ruled that Florida’s Okeechobee High School must grant the same privileges to the Gay-Straight Alliance that it grants to other student clubs.
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By Paul Cummins — The author takes aim at the shortcomings of the contemporary American educational system, laments the current state of arts education, and wonders what exactly schools are preparing younger generations to do—and become.
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By Paul Cummins — We’re never going to make any progress reforming the nation’s most dysfunctional school systems unless we first address the segregation that partitions our communities.
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whitehouse.gov
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Julia Wilson, a 14-year-old honor student, was removed from her class and interrogated by Secret Service agents for writing “kill Bush” on her MySpace page. The teen said the agents’ “unnecessarily mean” questioning brought her to tears, but ultimately encouraged her activism against the Iraq war.
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On Monday’s “Free Speech” segment, CBS News featured a Columbine father who blamed school shootings on the teaching of evolution and the proliferation of abortion. (Video & Transcript)
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Image: ancientsculpturegallery.com
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A fifth-grade teacher is out of a job after leading a class through an art museum in Dallas. One of her students saw nude art; the student’s parent complained; the teacher is suspended.
Even crazier: Local TV stations are blacking out Greek sculpture genitalia during newscasts.
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By Paul Cummins — The co-founder of the trailblazing Crossroads and New Roads schools in Santa Monica argues that if we can?t fund cuts in class sizes and improve educational resources, nothing else we do will matter a whit.
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Photo: zauberbilder.de / Illustration: Peter Scheer
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Two private elementary schools in Oakland, Calif., have adapted to a phenomenon known as gender variance?when kids identify as the opposite sex. Some grow out of it, some don’t, but the schools’ open attitude is meant to bolster self-esteem and avoid the kind of scars that can follow children into adulthood.
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From feministing
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An Ohio school board voted to allow discussion of contraception in sex education classes upon learning that 13% of one high school’s female students were pregnant.
Earlier: Congress declines to fund abstinence only-programs
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From wallpaperbase.com
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Read about a day and night in the life of a guy who paid $1,600 to learn how to interact with women.
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From Newsweek.com
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By Ellen Goodman — Although it’s sexier and more startling to talk about boys falling behind girls in schools, the real dividing line is race and class.
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