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May 12 2012 | Education | Comments Off
Story By: All Things Considered
Students of all backgrounds are coming of age in an era when the economy is always described as “recovering” â never “recovered”. So with graduation coming up, how are college students are feeling about their prospects? Audie Cornish visited the University of Maryland to find out.
May 11 2012 | Education | Comments Off
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April 27 2012 | Education | Comments Off
Story By: by Tovia Smith
Alyssa Rodemeyer, 16, talks about her younger brother Jamey at an anti-bullying rally in San Francisco. Jamey committed suicide in September 2011 after being bullied. More schools are looking for ways to combat bullying among students.
Erica Newell of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center gives an anti-bullying presentation to middle-schoolers in Medway, Mass.
Part of what made it hard to talk about was that the bully was one of Carly’s friends.
It was the same for Shannon McHugh. “In the movies, it’s always a big tough guy who picks on the little nerd. But, it was my friend,” Shannon says.
“We would all joke around … but then, she kind of took it to the next level and it started getting meaner,” she says. “And she took it to the next level, and the next â and she just turned and bullied all of us.”
Westfield State University professor Elizabeth Stassinos says that’s often the case. Kids often play both roles of bully and victim, and it’s often hard to know who is engaging in aggressive or bullying behavior. That’s why, she says, just cracking down on bullies is ineffective and why peer intervention is key.
“Kids themselves need to create new social norms where bullying is not cool, and create an environment where the cool way of dealing with bullying … is for one kid to say to the kid who’s aggressive, ‘Hey, why are you hating on so-and-so all the time?’
“It’s very much like drunk driving,” Stassinos says. “It’s more effective when a student takes the keys away from another student.”
Making it cool to stand up to bullies may sound like a tall order, but it begins to seem a little less impossible when stars like Lady Gaga get into the game.
At Harvard last month, when she announced her new Born This Way Foundation aimed at combating bullying, she told kids it’s on them to change their school culture.
“There is no law that can be passed,” the pop star told the students. “I wish there was, because you know I’d be chained naked to a fence somewhere trying to pass it.”
Indeed, some people feel that laws can do more harm than good. New Jersey recently passed the nation’s strictest anti-bullying law, leaving schools with an 18-page “compliance checklist.” One school made headlines for investigating a second-grader who said another kid had cooties.
Harvard education professor Rick Weissbourd says it’s easy for adults to overreact.
Experts say high-profile school shootings reinforce the perception schools can be dangerous places.
The decision to slap Bully with an R rating is not your average ratings dust-up.
Robert Siegel talks with Lee Hirsch, director of a documentary about bullied schoolkids.
The bullying of a high school student in South Hadley, Mass., allegedly went on for months with …
“There’s an allergy to kids experiencing any adversity,” he says. “[But] we don’t want adults intervening every time a kid teases another kid. We want kids to be able to learn how to develop coping strategies, and learn how to deal with conflict in constructive ways.”
Not All Programs Created Equal
The MARC program spends nearly as much time defining what bullying isn’t as what it actually is, but not all programs do. In fact, some experts say it’s a bit like the Wild West in the fast-growing industry of bully-prevention programs. Anyone can peddle anything â and they do.
Massachusetts anti-bullying campaigner Joe Wojick, also known as “Joe the Biker,” travels schools with his tough persona, rap songs and his motorcycle jacket to tell his story.
“When I was your age, they called me ‘yubbie,’” he tells a group of students.
They may be compelling tales told with the best intentions, but Stassinos says schools should not be investing in programs that are not research-based.
“It’s often a feel-good experience, but it’s a one-off event, and it doesn’t change the climate,” she says. “It seems just like a horrible waste of money to fund programs that aren’t proven to work.”
Stassinos says the evidence is clear about what works: the slow and tedious task of changing kids’ hearts and minds about what’s cool â and what’s not, and convincing them to speak out against aggressive behavior.
April 04 2012 | Education | Comments Off
Story By: by The Associated Press
The last straw for 17-year-old Alton Burke was a note left on his door. The high school dropout picked up the phone and re-enrolled at South Hagerstown High.
Burke missed roughly 200 days of class, but Heather Dixon, the student intervention specialist who left the note, never gave up on him.
Aggressive efforts to prevent students such as Burke from dropping out contributed to a modest 3.5 percentage point increase nationally in the high school graduation rate from 2001 to 2009, according to research presented Monday at the Grad Nation summit in Washington. The event was organized by the children’s advocacy group America’s Promise Alliance founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The graduation rate was 75 percent in 2009, meaning 1 in 4 students fails to get a diploma in four years, researchers found. That’s well below the organization’s goal of 90 percent by 2020.
Researchers found that the number of “dropout factories,” schools that fail to graduate more than 60 percent of students on time, had dropped by more than 450 between 2002 and 2010, but that 1,550 remain. The largest declines in dropout factories were in the South and in suburban communities.
“Big gains are possible if you work hard at it, and if you don’t focus on it, you’re going to go backward,” said Robert Balfanz, a report author and director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University.
The increase in graduation rates was primarily because of growth in 12 states, with New York and Tennessee showing double digit gains since 2002, according to the research. At the other end, 10 states had declines: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island and Utah.
So far, only Wisconsin has met the 90 percent benchmark, although Vermont is close.
“This year’s report proves struggling schools are not destined to fail,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “The reality is that even one dropout factory is too many.”
The authors said there are proven strategies to tackle the problem, such as getting all students to read at grade level, raising the compulsory school attendance age to 18 and developing “early warning” systems to help identify students that might be at risk of later dropping out.
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama encouraged states to pass laws to require students to stay in school until they graduate or they turn 18.
It’s estimated that high school graduates will earn $130,000 more over their lifetimes than dropouts, and that high school graduates will generate more than $200,000 in higher tax revenues and savings in government expenditures over their lifetime, the report said. And, the report said that if the 90 percent goal had already been met, 580,000 more students would have graduated last year, generating $1.8 billion in additional revenue because of increased economic activity.
How to track high school graduation rates has been a contentious issue for years, with states using different methods to come up with a number. Balfanz cited this as a reason why the report does not include the names of the dropout factories. He said they will be included in a future report once all states are consistently reporting data.
States are now required to use the same method to compute graduation rates based on a Bush administration rule issued in 2008.
Nevada stood out for its low graduation rate of 56 percent, a decline of more than 15 percentage points from 2002 to 2009, the largest of any state, the report said. During Nevada’s boom years, students dropped out to earn hefty paychecks parking cars, pouring concrete or serving drinks along the Las Vegas Strip.
“Today, many of Las Vegas’ dropouts are out of work and unable to jumpstart the economy because they lack the required credentials,” the report said.
But Balfanz said there are some signs that the state is “organizing itself against its big challenge.”
The Clark County School District of Las Vegas, for example, has developed a partnership with Vegas PBS for an online program designed to help students earn missing credits needed to graduate. It also started the “Reclaim Your Future” program, which sent school employees and community volunteers door to door to persuade dropouts to return to school.
Many of the strategies encouraged by the authors have been adopted in Washington County, Md. The district has a 92 percent graduation rate, up 15 percentage points from 2000. It’s made progress in recent years even as the county’s unemployment rate lingered above the national average and more students needed homelessness services.
The district offers e-learning classes for credit recovery, evening classes, and a family center where pregnant teens and student parents can attend class. Student attendance and performance data are carefully tracked to identify early any students at risk. Intervention specialists develop relationships with these students, doing everything from visiting their homes to helping them connect with community mental health services.
Clayton Wilcox, the district superintendent, said that even as they work to keep students, those who drop out are warmly welcomed back.
“It’s not easy to drop out. We’re going to hound you. Classroom teachers are going to talk to you. Principals are going to talk to you. The guidance counselor is going to talk to you. We don’t make it easy.” Wilcox said.
Dixon, the intervention specialist who works with Burke, and Amy Warrenfeltz, another intervention specialist at South Hagerstown High, said some of the kids they deal with have mental health issues or drug and alcohol problems. Others struggle because they switched schools because of financial issues in their family or had a bad experience in school with a teacher or peer, they said.
Burke said it was hard to get motivated to attend class once he “got into the routine of not getting up and it became a habit.”
“I was nervous coming back because of what people would say or how people would look at me,” Burke said. “It’s awkward when you haven’t been to school in a couple weeks or whatever and then you come back.”
He had met with Dixon multiple times at his house and at school, and after he dropped out, he said he was sure she would return to his home. He said he was happy when she left the note because he wanted an excuse to return to school. He now goes to school full time and takes evening classes four nights a week. He anticipates graduating this spring and wants to attend technical school in heating, ventilation and cooling.
“Before that, I wanted to come back, but I just didn’t know how to come about it,” Burke said.
March 28 2012 | Education | Comments Off
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March 26 2012 | Education | Comments Off
Story By: by Krissy Clark
A Los Angeles police officer detains a San Pedro High School student in 2010 for truancy. After years of following a more punitive approach, Los Angeles is reconsidering how it handles students who skip class.
At a recent rally to protest the law, teacher Andrew Terranova explains that tickets meant to scare kids into going to school have had the opposite effect.
“I had students who I’d say, ‘Where were you yesterday? You were absent from my class.’ ‘Oh, Mister, I was late. I missed my connecting bus so I went home.’ ‘Why’d you go home?’ ‘Oh, I was afraid of getting another truancy ticket.’ “
Michael Nash, the presiding judge for L.A.’s Juvenile Court, where most of the tickets and fines are handled, called the fines crazy.
“We weren’t really accomplishing anything,” he says. “The court is not going to solve that problem if the kids are late to school. That’s something for the schools to work out with the kids and the families.”
So now, under the new daytime curfew law, police must avoid targeting students clearly headed to campus in the first 90 minutes of school.
“We have to take a look at what can we do to try and help us resolve the root problem of this rather than the Band-Aid approach of just writing the citation,” says L.A. school police chief Steve Zipperman.
When tickets are issued, fines will be waived for the first two offenses, and students will have to work with counselors to come up with an attendance plan â looking into transportation issues or family stuff that might be getting in the way.
City Councilman Tony Cardenas recently summed up the city’s new approach to a crowd of students inside city hall.
“Young people, this is not a permission slip to be late. There are still consequences,” he said. “However, instead of purely punishing like the current system, we will be there for you; we will be there with you.”
Believe it or not, Cardenas told them, an adult is actually going to talk to you, and help figure out how to get you to school on time.
This story was co-reported with Susan Ferriss of the Center for Public Integrity.
March 14 2012 | Education | Comments Off
Story By: by Krissy Clark
Teacher Ruben Gonzalez conducts the South Gate High School band. According to Gonzalez, thieves passed up a computer as well as a stash of valuable flutes, saxophones and clarinets to get to the school’s tubas.
La Banda Rebelde charges twice as much per song as a band without a tuba charges. People have been known to throw hundred-dollar bills into the tubist’s horn to show their appreciation.
“If I just said, ‘Hey, I got a friend who knows a friend who knows a friend who has a tuba,’ you can easily sell it from word of mouth and the black market,” Sanchez says. “It’s big money. It’s just very popular music around here â in any Latino culture area. Me being a fan, I can understand. [I'm] a big tuba aficionado.”
At a Mexican restaurant in South Los Angeles, a group called La Banda Rebelde plays on a makeshift stage in the parking lot. People swarm around them just to hear the tuba. According to one audience member, “Once you put the tuba in there, it makes the whole song different â makes it better.”
But the tuba effect doesn’t come cheap. The band here charges $20 a song â almost twice as much as a group without a tuba. People have even been known to stuff $100 bills down the tuba’s bell.
Putting Bertha Back In Retirement
Back at South Gate High School, that kind of cash could go a long way. At $7,000 a pop, band teacher Ruben Gonzalez says, the tubas stolen from his band will cost more than $35,000 to replace. In the meantime, the band is relying on a 40-year-old sousaphone called Bertha.
“We’ve retired her a couple times, but we’ve brought her back because obviously now we have no tubas,” Gonzalez says.
The school hopes to raise enough money for new tubas in time for band camp this summer.
February 26 2012 | Education | Comments Off