In the fiscal year 2011, 330,000 non-traffic citations were handled in the municipal and justice of the peace courts for juveniles in Texas. Many say these zero tolerance policies unfairly target minority and low-income families.
Testing, testing
Diane Ravitch on teacher evaluations and teaching to the test:
First of all, should teachers be evaluated? Yes. Should they be evaluated by the test scores of their students, as Race to the Top, the Obama program, requires? Absolutely not. That is an unproven and actually a very harmful way to evaluate teachers.
Should teachers be paid more if the test scores go up? No, they should not be, because that puts too much emphasis on very poor tests. It causes teachers to teach to the test, which everybody agrees is a terrible thing to do. It also leads to narrowing of the curriculum, so that schools will drop the arts. They will drop history. They will drop civics, foreign languages. And they will focus only on what’s tested.
Are teachers too easily caught in crossfire over student achievement?
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Sometimes, people look at something like a foundation or our foundation and say, my gosh, they have huge resources.
And the truth is, when you look at the scale of the problems we’re going against, the state of California spends slightly under $30 billion a year educating their kids. So our entire foundation is $30 billion. So we could spend — spend our money all in one year just in the state of California.
But we don’t do that. What a foundation has to be is to be a catalytic wedge. It can take innovations and show where they work. It can measure them. It can show what doesn’t work and take the problems apart. And it’s ultimately for governments to scale up.
"— Melinda Gates on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to reform education
"The college classroom should be a place where students learn to speak with civility, to listen with respect to each other, to know the difference between an argument based on evidence and an opinion, and most of all to realize that they might walk into the room with one point of view and they might walk out with another."
— Andrew Delbanco on college classrooms as the “best rehearsal spaces we have for democracy”
Meet the 1st-Grade Reporters Who Staff the Manatee Messenger
via PBS:
When my colleague Mike Fritz and I headed down to St. Petersburg, Fla., recently, we knew we were going to see young journalists at work. It’s not too hard to imagine that middle school students with a bit of training can write for a newspaper or even shoot video; plenty of kids have cellphones with cameras these days. But birthing journalists from first grade? I couldn’t imagine how it was done — until we arrived at Melrose Elementary, a journalism magnet school.
On a cool April morning the first graders from Teresa Scott’s class silently make their way into a multimedia classroom where they gather once a week. The question “What is a reporter?” was written on the white board in the front of the room. Most seemed already to have the answer.
First up on the agenda: a bit of review. Journalism teachers Carol Blair and Cynthia Vickers began by reinforcing an earlier lesson. In unison, as if they were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, the students and teachers said: “A good journalist uses their brain, eyes, ears, nose and mouth to ask the five W’s: who, what, when, where and why.”
FJP: The video is simultaneously adorable and an eerie sort of indoctrination but we’ll keep this light. Here are some delightful highlights from our archival exploration of the Manatee Messenger.
- Akerah Robinson and Adrianna Lewis (Fifth-Grade) report on student flexibility:
Omari Booker, a fifth- grader, is an unusually talented person. He can crack his wrist, wiggle his ears and rotate his eyeballs up inside his head, so all you can see is the white part. When asked about his talents, he said, “I don’t know how I do it. I guess I was just born this way.”
- Adriana Landes (Third-Grade) writes this bold letter to the editor:
Dear editor:
I think we should have a chocolate fountain in the cafeteria so we can dip food in it and use it for a decoration. It would look pretty. The other thing we should change is to build a bigger and different playground. We need more room to play. When we play games now, we have to stay inside the edge of the playground where there is no equipment and there isn’t enough room to run.
- And this: First-graders hold a Press Conference with Coach Wong.
Somewhere down they line, these Manatee Messengers end up in middle school, where the questions they ask become more than just “what is your favorite thing to do on Saturday? Sleep, play or go to Busch Gardens?“
Check out this honest and striking video investigation, produced by eighth-grader De’Qonton Davis and his classmates at John Hopkins Middle School, on how neighborhood violence spills over to the classroom — a problem adults have been trying to deal with for years. More than 100 students were arrested in one year alone at John Hopkins, and these young journos decided to dig deep and investigate why. The video has already garnered local and national attention, but De’Qonton is still trying to get it to one person in particular…
De’Qonton Davis:
I want the president to see what I could do and see what — what young kids can do, young black American kids. And I want them to know that somebody out there is trying to learn and trying to get their education right and be a good adult dad in a community when he grows up.
(Get Schooled/The Johns Hopkins University)
#AmGrad2012
you guys
i am graduating in the morning
Congrats, you! Take a pic for us, will you? We’re curating a Pinterest board for the high school graduating class of 2012. Would love to have you on it. (A couple of different ways to get it to us: tag it #AmGrad2012 on Instagram/twitter, email us, Tumblr it or send carrier pigeons). Have fun tomorrow :D
^KC
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Photography and journalism have made me a different person.
For the first time, I love telling stories because I can express myself through photos. It makes me want to come to school every day, and it has given me something that I’m really good at.
I like being able to tell stories without using words. I like being able to tell people things that are important in my life.
"— De’Qonton, an eighth grader at John Hopkins Middle School (who produced the report Fighting Chance? Students Investigate Middle School Violence) on how journalism has made a difference in his life and in his schoolwork.
(Source: studentreportinglabs.com)
