June 8, 2008 - June 14, 2008 Archives

A close friend visited over the weekend, bringing home the realities of the recent hike in food costs. A third-year law student, she is within arm’s reach of achieving a long-held dream -- and a lucrative career, as well. But for now, she is a poor college student. So much so that she professed to me that she stopped buying bread when it hit $2.50 a loaf. “I don’t need to eat sandwiches,” she said.

Despite soaring food prices, school district food service departments don’t have a choice in what they can and can’t offer. Regulated by state and federal guidelines, child nutrition programs have to provide so many calories, adhere to certain rules and procedures, and appeal to student tastes. And with childhood obesity becoming a targeted issue, also districts must ensure meals are healthy and nutritious.

Remarkably, some districts aren’t just surviving, they are thriving. Berkeley Unified School District in California is one such example. Nearly three years ago, the school district received a grant that allowed them to hire a chef who revamped what comes out (and in) all of the district’s 16 schools.

Some of their accomplishments:

The central kitchen serves more than 5000 meals daily, utilizing fresh whole produce, instead of frozen, processed vegetables.

Each school hosts a salad bar, which features seasonal fruits and vegetables -- nearly a third of which is organic and locally grown.

Three-quarters of the schools employ a buffet service, reducing the need for plastic-wrapped disposable trays.

All meals are free of trans fat and high fructose corn syrup.

All kitchens compost and recycle.

But Berkeley has its challenges, too. The central kitchen has no stove or walk-in refrigerator, in fact, most of the site-based kitchens are antiquated. Many of the kitchen staff had to be trained to know how to handle fresh, unprocessed food; Many of them had never even held a knife. And of course, the biggest obstacle is the lack of funding, which when all is said and done, amounts to 80 cents to purchase food. What kind of meal can you possibly provide at that price?

Berkeley, not surprisingly, is trying to revolutionize its food services and has made great gains. But it can’t continue, nor can any other school district, unless the realities of today (rising food, gas, and labor costs, to name a few) are addressed.

Make to visit ASBJ.com to read our package of articles on school food nutrition.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor

Of course it’s about religion. How could it be about anything else?

I’m talking about a push among members of the Texas State Board of Education to ensure that textbooks cover the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary theory. That mandate was already snuck into the state curriculum standards in the late 1980s, but little was done about it “because evolution skeptics have not had enough power on the education board to win the argument that textbooks do not adequately cover the weaknesses of evolution,” according to an article in the New York Times.

Now they may have that power. “Seven of 15 members subscribe to the notion of intelligent design,” the Times says, “and they have the blessings of Gov. Rick Perry…”

The board chairman, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist and creationist who believes the earth is thousands of years old (and not the billions of years cited by the vast majority of scientists), argues that the case for evolution “is not there.” But he says his rejection of evolution -- and, presumably, his insistence that Texas textbooks point out its “weaknesses” -- is not made on religious grounds.

Not on religious grounds? The Board of Education isn’t going after Germ Theory, or Color Theory, or the Theory of Gravitation -- although, if you look, there are weaknesses in all of these, just as there are in any scientific theory that attempts to explain how the natural world works. The board just happens to have focused on evolution.

The repercussions from this debate won’t end in Texas. Textbook makers routinely defer to the request of their big-state clients so they won’t have to tailor their books to every market. That could be bad news -- not just for schoolchildren in Texas, but for the science literacy of public school students across the United States.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

This summer, everyone will be impacted in some way by the declining economy and rising gas, food, and—fill in the blank—prices. Unfortunately, your students aren’t immune, either.

It’s a cruel summer for teenagers looking for jobs, as a recent survey by SnagAJob.com showed. Many employers are not hiring for temporary summer jobs—some of those positions have been taken by older, displaced workers and others have been eliminated. Of the employers who were hiring students on break, they were hiring teens they’d worked with the year before.

Even students who aren’t old enough to work are affected. Some districts are cancelling summer school and enrichment classes, which will hurt the neediest populations. And many school officials and social workers are worried that more students from impoverished households could go hungry this summer without the guarantee of a school lunch.

For older students, a summer job may mean extra spending money or college savings, valuable experience in a field, or food for their families.

But last year, the job market for teens was the worst on record since the World War II period as the seasonally adjusted employment rate for teens plummeted to 34.5 percent, Michelle Singletary, one of my favorite financial columnists, recently wrote. This year, it’s only going to get worse, with only about 34.2 percent of teens employed, she says.

Researchers at Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies say it’s an even harder market for particular groups of students, including: 16- and 17-year-olds, males, blacks, Hispanics, and low-income students. These teens “face the equivalent of a Great Depression,” they write in a dire report called “The Continued Collapse of the Nation’s Teen Job Market and the Dismal Outlook for the 2008 Summer Labor Market for Teens: Does Anybody Care?”

That can lead to some alarming consequences: “Less work experience today leads to less work experience tomorrow and lower earnings down the road,” write the Northeastern researchers. They also cite research showing that disadvantaged teens who work in high school are more likely to remain in high school than their peers who do not work, and teen girls who have jobs are less likely to become pregnant.

For teens looking for summer work in this economy, Fortune Magazine’s columnist Anne Fisher advises to start early—ideally, in January -- and apply often, sending out dozens of applications instead of one or two.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

Which academically struggling students do you help? That’s a question that local school leaders constantly are forced to make.

You can focus intervention efforts on the early grades—and ensure that all children can read by the end of third grade. But that may require you to shortchange help for high school students on the verge of dropping out.

You can focus on dropout-prevention, counseling, and smaller learning environments at the high school—and then lack the money to help primary school children who are just starting to fall behind academically.

Or you can try to help both ends of the age spectrum—but stretch your resources so thinly that you never really solve anything.

So what should school policymakers do? Well, a new study by the Public Policy Institute of California cements my personal opinion. It examined student achievement in San Diego and found that you pretty much can identify which students will fail the state exit exam by fourth grade.

Hardly a surprise given what we know about academically struggling students. Those struggles start early—and only get worse with the years.

Some school districts share my perspective on these hard choices. They’ve quietly focused most of their reform efforts on the early grades, holding off high school reform a few years. The hope is that younger students will naturally lift academic achievement at the middle and high schools as they grow up—and make the challenges of later-grade reform all that much easier.

Also, it’s simply easier to intervene with younger students—and thus such efforts are more likely to succeed and positively affect more students.

The report’s authors appear to agree, expressing doubts about tutoring programs designed to help older students pass the state exit exams. “Our results strongly suggest that these 11th -hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results.”

Instead, they conclude, “moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in the early grades . . .could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure.”

That’s a hard pill for some folks to swallow. The Los Angeles Times, in its coverage of the study, quoted a state legislator, who voiced the commonly heard refrain that “we shouldn’t be put in a position where we are pitting the outcomes of seniors against the future of preschoolers.”

True enough. But when the legislator added that such a choice “makes no sense,” I had to wonder what her solution is. Is she going to push through more state funding for schools?

You know the answer to that. State lawmakers are going to give you enough money to keep the schools open, and you’re going to have to make the touch choices.

So, what do you think is the best investment of your limited resources? Which students are you going to help?

Del Stover, Senior Editor

On Tuesday, three of the country’s largest Internet service providers -- Sprint Nextel, Verizon Communications, and Time Warner Cable -- agreed to block customer access to child porn sites.

While child welfare advocates declared the agreement -- which would prevent users from visiting newsgroups with suspected child pornography and remove websites with questionable images from servers -- others saw the move as the first step toward censorship.

Interestingly enough, many of the same issues were discussed at a conference held in Washington D.C., also on Tuesday. The “Point Smart, Click Safe” summit drew together representatives from the education, child safety, law enforcement, and cable and telecommunications field to talk about ways to ensure children’s online safety.

What role each group, particularly industry, plays in achieving this goal was a central theme of the summit, and a question that wasn’t easily answered.

“There’s always a feeling that more should be done, either by government or industry,” said Adam Thierer, a senior fellow and director of the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom. “We can always pressure companies to do a little bit more, but I think it would be crossing the line to clean up all content and the naughty bits out there. How far can you go in empowering (parents) without going into censorship?”

While all of the tools, ratings, and policies have helped parents and families in safeguarding children’s online activities, nothing can be substituted for education.

“But when we turn to policy, we regulate first and then turn to education,” said Thierer, who examined more than three dozen recent bills on online safety and discovered only two included an education component.

“Our government has spent money losing this stuff, when what we really need is an outreach and awareness building,” Thierer surmises.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor