There are some things that should be so obvious when left up to a simple test of common sense that no formal law should be required to regulate them. One would assume that teachers having a sexual relationship with their students would fall under this category, but apparently some educators need a little more guidance to see the difference between right and wrong.

In the District of Columbia, the only thing that bars a teacher from sleeping with one of his or her students is the age of consent, which is 16 in the District.  That’s right, by current law, as long the student is 16 years or older, a teacher would not be committing a crime if they had sex with that student. Whether this seems like a gross ethical blunder by the teacher or a huge legal oversight by lawmakers, the problem is certainly not unique to D.C. schools.

Georgia state law also holds that those students over 16 are at the age of consent, and therefore a teacher cannot be arrested for being intimate with those students. A unanimous ruling last year in the state of Washington allowed for teachers to have a sexual relationship with students as long as they were over the age of 18.

D.C. Council member Kwame Brown is taking a step in the right direction by sponsoring emergency legislation that would require the firing of any teacher convicted of sleeping with a student, regardless of that student’s age. The bill would not yet allow the District to bring criminal charges against the teacher, but “Brown (D-At Large) and his legislative staff determined…he needed more time to draft that proposal. He instead decided to push for emergency legislation requiring that such teachers be fired, the Washington Post reported Monday.
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Photo courtesy Stockvault

Special education is one of the most complicated, misunderstood, and underreported facets of K-12 education. And for journalists, the factors that make special education topics so compelling—the emotions, the politics, and the money (lots of money)—are the same issues that give school board members angst.

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Keeping All Students Safe Act (formerly the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act),

 H.R. 4247, a bill that would mandate states and districts to monitor the use of restraints and seclusion or isolation in all classrooms, report actions to parents, and provide better training for teachers.

The bill is strongly supported by the disability community, but also by education groups including NSBA and the American Federation of Teachers, who typically advocate for local control for school officials on such issues. In spite of this endorsement, quite a few school board members are concerned—and rightly so–that this bill would lead to another unfunded mandate and paperwork for their districts.
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Don’t you just hate the redheaded lifestyle?  All those pigtails and freckles — that attitude that says “We’re one in 50 and so, so special.” Makes me want to gag.

Ditto for diabetics and their nasty little needles. Don’t they notice kids could be watching?

Finally, and then I’ll stop: Old People. Excuse me, Senior Citizens. Please, somebody: take them off our streets and let them drive their silly golf carts at their retirement homes — far away from the rest of us. 

Fortunately, I’m not alone in my disgust of alternative lifestyles. I have an ally in Ken Cuccinelli, the attorney general of Virginia. This month, as you may know, Cuccinelli sent letters to every Virginia public university saying they could no longer include sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination policies because, in his view, the authority to add protected groups rests solely with the state legislature. And luckily, our ever-vigilant Virginia General Assembly has defeated attempts to include gay people in state nondiscrimination policies 25 times since 1997 — a record we can all be proud of.

Now there’s some question over whether the attorney general really has this kind of power over the universities, which have long been allowed — too long, some of us say — to go their own way regarding their antidiscrimination policies. In fact, as one letter-writer to The Washington Post pointed out last week, the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and some other state universities have also include veterans as a protected class!
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Photo courtesy of Stockvault

From serious cases of senioritis to the infamous senior skip day, the last year of high school is sometimes wrongly deemed by students as a year to coast through their classes and responsibilities. Even high achievers may soon be skipping out on senior year, but they wouldn’t be playing hooky—they’d be headed off to college.

Twenty-one states already allow students to graduate early, and 35 let students graduate based on performance on state proficiency tests, rather than fulfilling specific course requirements, according to the Education Commission of the States.

A recent USA Today story said that many high school students end up “tinkering with their senior year,” whether this means graduating early or earning college credits while still in high school.

“By the fall of 2011, a small group of high schools in eight states will take part in a new initiative, announced last week, that will allow high school sophomores who pass a series of ‘board exams’ to graduate two years early and move directly to a two- or four-year college,” the USA Today story said. They also mentioned the 50,000 students enrolled in early-college high schools, which operate specifically for this purpose.

In addition to getting students into universities and/or the workforce sooner, eliminating senior year would also take some of the strain off school budgets that are already stretched to the maximum. 
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In his annual address to secondary school heads, John Dunford, the general secretary of the U.K.’s Association Of School and College Leaders, acknowledged yesterday that a culture of instant gratification has made the job of teaching today’s youth harder than its ever been.

“Success appears to come instantly and without any real effort,” Dunford told the conference audience. “It is difficult for teachers to compete. Success in learning just doesn’t come fast enough.” 

Well said, Mr. Dunford, but hardly revolutionary.

For years now, I’ve heard from teacher friends and seen from site visits how much teaching has become by necessity almost entertainment like; we must engage the students by making lessons fun and relevant.

One teacher told me recently that she has to convince high school students that learning basic math concepts like multiplication and  division are necessarily skills in life, even employing popular rap stars and their lyrics about money making within her arsenal.

That’s sad … but is it inevitable given how prolific and accessible technology and media are and make everything seem? Not only do we have 24/7 media, we have an endless supply of fame-seekers willing to broadcast their lives 24/7.
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Photo courtesy Gates Foundation

Want to hold onto your best teachers? Put good principals in your schools.

For years, teachers have been telling me that a good principal—someone who is supportive, focuses on improving instruction, and creates a healthy school climate—is the single most important factor in their choice of schools to work in.

Now a national survey of 40,000 teachers confirms my anecdotal-based opinion.

The survey, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found that 68 percent of teachers said  “supportive leadership” is essential for retaining good teachers, as opposed to only 45 percent who rated higher salaries as important.

That comes as no surprise to me. Without a good principal or an enlightened central office, a school can become a lousy place to work. No teacher is going to sit in a classroom every day if the principal won’t intervene against student misbehavior in hallways or classrooms—or can’t inspire a sense of meaning and progress to the work teachers do.

Conducted in conjunction with Scholastic Inc., the survey findings, Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools, offers some other insights into the minds of teachers:
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Photo courtesy Stockvault

There’s a reason school districts still rely on the same teacher evaluation model that’s been around for half a century.

Many are not ready for anything more ambitious.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of local school leaders who do a great job of evaluating teachers.

It’s just that, with everything else there is to do in today’s public schools, the teacher evaluation process can get lost in the shuffle. You just assume it’s working fine.

That’s why there are principals out there who are not adequately trained to evaluate their faculty. And why there is little money out there to provide that training.

And why lots of mediocre teachers get a “satisfactory” rating each year—because principals don’t feel qualified to make hard judgments or prefer to avoid the hassles of dealing with a struggling teacher.

Of course, there also are those schools that just avoid the issue altogether. That reality was revealed in a new report that concludes the Boston Public schools “routinely neglect a basic task: evaluating teachers.”

According to the Boston Globe, the report, commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, found that “half the city’s approximately 5,000 teachers have not received an evaluation in the past two years, and a quarter of the city’s 135 schools have not conducted evaluations during that period.”
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A good night’s sleep can be hard to find for busy students, but a new study shows that a daytime nap can boost learning and memorization power in young adults. The idea certainly makes sense to me—even a short snooze has the power to leave me feeling exponentially more lucid than I was 20 minutes before.

Unfortunately, nap time during the school day pretty much disappeared after kindergarten. Even in college, when my dorm was just a short walk away, it was hard to find a time when work or class was not demanding my attention.

The new research, presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, shows that young adults who took a 90-minute nap after eating lunch were able to boost their learning power, according to a Monday New York Times report.

Today, the New York Times posed the question, “do you get enough sleep?” to students on their education blog, The Learning Network. Most students replied that they were carrying some serious sleep debt, but highly doubt that schools would be amenable to giving students a free period to sleep. “If we told our school they probably would laugh at us,” one post commented.
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I’m really tired of suggestions that school boards can ease their school budget deficits by cutting more administrators from the payroll.

One of the latest to offer this all-too-common recommendation was Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, who recently was talking about his state’s more than $1.5 billion budget shortfall.

“We don’t want to cut public education, so we’re going to have to go to superintendents of schools and say: ‘Listen, you’ve got to find us some administrators, some bureaucrats, some public relations people that we can cut, because we’re not going to furlough teachers,’ ” the Baltimore Sun reports Miller saying.

Now, I applaud any recognition of the importance of teachers—and protecting the instruction that goes on in the classroom. And I’m sure Sen. Miller means well.

But, really, this sounds like one of those off-the-cuff remarks that policymakers spout every once in a while.

And it’s not helpful. It just gets people thinking that there’s fat to cut in today’s school budgets. That many school district central offices are bloated, staffed by people who don’t do essential work.

It ain’t so.

School board members and superintendents know the reality. A school system is a complex, multi-million-dollar operation, and there is a lot of work to be done outside the classroom if teachers are to teach—and students are to learn.
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More than a year ago, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., head of the House Labor and Education Committee, began probing the use of seclusion and restraints in special education classrooms. At the time, those acts seemed to be rare and isolated.

But new research has, unfortunately, proved otherwise.

Not only are many schools and teachers frequently and improperly using those methods to punish students—sometimes for seemingly trivial behavioral issues— but also a handful of incidents have resulted in students’ deaths. And state and federal policies are lax in addressing the issue, which can leave districts unable to fire abusive teachers or reprimand inappropriate acts.  

In a story for the March ASBJ, I spoke to researcher Joseph B. Ryan, who was concerned about the training teachers are receiving. As part of a study that was used by Miller’s staff, he interviewed teachers and found that many had only received training on how to restrain, not when. Others, when asked about the prevalence of the use of restraints, cited policies and school rules, but when he examined incidence reports he found that the use of restraints was much more widespread than they acknowledged.

“It becomes a cultural situation—this is why parents and advocates are up in arms,” he said. “It’s an inappropriate response in the majority of times staff use it.”

Miller’s bill – which was passed by the House committee by a vote of 34 to 10 earlier this month — would create minimum safety standards for schools and require states to set and enforce policies. It prohibits a number of types of restraints deemed dangerous and requires schools to notify parents of incidents and report data to the U.S. Department of Education.

Since the story was published, NSBA has given another resounding endorsement to the measure.

“We believe that this legislation will meet our safety and other goals for students and school personnel while providing sufficient authority and flexibility to schools and school districts in training school personnel based on their unique needs,” NSBA associate executive director Michael A. Resnick wrote in a Jan. 25 letter to Rep. Miller. “The legislation is strategic and balanced in dealing with such factors as training, prohibiting the use of certain practices, and promoting positive learning supports.”

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor