Read any good books lately? 2009 was an interesting year for education books — and the editors of ASBJ have picked 10 books published in 2009 that are notable for school leaders and anyone else involved in education.

Columbine, by Dave Cullen, tops the list. When I wrote about the 10th anniversary of Columbine in May 2009, I read the book and was stunned by how much we don’t know about an event that has shaped education for a decade. Cullen, a journalist for Salon, uncovers the myths of the tragic school shooting, revealing the ugly and unsettling truth about the incident.

For our complete list of top education books, go to http://www.asbj.com/MainMenuCategory/Archive/2010/January/Top-Education-Books-for-2009.aspx.

Let us know if you disagree with our choices or if you want to nominate another education book for the list.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor

Police issued X-26 Taser

An interesting  and, for the moment, civil debate  has ensued between North Carolina’s Guilford County law enforcement and school officials.

On one hand, we have the district. Tasked with  providing a nurturing and safe learning environment, it has contracted with various local law enforcement agencies to help them in this endeavor, placing them in just about every middle and high school campus. 

And for it’s part, the local police departments are more than willing to help schools remain the secure and sound places of learning they should be. Where the two entities are disagreeing, however, is the method.

When the Guilford County Sherrif’s Office began arming its deputies with Tasers in 2007, it also went to the school resource officers. And this year, two other police departments that the district works with, provided their SRO’s with Tasers, too, heightening a percolating sense of unease that educators and families have felt about having these weapons on school sites.

It certainly didn’t help, when an SRO used a Taser on a female high school student earlier this year, nor that days later another SRO suffered injuries after breaking up a student fight because, according the sherrif’s office, the deputy wanted to avoid further controversy and abstained from using the device.  

School board member Sandra Alexander told the News & Record, the majority of the board and the public don’t like the idea of Tasers in schools, with the board extending an invitation to local law enforcement officials to speak about the matter at an upcoming board meeting.  
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Back in July, my colleague Lawrence Hardy wrote a list of “five reforms that failed.” Not surprisingly, “Zero Tolerance” policies were ranked. Larry’s example was a Delaware high school student who got suspended for bringing a pastry knife to school for a Junior Achievement project.

It certainly wasn’t the first time zero tolerance got lambasted, but apparently some schools in Delaware still didn’t get the message.

This week, a 6-year-old boy named Zachary Christie is the poster child for zero tolerance gone amuck. He’s a Cub Scout who loves school so much that he sometimes wears a suit. And on Sept. 29, he was so excited about a new tool his parents gave him—a jackknife-type tool that has a knife, fork and spoon for camping—that he brought it to school to use for lunch.

And that’s where the trouble started. Under the Christina, Del., school district code, knives are banned. Zachary was sentenced to 45 days in a school for juvenile delinquents, and his parents, who are home-schooling him in the interim, created a website and are making the rounds on national news to tell their son’s plight.

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The gut-wrenching photo in this morning’s New York Times tells only part of the story: a little girl holds a sign saying, “Don’t shoot. I want to grow up.”

The gruesome beating death of a Chicago honors student outside his high school wasn’t an act of gun violence, though. This time, Derrion Albert, 16, was beaten to death by a group of thugs with a railroad tie. His death might have been another statistic in an urban district struggling to deal with violence, except a bystander caught the beating on a cellphone video.

That video—shown on broadcasts internationally—did not help Chicago’s reputation for violence, but it did spur local and federal officials into action. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former Chicago schools superintendent, and Attorney General Eric Holder will visit Albert’s family today and later will speak about the federal initiatives to curb school violence.

Albert was the third student to die violently in Chicago this year, and he was the 67^th since the 2007-08 school year, according to the New York Times.

Hundreds of others have been shot or beaten on their way home from school, arguably the most dangerous time of day.

The new schools chief, Ron Huberman, has a plan, and it’s not just about increasing security. Instead, he’s using $60 million in federal stimulus funds for the next two years to use data to find the students most at risk for becoming victims.
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“It’s like you’re driving drunk!” is what I tell friends and relatives who talk

Photo courtesy of Stockvault

on their cell phones while driving.  And if  that sounds overly emphatic (it’s correct, by the way), that urgency is in roughly inverse proportion to what people tend to think about the dangers of this practice — i.e., that it’s no big deal.

It is a big deal, unfortunately, as numerous studies show. Among the latest is from Safe Kids USA, which looked at distracted drivers in school zones and came up with some disquieting results.

One would assume that if more and more people are driving while phoning or text messaging — and, by all estimates, they are — they’re not suddenly hanging up or signing off when they enter school zones.

It’s also not surprising that a recent Canadian study, cited in the report, found that more child-car collisions occur within 150 meters of schools than 300 or more meters away.

Just how many people are driving while distracted in school zones? Safe Kids wanted to find out, so it posted observers at 20 middle schools in 15 states. It found that 187 out of every 1,000 female drivers (and 154 out of every 1,000 male drivers) were distracted by at least one of the following: cell phones or electronics; eating, drinking, or smoking; reaching or looking behind; grooming; or reading.
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LAUSD parents urged to demand more control of schools
Los Angeles Times, May 11
Risk-taking charter school operator Steve Barr is launching an effort through which parents would wrest political control of the L.A. school system from unions, school bureaucrats and other entrenched interests. The plan is for parents to form chapters all over town and improve schools using the growing leverage of the charter school movement.
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School violence drops, but bullying, thefts persist
Washington Post, May 11
Even though spasms of intense violence erupt on campuses occasionally and linger in the social consciousness, violence at schools across the country has been decreasing for a number of years.
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Texas district may give students week off for passing tests
Dallas Morning News, May 11
High school students in Mesquite, Texas who pass state assessments and their classes could skip the last week of school next year while their peers get intensive academic help under a plan expected to be approved by the school board.
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Nevada district to eliminate administrative jobs to save $1.1 million
Las Vegas Sun, May 11
The Clark County school district expects to save $1.1 million a year from an administrative reorganization that shrinks five regional districts into four and eliminates another office.
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California budget crisis threatens high school sports
San Francisco Chronicle, May 10
The state budget crisis has prompted school districts to contemplate painful cuts to sports programs–including the possibility of eliminating athletics entirely–and forced them into frenzied fund-raising.
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Fertile N.Y.C. job market dries up overnight for new teachers
New York Times, May 10
As a result of efforts to cut costs and avoid teacher layoffs, New York City principals may only fill vacancies with internal candidates for the 2009-10 school year, leaving new graduates and aspiring teachers from programs like Teach for America and the city’s Teaching Fellows scrambling for jobs.
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For more news, go to School Board News Today.

Obama offers D.C. voucher compromise
Washington Post, May 7
President Obama will propose setting aside enough money for all 1,716 students in the District’ of Columbia’s voucher program to continue receiving grants for private school tuition until they graduate from high school, but he would allow no new students to join the program, administration officials said.
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Indian-born school board candidate banking on Asian-American votes in Texas district
Dallas Morning News, May 7
An Indian-born candidate for the Plano, Texas, school board has traded the traditional path used to win such elections — candidate forums and endorsements from the city’s political elite — for a strategy nearly entirely dependent on the voter turnout of the city’s growing Asian-American population.
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Calif. judge bars drug tests for students in band, chess club
Los Angeles Times, May 7
A Shasta County, Calif., Superior Court judge has temporarily barred a school district’s policy that subjects students in band and academic clubs to random drug tests.
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N.Y.C. schools chief bans hiring of teachers from outside
New York Times, May 6
Anticipating significant budget cuts to New York City schools in the coming year, Chancellor Joel I. Klein has ordered principals to stop hiring teachers from outside the system, a move that will force them to look internally at a pool that, according to an independent report, includes many subpar teachers.
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Judge: Calif. teacher violated students’ rights by calling creationism ‘nonsense’
USA Today, May 6
A federal judge ruled that a public high school history teacher violated the First Amendment when he called creationism “superstitious nonsense” during a classroom lecture.
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From School Board News Today

When I heard the news, I remember thinking,  ”No, don’t do that. You don’t have to do that. It’s not your fault. Lots of people screwed up, didn’t see it coming. You may not see it now, but you have a lot to live for….”

The story of 41-year-old acting CEO of the mortgage colossus Freddie Mac, who hung himself last month over the collapse of his enterprise, really hit me hard. He had a family, including a young daughter. He had choices, even if he couldn’t seem them through the fog of overwork and depression that had consumed him. “Just walk away from the mortgage business,” I would have told him. “Let it go and do something else.”

About that same time, I received an e-mail from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) about another suicide. This one was of a Massachusetts middle school student who hung himself after being taunted and bullied over his supposed sexual orientation. A similar incident happened with a Georgia boy. The students “didn’t identify as gay,” GLSEN said. But, of course, it makes no difference. No child — gay or straight — should have to endure that kind of abuse.

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Unlike many, if not most you reading this, I don’t remember where I was when I first heard about the Columbine High School shootings. I was at work at the magazine offices that day; I’m sure we heard the news on the Internet and we discussed it.

But the indelible memory for me on April 20, 1999, is listening to CNN later that evening as I bathed my 8-month-old son. He splashed happily in the tub as the horrific details filtered in: Two young men in suburban Colorado came to school, heavily armed, intending to murder their classmates and teachers. They killed 13 that day before committing suicide.

As a new mom, I suddenly saw the incident as a parent first, journalist second. I wondered how this could happen. I wondered if it could happen in my community. I wondered if my little boy would be safe when he went to school.

Children are a striking barometer for the passage of time. A young man has taken the place of my baby. Today, my son is 10 years old. He pitches for his Little League team and he just took an eight-mile mountain hike with his Boy Scout troop. Likewise, the children who attend Columbine High School today were in early elementary school or even preschool when the shootings occurred.

Time passes, yes. But 10 years after the worst shooting in a U.S. public high school, we – parents, school board members, teachers, administrators, journalists – are still asking the same questions that I asked that evening.

My article on the 10^th anniversary of Columbine appears in the May issue of American School Board Journal, online now. ASBJ readers are school leaders – school board members and administrators. So I interviewed the district’s leadership team – Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis, former superintendent Jane Hammond, former public information officer Rick Kaufman, current superintendent Cindy Stevenson, school counselor Sandy Austin, and current school board member Jane Barnes.

They patiently recounted their stories to me – stories that make the shootings very real and very personal. These were people who went to work that morning expecting a regular work day. What happened instead, as Frank DeAngelis told me, changed their lives forever.

We may never fully understand this incomprehensible act. I hope that my article will in some way help those of us still trying.

 Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor

The MacArthur Foundation just released a new study on teens and their online habits.

Billed as the most extensive examination of Internet and new media usage by U.S. teenagers, “Living and Learning with New Media” was conducted over three years by more than two dozen researchers who interviewed and observed more than 800 youth and their families.
Their findings: Kids are learning valuable technical and social skills that aren’t always understood or appreciated by adults.

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” says Mizuko Ito, the study’s lead researcher. “But their participation is giving them technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

Hear Ito talk more about what she and other researchers discovered:

Then check out American School Board Journal’s current cover story, “Protecting Students Online,” which explores how educators can keep students safe while still embracing and integrating the tools of the 21st century.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor