One of the names under consideration for a new elementary school in Rochester, Minnesota is Falcon Ridge Elementary. There are plenty of hawks, owls and turkeys near the new school, but no falcons. There’s really not much of a ridge either, apparently. If you wanted to name the school after local fauna and geographic features, then you might have to go with Turkey Floodplain Elementary, one wag observed.
Such is the difficulty in getting schools named after human beings. As a report by Jay Greene noted last year, there are 11 schools in Florida that honor manatees,while George Washington has five.
Geographic names are non-controversial, even when they’re made up. The other name under consideration is George Gibbs Elementary, in honor of the first African American to set foot on Antarctica and the founder of the local branch of the NAACP. The Rochester school board chose Gibbs the other night, but there will be time for public comment before it’s final.
Here’s a list of 100 names the board started with before narrowing it to Falcon Ridge and George Gibbs. I wonder if Al Gore and Bono (School of Rock, indeed!) are miffed at not making the cut.
From the Washington Post comes an uncharacteristically credulous piece about a soon-to-be launched private school built around a radically student-centered model. Harvard-educated lawyer Alan Shusterman’s 6-12 grade school will charge $25,000 a year in tuition, but the schedules and lessons will be different. “The model is inspired by the success of home-schoolers,” says Shusterman.
“Students will set their class schedules, enabling them to learn at their pace and in their styles. Teachers will act as advisers, not taskmasters,” reports the Post’s Jay Mathews. Yup, more “guide on the side” stuff.
As for homework, “the one-size-fits-all [model] mandated in today’s schools is largely counterproductive,” Shusterman says in a slide presentation he uses to sell his idea. School for Tomorrow will have a home reading requirement and “encourage and support individualized, student-initiated homework.”
Mainstream education can learn a thing or two from successful homeschoolers. But if this kind of radically student-centered model is what you’re after, why pay $25,000 for what you can get at home for free?
Surprise Update. Alan Shusterman responds in the comments section. He turns out to be quite well-versed on Core Knowledge–and his school will have a core curriculum after all.
Enhanced school safety? Or just plain creepy? That’s the question school officials and parents in Rhode Island are grappling as they weigh the efficacy of a pilot program that equipped elementary school students’ backpacks with radio frequency locator tags in the name of improved safety for children in transit to and from school on buses.
House and Senate lawmakers, worried about privacy violations, passed legislation prohibiting the use of such tags to track students. But Rhode Island’s governor has vetoed the bill noting that “in certain circumstances, it may be helpful for schools to have the ability to quickly identify where each of their students is located.”
A Middletown school official said the tracking devices were not meant to infringe upon students’ rights. The tags were placed on backpacks of children who rode buses and were used to track them in real time as they boarded and left the vehicles. The Providence Journal says the idea was “to help notify parents when a bus is running late, or has encountered trouble, as was the case during the December snowstorm that saw more than 50 Providence buses stranded for hours, said school facilities director Edward Collins, a program supporter. In more serious circumstances, the chips could alert school officials if a child was lost or abducted.”
About 100 students who didn’t get into the selective North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics will still be able to take school courses, but from their homes instead of the Durham campus, the Charlotte Observer reports.
Great idea.
Nearly 30 years after Seattle’s schools were integrated through busing, the city’s schools have long since resegrated, writes Linda Shaw, the Seattle Times education reporter. Today, about one-third of the district’s schools have nonwhite populations that far exceed the district’s average of 58 percent. In 20 of them, nonwhite enrollment is 90 percent or more. There are fewer nearly all-white schools today than when Seattle began districtwide busing in 1978. But Seattle Public Schools, like many districts across the nation, has slowly, steadily resegregated, Shaw writes.
The Seattle School Board is weighing what, if anything, to do about the situation. As the board plans a major overhaul of how it assigns students to schools, its members face conflicting desires. Do they assign more students to schools close to their homes? That’s what many parents say they want, and it’s what the board (before last year’s elections) voted to pursue. Do they try to ensure racial diversity at every school? Many parents say they want that, too. But if a neighborhood is segregated, a neighborhood school will be, too.
But the school board is more limited than ever in what it can do, the paper notes, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s closely watched desegregation decision a year ago. The court ruled that Seattle and Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky could no longer use a student’s race in deciding where some students attend school.
The paper’s long, thorough report notes that busing “as the numbers might appear to show” with white enrollment dropping as many students left the system. Diversity also did not raise academic achievement, After the district reduced busing in 1989, then ended it entirely eight years later, the racial balance at many schools continued to unravel. “The hard truth,” says School Board member Steve Sundquist, “is that the school district is hard-pressed to single-handedly overturn segregated housing patterns in the city.”
Pittsburgh police say a public high school teacher nabbed in a heroin sting returned to school for the rest of the day before she was suspended with pay.
A longtime high school wrestling coach has lost his job amid concerns a former assistant coach tried to convert Muslim students to Christianity.
The lawyer for a suspended Greenwich elementary school principal confirms that the key issue in the dispute involves cupcakes.
For the second time this week, a ghastly-sounding story of a teacher verbally abusing a five-year-old child. And this time, it’s on tape. The parents of an Indiana kindergartener sent the child to school with a tape recorder in his pocket after suspecting problems:
I’ve been more than nice to you all year long and you’ve been ignorant, selfish, self-absorbed, the whole thing! I’m done!” Indiana teacher Kristen Woodward says to Gabriel on the tape. She continues: “Something needs to be done because you are pathetic! If me saying these words to you hurt, I hope it does because you’re hurting everyone else around you.”
One-hundred percent reading proficiency six years early. Last spring, all 184 students in the third and fourth grades at Ocean City Elementary School passed the Maryland School Assessment, or MSA, a battery of tests given by the state every year since 2003 to satisfy the law. “The school was the first in the state, apart from a few tiny special-education centers, to meet the goal that has defined public education this decade,” reports the Washington Post.
While not a disadvantaged school, neither Ocean City Elementary an affluent suburban school. The Post notes the student population, nearly 600 in total, is 89 percent white, 5 percent Hispanic, 3 percent black, 2 percent Asian and 1 percent American Indian. Twenty-nine students have limited English proficiency, and 134 qualify for subsidized meals because of low family income.
Daniel Santillan is a residency enforcer for the Calexico school district. His job is to make sure that students in the California school district actually live in the US, not Mexico. “When he’s not tracking students on weekday mornings at the border crossing, he visits local homes to make sure children live where their parents say they do,” reports the Christian Science Monitor.
“Santillan isn’t thrilled about busting youngsters for living south of the border, but he accepts his job. ‘The bottom line is that these kids are taking up room,’ he says. “Some schools are now doing more to enforce residency requirements under pressure from politicians and activists concerned about wasted taxpayer money, reports the paper, which notes it’s impossible to know how many Mexican students cross the border daily to attend school in the US, sent by parents who think they’ll get a better education. Still, border communities have fretted over their presence for more than a decade. Calexico’s schools, however, have gone further than others by sending Santillan to photograph students at the border and requiring parents to provide proof of residency twice a year.
A Port St. Lucie, Florida parent is threatening to sue after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to “vote him out of class.”
After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Melissa Barton. By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.
Barton filed a complaint with the school resource officer, who investigated the matter, according to Port St. Lucie Department spokeswoman Michelle Steele, who said the teacher confirmed the incident took place. The state attorney’s office concluded the matter did not meet the criteria for emotional child abuse, so no criminal charges will be filed, Steele said. The district is investigating, not surprisingly.
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