In Burma, Politics Could Get In The Way Of Saving Lives
Relief organizations and the U.N. are becoming more and more frustrated with the Burma junta’s unwillingness to accept foreign aid for cyclone victims. Cyclone Nargis has killed nearly 30,000 people in Burma, according to Myanmar TV, although some are putting the death toll as high as 100,000. Around 1.5 million people have been displaced from their homes.
The Burmese military government began accepting some aid from the U.N. last week, but aid workers have struggled to gain access. The process has been slow, relief workers have experienced trouble getting visas and delivery of aid by the junta has been characterized by an “unacceptably slow response to this grave humanitarian crisis,” according to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The U.N. has tried to increase pressure on Burma this week to avoid making the crisis exponentially worse. Many cyclone victims currently require medical attention that they’re unable to receive. Another serious concern is that there could be an outbreak of infections diseases. Both of these factors could result in an even higher death toll.
Today, the U.N. and other agencies expressed additional concerns about the children affected by Nargis. Up to 40 percent of those killed in Nargis were children, they said, and many of the survivors are also children. Children who are now staying in crowded, makeshift shelters could be at an increased risk of human trafficking and sexual abuse, the agencies said. Children separated from their families are forced to live alongside adults “often in dark or unlit areas with little supervision” reports the AP.
“We are really concerned about the risk of exploitation and sexual abuse,” said UNICEF’s chief of child protection in Myanmar, Anne-Claire Dufay. She said that this is a common concern in post-emergency situations.
The lack of security in many areas of the country, among all populations, is another cause for concern with Burma’s reluctance to accept aid. Since U.N. orders don’t seem to be getting the country’s attention, many are trying to get another government to step in.
Human rights advocates have called upon China to use its significant influence in Burma to pressure the junta to immediately accept U.N. relief. Human Rights Watch says that China must do “the right thing” and pressure Burma to lift restrictions on foreign aid efforts. "The world is watching to see if China does the right thing for Burma's cyclone victims," said Brad Adams, the HRW Asia director.
Sein Win, an exiled leader of Burma’s opposition party, has made similar pleas. “The world is not telling China to do what they should do…to save people,” he said. “[T]he question is whether they are going to use [their leverage] or not.”
But China is busy worrying about political strategy. The country does not want to alienate Burma’s government, and it does not want the world to see it siding with Western aid interests. China itself doesn’t like Western agencies to independently operate within its borders, even in national disasters.
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Despite a regular stream of criticism from politicians and educators about the law--some for its complete abolition, others for severe revision to the point of rendering it unrecognizable from the law's original goals--the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 remains, for the most part, safe and unchanged.
That's not to say that it hasn't been challenged and at times, threatened. But one of the more serious threats was unmistakably denied last week, when a federal judge ruled against Connecticut's lawsuit challenging NCLB as an unfunded mandate.
The root of Connecticut's lawsuit was a claim that the cost of fulfilling the annual 3rd through 8th grade testing requirements of NCLB was greater than the amount of money the federal government was providing the state in Title I funding. Connecticut sought an exemption from the US Department of Education to continue testing only in 4th, 6th, and 8th grades as it was doing prior to the law's passage. But the federal circuit court judge ruled that Connecticut had failed to provide any evidence that the federal government was not providing enough money to pay for the testing. NCLB's mandate to test every year between 3rd and 8th grade and once in high school, in other words, was sufficiently funded.
The case itself was simple in its holding, and relatively uncontroversial. The more interesting question for those of us concerned with the implications for chilrden is, where is all of the anti-NCLB sentiment coming from? The law has pretty universal goals, after all: to reduce the achievement gap and ensure school accountability.
My observations about the origins of anti-NCLB sentiment among educators is that it is partly due to top-down teacher union influence, and partly due to a bogey-man type mentality. In the former regard, national level officials in the NEA and AFT have long regarded NCLB as a problematic path for reform, since its chief proposal (school level accountability for student achievement) diverts attention from policies that would enhance teacher union membership or teacher benefits (such as class-size reduction or across-the-board teacher pay raises).
In the latter regard, my experience is that a significant number of teachers are upset about NCLB because of a post hoc ergo proper hoc* logical fallacy. Essentially, teachers get frustrated about their jobs for a multitude of reasons (low administrative support, lack of staff-wide teacher quality, poor student behavior, pay that they believe to be too low, to name a few). Many of these reasons may just have to do with the fact that teaching is, of itself, a challenging job. But since the passage of NCLB, teachers have attributed their angers and frustrations to the laws, rather than to more subtle demands that have long existed on the profession.
In short, teachers are blaming the NCLB-bogey man for non-NCLB-related problems. A great example of this is when teachers blame NCLB for high-stakes testing policies that school districts and states decide to implement. NCLB itself says nothing about making a certain grade level test a requirement for grade promotion; the states are to blame for it!
Sadly, this kind of attribution problem is probably par for the course any time a significant policy change is made without immediate results. But what we must make sure to avoid is giving up on a potentially positive policy because of wrong-headed backlash.
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A new documentary, simply titled Asparagus!, gives us big reasons to care about this one little green stalk. The film focuses a magnifying glass on Oceana County, Michigan, the asparagus capital of the world. Over the course of 53 minutes, we meet many of the residents, family farmers, and farm workers for whom asparagus defines life.
The film brings to life our country’s local asparagus industry, while pulling in issues from the local food movement to free trade to the U.S. war on drugs to the struggle of family farmers in an increasing globalized world. As many documentaries do, Asparagus! sets up a David/Goliath conflict: Oceana County’s asparagus community finds itself under serious threat from foreboding forces of the U.S. government’s war on drugs.
In the early 1990s, the government started using U.S. tax dollars to pay Peruvian farmers to grow asparagus instead of coca. Since then, hundreds of American farms have gone out of business. Not only is imported asparagus cheaper, but it’s available year-round – because Peru’s agricultural conditions allow for year-round growth.
For Oceana County, the impact has been particularly damaging. Many family farms have been forced to shut down. The ones still holding on for dear life struggle to compete with cheap imported asparagus.
Unsurprisingly, the so-called war on drugs initiative has done nothing to curb cocaine production or distribution. As one farmer in the film says, it’s not like coca farmers stopped their growing and switched over to asparagus. And why would they, when the cocaine industry is such a lucrative one, mainly due to high demand from the U.S.?
The film also takes on free trade, depicting small farmers whose lives and livelihoods are being greatly impacted by U.S. foreign trade policy.
But the real appeal of the film is that it’s got heart. As we get to know Oceana’s residents and farmers, hear their stories, and learn about their idiosyncratic love for asparagus, it’s hard not to fall in love with the town. Which also makes it hard not to get onboard with their cause.
Asparagus!, the award-winning “stalk-umentary,” is part of the Media That Matters film festival, and was released in its full length on DVD last week. Watch the trailer here.
The U.S. Supreme Court voted last week that could make it more difficult for Indiana residents to cast a ballot. And due to this ruling, many other states might follow suite. Remember that whole thing about democracy and everyone having the right to vote -- ha! I bet you thought that was real, right?
Rock the Vote released statement calling it "supremely wrong."
Politico has also reported on the topic saying that it hurts young voters.
In CNN's report they talk about the many, many other groups that will face voting difficulties in November as a result including, but not limited to: the poor, the elderly, African Americans, disabled Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, not to mention (and CNN didn't) young voters.
While this decision was only for Indiana, Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri all have similar cases pending. Nearly every state has had some kind of ID law proposed in the last few years. As one activist told me we should "look for a lot of legislation to come very quickly on this, in time for November." Currently, some states allow student ID's as a form of verifiable identification, but only for state schools, and unfortunately, many states do not allow this.
I believe this ruling is the most devastating to our country and our rights than any ruling I've seen in my lifetime. I personally am shocked and disgusted in The Court, which leads a country that is supposedly a free society where you don't need a reason to make something legal -- you need a reason to make something illegal.
As the CNN report says, there is no evidence that widespread voter fraud has ever happened or that presenting an ID at the poll would stop this. What the law does do is disenfranchise millions of people and cause considerable problems for Americans who want to vote, but who will most certainly be turned away in November.
In Rock the Vote's latest report one in five young voters do not have the correct address on their driver's licenses leaving them at the mercy of the polling workers to decide if they can vote.
Sen. Russ Feingold is so concerned about this ruling that he has proposed legislation that would nationally allow same day registration or Election Day Registration (EDR) so that people can register under their current information and vote by provisional ballot so that their information is correct and they can still vote. This would essentially allow more people access to voting and to registration but still adhere to the Court's decision requiring identification.
Not surprisingly, the community of voting rights proponents and youth advocates spent the day filling the news will statements.
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NCLB in the Classroom: Observations from the Front
Debates about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) often come down to fractures based on perspective. Many of the educators I've met ground their opinions on the law in their experiences in the classroom. To these educators, NCLB's annual testing requirements have turned schools into factories where innovative lessons have been replaced by rote test preparation. Moreover, the annual tests have placed onerous expectations on students, filling some youth with such anxiety that they shut down or disengage from school entirely.
On the other hand, policy makers analyze the law from a perspective that can be characterized generously as a birds-eye view, or cynically, as an ivory-tower view. From their vantage point, requiring regular standardized tests in schools is crucial to ensure that schools are successful in their core purpose of advancing student achievement. Moreover, detailed, thoroughly examined data on how our students are doing within each racial and socioeconomic grouping is absolutely necessary if we want to close down the pernicious achievement gap affecting low-income and students of color.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that for most of my time in the education policy arena, I've fallen squarely in the latter camp. But now that I've taught and gone through a year where standardized testing has been a serious challenge, I am better able to understand the nuances of the debate.
The basic problem boils down to a simple fact: students of all ages and all backgrounds are already not inclined to test-taking. Now, some tests are easier to stomache than others. Tests that are relevant and reasonable are always better than tests that seem arbitrary and unnecessary. Tests that students feel well-prepared for are also more likely to be taken seriously than tests that seem overly difficult.
On both of these fronts in my school this year, however, NCLB-required standardized testing did not fare well with my students. Since passing the tests is not required for grade promotion (which, contrary to popular belief, is usually the case with most of these tests), the students did not see any direct reason to try hard on the tests. Moreover, the tests asked many questions that were inaccessible to the students, particularly on the math and science sections. So students who were already uninspired to try hard on the tests found themselves frustrated with confusing questions.
When that happens, the natural inclination for almost all of my students was to quit trying. There was a lot of random bubble-filling going around my room, and test sections that should have taken an hour only took 15 minutes. And there were a lot of angry students lashing out at teachers and other staff members who they perceived to be the reason why they had to take the seemingly unreasonable tests.
But here's where the rub is. Because the students did not try hard on the test, the data from the tests will not actually be a reliable way to measure our school's success! So the education policy maker's original goal of getting data to evaluate schools will not be met, and the process will only anger children and their teachers in the process. No wonder why there are so many educators who are upset!
Yet to demand that NCLB's testing requirements be shelved also misses the point. Because the real root cause of the controversy over the tests is that many of the students, in my school at least, find them so difficult that they refuse to try. Addressing this root cause problem by demanding an end to standardized tests makes as much sense as a shopping mall getting rid of its security cameras when it finds out that there has been an outbreak of theft.
The solution?
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Biggie and Puff might have popularized the refrain "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems," but nowadays, millions of Americans find the exact opposite to be true. With skyrocketing gas prices, thousands laid off at jobs, a housing crisis, cuts to school budgets and a costly war, words like "recession" are on the minds of millions. And with no lucrative record deal or Hollywood biopic film, no one's really singing anymore.
For our third virtual event, WireTap and Youth Outlook want to know your story. Our monthly Youth Media Blog-a-thon is set to run from April 23rd to April 30th and the topic is: Money.
Some questions you might want to address in your entry:
• What do you and people you know do to make money, i.e., sell things on eBay, braid hair, babysit, DJ, sell drugs, etc.?
• Do you feel the effects of the national “recession” in your community? What does it look like? What has changed? How are people dealing with it?
• What are your strategies to save money during hard time? What does your family do to cut corners? How do you save money?
• California is cutting $5 billion from the school budget next year, what will this mean for your education system? How does the lack of money affect your school?
• The price of gas is $4 a gallon in some states, how does this affect your life?
• The “recession” is due to the sub-prime mortgage disaster which caused many people to lose their homes, do you know anyone this happened to? Tell us about that.
• Do you know how to go out and have a good time without spending a dime? Write a post advising others how to have fun on the cheap in your city or town.
Past participants include:
Boston Progress Radio (http://www.bprlive.com)
iLL-Literacy (http://www.ill-literacy.com)
The Playground (http://www.jaysplayground.com)
The Cheddar Box(http://www.thecheddarbox.wordpress.com)
Oh Dang! Magazine (http://www.ohdangmag.com)
Youth Radio (http://www.youthradioflows.com)
Girls for Change (http://www.girlsforchange.org)
Edin08 (http://www.edin08.org)
Respect RX (http://www.respectrx.com)
Vanessa Van Petten (http://vanessavanpetten.com)
Kameelah Rasheed (http://kameelahwrites.blogspot.com)
Vanessa Huang (http://graniterainbow.wordpress.com)
Sex Etc. (http://www.sexetc.org)
We want to hear from you! Read, comment and participate! For more information, contact me at Jamilah@wiretapmag.org
The Federal Communication Commission makes nationwide rules about communications technology like radio and the internet. When considering rules on issues of public interest, the FCC is required to make time for the public to raise their concerns.
Of course, a lot of media and technology corporations are also interested in communications rules, which is probably why Comcast hired people to fill seats at the last public hearing so that regular members of the public couldn't get in.
Why is Comcast so anxious to keep us out? Because the FCC is considering regulating the accessibility of the internet — whether internet service providers like Comcast should be allowed to provide different levels of service to different users. If the ISPs are allowed to differentiate, which users would likely be at the bottom of the heap? Those who can't afford to pay extra — also people who rely most on the internet to offset their lack of access to other public forums.
On Thursday April 17 Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society is hosting a public hearing on the Future of the Internet where experts and the public can share their views with all five FCC commissioners.
The hearing will be held on the Stanford campus at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, 471 Lagunita Drive, Stanford University, Stanford (Palo Alto), CA 94305. Seating is first-come, first-served, and open to the public.
Hearing schedule:
12:00 p.m. Welcome/Opening Remarks — Stanford Center for Internet & Society
12:45 p.m. Panel Discussion 1 — Network Management and Consumer Expectations
2:15 p.m. Break
3:00 p.m. Panel Discussion 2 — Consumer Access to Emerging Internet Technologies & Applications
4:30 p.m. Public Comment
6:30 p.m. Closing Remarks
7:00 p.m. Adjournment
Before then Media Alliance and SaveTheInternet have organized community meetings for people to share knowledge and prepare their own testimony. Let's get out other and speak up — don't let Comcast pack this one with sleepers!
Monday, April 14, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
1929 Martin Luther King Way, Berkeley
Tuesday, April 15, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Bay Area Video Coalition (BAYVAC)
2727 Mariposa Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco
Wednesday, April 16, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
One East Palo Alto Office
1798 Bay Road, East Palo Alto
For directions, maps, and more information go to Save The Internet.
Pomp, Circumstance, and Fudging Numbers
Try and make sense of these two sets of facts:
Fact set 1: The state of Missouri reported an 85.8 percent high school graduation rate for the 2006-2007 school year. In the same year, New Mexico reported a high school graduation rate of almost 90 percent to the US Department of Education. Multiple states provide similarly high rates in their official reports to the federal government.
Fact set 2: At the middle school where I teach in St. Louis city, no fewer than ten eighth graders have dropped out of school or have been expelled without any intention or re-enrolling elsewhere. This means that our junior high school graduation rate is just over 90 percent.
How can these two sets of facts co-exist? To be sure, part of it owes to the nature of the St. Louis City school district, which has lower school completion rates than Missouri as a whole. But the main source of the dissonance is something altogether different, and worse: most states are simply lying when they disclose their high school graduation rates.
There is little surprise as to why the states are so willing to lie about their graduation rates -- it's just good public relations. Admitting that thousands upon thousands of students are quitting school early does not win points with current residents, potential residents, and certainly not voters. The more perplexing issue is why we (the public, the federal government, America as a whole) have not made a fuss about it.
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Pro-Tibet Protests: Sports Lovers Meet Torture Victims
UPDATE: We've been holding the corner of Embarcadero and Washington streets since 10 a.m. this morning in San Francisco together with Tibetans, Students for a Free Tibet, Darfur activists, and then of course pro-China folks have been right here with us. Intense emotions abound as sports lovers meet torture victims.
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I'm sitting with a mix of folks from Students for a Free Tibet, Ruckus, RAN and others at the jail where the seven Tibetan rights activists who pulled off the stunning Golden Gate bridge action have been held since being whisked off the bridge yesterday.
Our latest news is that they're coming out any minute now -- that's been the word for two hours. I think of them through the labyrinth of halls and walls beyond the door so sleepy, sore, with perhaps no idea of just how far reaching their tremendous action has been for two days.
This isn't the first action on the Golden Gate Bridge, but a good friend pointed out that its probably the biggest action since 9/11. But the actions in this campaign so far have all been big -- Mt. Everest, the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower. Well, almost the Eiffel Tower. Police presence in Paris was too high for the action to get going, so they defaulted to a nearby bridge over the Seine whose name escapes me now, writing this on my phone from the waiting room of this jail.
The demands -- no torch run through Tibet, an end to human rights abuses, and ultimately the liberation of Tibet -- are on the front page of newspapers worldwide.
The victory in many ways is already complete for the campaign on the torch. The Olympics were supposed to herald a new China. Thing is, the Chinese government thought it could get the symbolic stamp of approval without actually changing its behavior. As Tibet has escalated their campaign for international attention, China's government has shown its unwillingness to improve their violent history.
The activists are released one by one, first the women, then the men, swamped by journalists and then enveloped by loved ones.
They are free! Tibet is next!
Recently Matt Nelson, a frequent contributor to WireTap and spokesperson for the Milwaukee Police Accountability Coalition, was stopped and harassed by an officer from the Milwaukee Police Department. In a written description of the confrontation, Nelson explains:
"On the evening of Monday March 10, 2008 at 11:40pm I was stopped by two MPD officers while standing on a public sidewalk outside of my business on 2008 N. Farwell Avenue. Officer Ferrell (District 1) approached me aggressively and demanded that I give him my social security number or he would have me arrested."
While Nelson pursues legal action against the department and the officers' blatant abuse of power, his situation sheds light on important issues related to the civil liberties we often take for granted. The issue is particularly relevant given the hostile climate of today's immigration debates. Whether you're documented or undocumented, it's crucial to counter the fear and intimidation tactics used by many over zealous folks in power with knowledge.
The National Lawyers Guild has a very detailed Know Your Rights manual, available in seven different languages including Spanish, Farsi, Punjabi and Arabic.
For more information, visit their website:
http://nlg.org/resources/kyr.php
Key points include:
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As young women, we're faced with choices on a daily basis: What am I going to wear today, do I have enough time to eat a good breakfast, will the bus arrive on time, will I be late for work, do I have enough money to do laundry or can I make it to class on time?
But what about choices that deal with matters of the heart? For me, the ideal relationship is one where you actually enjoy the other person's presence, have chemistry, can laugh or cry together and have deep conversations about life. Maybe that's just what I look for in a partner as do many of my 20-something friends. For us, having a boyfriend or a girlfriend is not a big deal — we have our careers to focus on and the rest of our lives to find that special someone.
But if it were up to author Lori Gottlieb, we would all have a life partner, even if we don't really like them. Gottlieb is the author of "Marry Him!", an article in The Atlantic that has sparked a national debate on whether women need men to survive in life. According to Gottlieb, women should just settle down and marry any available person before it is too late and we end up like her: a single 40-year-old parent who has to juggle a career and a child all by herself.
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ACLU Sues Over High School Dropout Rates
In a notable development last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Palm Beach County School District in Florida over what it claims is a violation of its students' basic right to quality education as promised in the state constitution.
In the lawsuit, the ACLU argues that the county school district has failed its students --especially kids from communities of color -- by not offering a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality education." It is, on the face of it, the same argument that has been made to varying effect in more than 20 states to date: states are not providing children the quality of education that they promise either implicitly or explicitly in their constitutions. But the ACLU has taken a different angle in the latest lawsuit, because rather than suing for a more equal distribution of school spending and other resources, the group is instead suing for the district to improve high school graduation rates, particularly among low-income and students of color.
It may sound like a minor distinction, but it is a meaningful one in both legal terms and practical terms. Legally, any precedent set by decisions such as the ones in New York State, and New Jersey does not apply because the existing suits challenged resource distribution within the state. ACLU is making no such complaint in this case, arguing instead that it is the responsibility of the Palm Beach County School District, and not the state of Florida, to make the needed changes.
Practically, I think the lawsuit is, perhaps regrettably, loaded with potential pitfalls. For starters, while the focus on graduation rates is on-point to the degree that a high school diploma is virtually a necessity to compete in the 21st century job marketplace, the ACLU's suit fails to acknowledge that a diploma is only valuable if it actually represents real skills and knowledge learned. By concentrating on a single measure of output (graduation rates) without regard for whether the measure is an accurate representation of student learning, the ACLU may just be trading one education injustice for another by a different name (would the ACLU be happy with this news headline in 2012: 100% of Palm Beach County Students Graduate High School; Only Half Can Read"?)
Secondly, the lawsuit fails to recognize the fact that the Palm Beach County School District is not singularly accountable for law student achievement. If anything, the lawsuit sends the onus of legal accountability in the wrong trend from state-level suits. If states have not been able to level the educational playing field in the past two decades, how much less successful will we be, if we try to rely on individual school districts? From a scale perspective, is the ACLU going to file a similar lawsuit in the 15,000 other school districts in the country? To improve educational outcomes for all youth -- including low-income and youth of color --we need to be talking about this as a problem of a crucial, national scope.
It's 7 a.m. and My School is Leaking
It has been raining for the past 48 hours in St. Louis, and my school is leaking.
I get to the building at seven every morning, but on rainy days I am confronted with a vexing decision: which staircase should I take to my third floor classroom?
If I take the south stairwell, I will have to step through large puddles and risk slipping and falling on the stairs. The puddles are generated by a constant flow of water out of large holes in the ceiling, such as the ones in the pictures to the right.
If I take the north stairwell, a different source of unpleasantness confronts me: a school security guard who believes that every teacher in the building is her enemy. Her particular gripe with me? I think it is that I am too kind to students when I ask them questions like "what are you doing," "where are you going," and "why are you doing that" instead of immediately assuming that they are guilty of something and writing them an office referral.
This choice that I face on each rainy morning conveys a challenging, parallel problem that faces our nation's efforts to improve chronically failing public schools much like the one where I teach. The problem is this: with a scarce amount of resources available, should it be a priority to fix physical capital shortfalls, or human capital problems?
It's a tough choice to have to make. But it's an even harder admission: do we really have to tell parents that either the building their child attends will have roof leaks and ancient textbooks, or their child's teachers and other personnel will be lackluster?
The answer? Yes... in the current political climate. WIthout a sea change of political will to bring about smarter, better resource allocation and tough, common sense policies, principals will continue to face impossible decisions. We have one working water fountain and, for a time, we had one working boys bathroom in our entire building. But we also had several negligent teachers who were wasting hundreds of hours of students' lives each week. With a budget already $600,000 in the red, what room is there to fix both problems?
Are you fresh out of high school or almost done with college and renting your first solo crib, dive, flat or apartment while working two jobs and trying to have a social life? Yeah, I was there too -- young, poor, and a little naive about how to be independent and rent secure. I began thinking about my early renter life recently after a friend's next-door neighbor, a young art student, was kicked out of the building after only three months for negligent, derelict and completely preventable behavior. Having band practice in your apartment at 1 a.m.? That's sooo not a good plan. It made me wonder though, was I a "terrible tenant" in my 20s?
My first apartment was a charming beige stucco number, tucked into the asphalt armpit between LAX airport and the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. The building was at the far end of a dreary block, devoid of streetlights, with dangerous allies in front and back of the four-unit space. Our scenery included a resplendent view of the neon-lit Nude Nudes strip joint. My roommates at the time did a lot of drugs and kept a rabbit indoors as their pet. It was definitely not the cleanest place, just a space to lay my head after work, DJing and college classwork. I left after a few months as my roommates' behavior became more bizarre. They were eventually evicted.
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Making Home-Schooling... Illegal?
California's Second District Court of Appeals issued a ruling last week that declared thousands of parents who currently home school their children to be in violation of the law. The ruling represented a stunning reversal of a growing trend in American education, as the number of children being home schooled has grown steadily to a total of over 1.1 million children last year.
The ruling received immediate criticism from key policy makers in California, including the state's chief of schools Jack O'Connell and from the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is almost certain to be appealed to the California Supreme Court on a fast track.
What were the grounds for the decision? To begin with, the ruling all stemmed from an isolated incident in which two parents who had been homeschooling their children were suspected of child-abuse. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) then sought relief from a juvenile court, asking the court to send the children back to a public school where they would be safer and where teachers could spot signs of physical abuse. The juvenile court judge ruled, however, that the parents had a right to homeschool their children. Last week, however, the LA-based 2nd District Court of Appeals ruled that no such right existed in the state constitution and that consequently, only parents who have credentials from the state department of education to teach in a public school should be eligible to home school their children.
Forget the glaring irony of the ruling, which is that the state is now requiring home-schooling parents to have a teaching credential that tens of thousands of state-paid public school teachers are themselves lacking. The question we should ask about this decision is whether, in the end, it helps or hurts children. Will students have more access to quality educational opportunity if parents are forced to get a teaching certifiicate in order to home-school, or less access?
In my estimation, they will have less access to quality educational opportunities if the Appeals Court decision is affirmed by the state Supreme Court. But I believe this for a different reason that you might think. Educational opportunity will, I believe, not suffer principally because home-schooling parents do a better job than the public schools. It will suffer because of the implicit foundation of the court's ruling: that somehow, going through the process of getting a teaching certificate makes a person a better teacher than they were before.
How long will it be before policy makers, educators, and judges recognize that a piece of paper, a "teaching certificate" earned through taking an arbitrary number of fluffy, un-rigorous, and un-proven education classes does not make someone a good teacher?
There are many homeschooling parents who do a better job of educating their children than their public school counterparts today who are not credentialed, and plenty of credentialed teachers who are worse than teachers in the next room over who are teaching on emergency certificates. Until education starts hiring, retaining, and rewarding teachers based on the quality of their outputs--that is, student learning--and not on the quality of their inputs--a fancy piece of cardstock issued by state bureaucrats--precious little gains will be had for our students, in California classrooms, kitchens, and anywhere in between.