A teacher at a Kansas City charter school has been suspended for posting a video of his students marching and chanting in praise of Barack Obama on YouTube. At one level, the video can be seen as uplifting, with the students, all African-American middle school boys, chanting how Obama has inspired them to want to become lawyers, architects and entrepreneurs. At another level, the chants about Obama’s policies feel forced, scripted and more than a little inappropriate. Utterly unsurprising are the complaints about the overtly partisan nature and appropriateness of the video, which was recorded last May and only recently posted online.
The teacher in question has not been identified in media reports. The school’s director, Joyce McGautha, says she has been “advised by legal counsel to make no more comments about the video while the school investigates.”
Meanwhile, another Obama-related school controversy has been rattling around the edusphere. A Florida teacher has been widely branded an idiot and a racist for writing an inflammatory acronym on his blackboard for the word “CHANGE.” What was he thinking? wonders Joanne Jacobs. I don’t know, responds Matthew Tabor, and that’s the point.
Three out of four teenagers report they were bullied online at least once in the last year, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists. Not yours? Only one in 10 reported cyberbullying to parents or other adults.
At Ars Technica, blogger John Timmer has a smart take on this. Parents and teachers are concerned that the anonymity of online bullying exacerbates the problem. But the study suggests it’s less of a new phenomenon than the playground gone digital.
The authors feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon. “These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents’ social worlds in school and online,” they conclude.
Iowa teachers can no longer ask students to pay for field trips or other activities during the school day. The Iowa Department of Education has ruled the practice is not allowed under Iowa law.
“In February, the Ames School District asked the state for clarification regarding the legality of 17 various fees charged by the district, such as student parking stickers, yearbooks, museum admission during field trips and musical instrument rental,” the Iowa Hawk Eye reports. When field trips are part of a class or instruction, the fees fall under tuition and thus are not an allowable fee. Furthermore, the law says if the field trip is not related to what’s going on in the classroom, it should not take place during one of the school’s 180 days of instruction.
PTOs can still raise money for trips. Still, this does present a small quandary. As a teacher, I tended to observe higher levels of engagement and behavior when my 5th graders had to contribute a token sum toward a field trip. Freebies were often free-for-alls.
A survey of 500 U.S. teenagers finds that almost 70 percent fear an “immediate negative impact” on the security of their families, the Washington Post reports.
“There are no secrets in families,” said Stanley Greenspan, professor of child psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University, who has started to see the economic anxiety show up in his practice. “Younger kids tend to be all-or-nothing thinkers. So a healthy 8-year-old is more likely to worry in a more extreme way than an adult.”
“What’s an economic crisis?” my ten-year-old daughter asked me on the way to the bus yesterday, echoing the phrase she had heard on the radio.
A 20-year, $3.2 billion study to be launched in January will track the health of 100,000 American children from before birth to age 21. The National Children’s Study will seek to identify factors behind a host of conditions including autism, learning disabilities, ADHD and obesity.
National Institutes of Health officials say they hope the study, to be conducted at 105 locations throughout the United States, can help pinpoint early-life influences that affect later development, with the goal of learning new ways to treat or prevent illness, Reuters reports.
Researchers will collect genetic and biological samples from people in the study as well as samples from the homes of the women and their babies including air, water, dust and materials used to construct their residences, the NIH said.
The first data from the study could be available in 2012 or 2013.
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