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Tensions are high in a San Antonio school district as allegations surfaced that New Braunfels Middle School principal John Burks threatened to kill the school’s science teachers if they did not improve their science scores on the TAKS test, a Texas standardized exam, and other benchmarks. According to Anita White, one of the four teachers present for the outburst, in an interview with a KSAT12 News, "He stated if the scores were not to his liking, he would kill us all and then kill himself. He was very emphatic, he was not laughing, he was not being funny.” She said he threatened her again on the day she was reassigned to another local school, calling her into his office to tell her, “I told you I was ruthless.”

The reaction from the community was surprise. Ellen Duncan, a parent of a New Braunfels student, had positive words for the school leader, "John Burks is a wonderful principal and I have been really, really proud of him. I just can't even imagine that would be anything that would come from him."

School officials have refused to comment except to deny the allegations on Burk’s behalf, though the police are reportedly investigating the incident. White says she is considering filing a civil lawsuit with the district.

Posted by Chris Chester at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The heated Democratic presidential primary is apparently boiling over into the schoolhouse. To wit: A Delaware government commission is investigating a complaint from a ten-year-old student that her teacher alledgedly told her class that she would not vote for Barack Obama because he is a Muslim who “believes in different things and is scary,” according to Delaware’s News Journal. The alledged incident occurred before the February 5th Super Tuesday mock election at Lord Baltimore Elementary School in the Indian River School District.

On February 24th, the student's older sisters, who describe themselves as American Muslims who “love our country,” wrote a a letter to the editor of the Cape Gazette charging that “This teacher is telling her class something that is dangerous and untrue. ... We feel that kids need to be taught the truth in school ... [instead of] hatred and fear of Muslims. Our sister was badly hurt by what was said in her classroom.”

However, the parent of one of the girl's classmates claims that the teacher's words were taken out of context and that in fact she has told her students that, though a Republican, she may vote for Sen. Obama in the general election.

To make matters more complicated, the Indian River District is not a stranger to diversity issues, having recently reached a settlement in a case in which it was charged with allowing Christian prayer at a graduation ceremony.

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Tensions are high in the nation’s fourth largest school district. Unionized teachers in the Miami-Dade district are charging that administrators, led by 2008 AASA Superintendent of the Year Rudy Crew, are exacting an excessive cost on the school’s already stretched budget. Specifically, they point to reports showing that 413 district officials earn in excess of $100,000 a year and that 31 employees have district owned-cars (ranging from Crews’ 2007 GMC Yukon’ to, oddly, a 1998 Chevy Monte Carlo valued at $645). Meanwhile, schools are facing some $200 million cuts over the next year, and teachers are in a contractual battle over health insurance premiums.

"In my mind, it's about equity and priority," said Shawn Beightol, a science teacher in the school district interviewed by The Miami Herald. "You've got people who are being taken care of really well at the top. The people at the bottom are pretty much slave labor."

Business experts, however, have come to the defense of Crew and his administration, citing comparable salaries at businesses the size of the Miami-Dade district, which employs over 50,000 people. "This is a large and very complex business," said William Werther, professor of business at the University of Miami."The company cars, the administrative salaries: None of these things stand out to me."

This doesn’t diffuse the district’s teachers, who are incensed that they’re being asked to pay insurance premiums while administrators get new cars. "If they're having a budget crisis, this kind of spending is inappropriate," said one teacher at a district middle school. "Even if it was one car, one would be inexcusable."

Posted by Chris Chester at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Teachers in the U.S. have been known to voice strong opinions about standardized testing, but the Brits appear to be taking things to a new level. In a speech this week at the annual conference of the UK’s Association of Teachers and Lecturers, Mary Bousted, the union’s secretary general, charged that testing in schools not only detracts from learning, it’s also contributing to an increase in mental illness among students. “Children suffer stress and anxiety as the test loom and the rise in [British] children’s mental health problems cannot be divorced from their status as the most tested in the world,” she said.

Bousted argued that schools today should be concentrating on teaching critical thinking and “life skills” rather than "rote learning" of factual information. “Is the world going to collapse if [students] don’t know ‘To Be, or Not to Be?,’” she asked. “Our national curriculum should be more focused on the development of life skills and ways of working than whether or not we teach the Battle of Hastings.” (Yeah, we needed a refresher on that one, too.)

The ATL's conference is turning out to be an eventful gathering, incidentally. In a separate session, a government education official was jeered after suggesting that class sizes of 38 students could be “manageable” and that he’d seen math classes with as many as 70 students that were “perfectly acceptable.”

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Technological advances have fueled a growth in the use of special microphones and speaker sets in the classroom that promise even the most soft-spoken teachers the ability to be fully heard by their students. Originally intended only for classrooms with special needs students, many schools are planning to install systems in all of their classrooms at a cost of up to $1,500 a room, according to a report by The New York Times.

Some experts however, suggest that the technology is being used to address the symptoms and not the causes. Says David Lubman, a fellow of the Acoustical Society, “In most cases, they’re putting [microphones] in as a substitute for good acoustics. In other words, instead of cutting down the noise, they’re blasting over the noise, so the net result is more noise.” Kindergarten Teacher Michal Linkar permanently switched off her microphone after finding it was not conducive to the kind of learning she wanted to provide. “I would rather they stop and pay attention than make it easier for them to hear me so they don’t pay as much attention,” she said.

Still, it’s hard to argue with results. In the West Orange district in New Jersey, a stereophonically-enhanced elementary school reportedly saw an increase in the percentage of students reading at or above grade level by an impressive 30% in just one year, with no changes to faculty or curriculum. There’s no mishearing those results.

Posted by Chris Chester at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Baltimore Sun reports that Maryland State Senate President, Thomas V. Mike Miller is putting pressure on the leaders of the Maryland State Teachers Association to support a referendum to legalize slots in order to raise hundreds of millions of education dollars. In a do-or-die scenario, Miller told the MSTA that a failure to support the measure would cause the General Assembly to seek other funding sources for teacher pensions (like counties and school boards). State Comptroller Peter Franchot, who has other ideas for filling the coffers (like putting pressure on tax evaders), said Miller was giving the MSTA a “false choice.” “I keep reminding them [the MSTA],” said Franchot “that slots are forever; the budget problems we have are temporary.”

Local teachers associations want the MSTA to hear all voices because, said one group’s president, “All of us local presidents know that we have members on both sides of the issue.” Gary Brennan, another association president, believes that the responsibility of revenue shouldn’t be on the shoulders of local counties because the decision would be to cut teacher raises. “No matter what happens, education funding should not be held hostage to any particular revenue.”

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Earlier this year, researchers reported that the number one source of frustration for teachers is parents. This week, the L.A. Times provided details on just how strained those relations can be, particularly, and this may come as no surprise, during conference time. In spite of the mood lighting and refreshments that some teachers offer to tamp down tension, stories of parents striking students or towering over their teachers or refusing future meetings can make for unpleasant encounters.

Myra McGovern, spokeswoman for the National Association for Independent Schools, sees a loss of respect for institutions and parents' growing sense of entitlement as possible causes for the increased stress in the parent-teacher relationship. “The parents feel like they …are their [child’s] advocates. Whereas in the past the parents may have sided with the teacher, now that’s less likely.” Scott Mandel, middle school teacher from California and author of The Parent-Teacher Partnership, sees it as a two-way street, “If you as a parent don’t respect your teacher, you should probably be at another school. Teachers in turn need to respect parents as a consumer. It’s like a doctor and patient who work together for the health of the body.”

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Canada’s Globe and Mail reports that a worldwide coalition of teachers’ unions is denouncing this week’s release of the video game Bully: Scholarship Edition for “condoning bullying in school.” The Wii and Xbox 360 game features a boarding school bully who harasses students by assaulting them, pushing their heads in toilets, and photographing them naked. Emily Noble, the president of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation which is spearheading the protest, said the game “doesn’t help us as teachers in the work that we’re doing at school.” Teachers’ unions in the U.S., Canada, Britain, South Korea, and Australia, among other countries, want stores to ban the game.

Sam Houser, the game’s creator, defended Bully: Scholarship Edition, according to Canada.com. “It’s really difficult to make a compelling comedy action game about anything, let alone about the experience of being at high school, and we think we achieved something unique with Bully.” Noble believes otherwise, “What it does is it encourages kids to target other kids…” Michael Hoechsman, a McGill professor and expert on the role of violence in video games, doesn’t think a ban on the game will do much. “As tempting as it may seem, I’m not so certain that banning this will somehow result in a more peaceful and more loving school population.”

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last week in New York City, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced the start of another student-incentive program, according to the New York Times. For 2,500 Brooklyn middle school and charter school students, Samsung flip-phones with 130 prepaid minutes will be their reward for doing well in school. Teachers and administrators will be able to text reminders to students about homework or say, an upcoming test. How can students, who are not known for telephonic brevity, earn more minutes? Behave in school, maintain good attendance, and keep their grades up.

The “Million” program, which refers to the city’s 1.1 million students, is the brainchild of Harvard economist, Roland G. Fryer. Fryer, the city’s chief equality officer who also oversees another cash-incentive program for students said, “We want to reach kids where they are and where they are hanging out; they’re texting.” “Million,” which cost double that, was supposed to provide cellphones for 10-15,000 students, but the Fund for Public Schools could not raise the money.

In spite of the critics who protest rewarding students with a device banned in schools, Chancellor Klein defends the plan, “...This is about reality. We have an enormous set of challenges of student motivation in their education and [are] finding ways to get those kids excited.”

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The culture war continues to find its way into science classrooms, with the flare-ups moving from evolution to global warming. In Utah, for example, a parent recently objected to an in-class showing of Al Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth,” saying that film’s thesis that human activity is the prime contributor to the earth’s rising temperature is not a scientific fact and should have been countered with opposing views.

Utah’s academic standards require high school science teachers to introduce the topic of global warming, but appear to leave a lot of gray area. They don’t require teachers to give equal classroom time to differing views on the issue, but also don’t identify specific causes. “You'll notice we don't say anywhere that humans are warming up the atmosphere,” notes Barbara Gentry, a district secondary science teacher specialist in the state. “Students are merely asked to investigate or research the effects of global changes on earth systems.”

Yet Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, suggests that teachers would be misrepresenting the topic if they neglected to teach about the human influence on climate change. "If evolution carries 99 percent unanimity among scientists, then climate change as being caused by human activity has a rate of 85 to 90 percent unanimity among scientists," she says.

Posted by Chris Chester at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)