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Yes Sir!!

Kindergarten through fifth-grade students in Louisiana are now required, by law, to address their teachers and school employees as "ma'am," or "sir," or to use a Mr. or Ms.

The law, enacted in July, prohibits schools from suspending or expelling students who are not courteous, but does call upon school boards to develop policies to ensure compliance.

The legislation originally demanded that all K-12 students stand whenever a teacher or administrator entered the room, but that measure was defeated.

Where Are the Books?

New York City schools spend twice as much per student on drug abuse programs ($30.41) as they do on library books and librarians combined ($14.81).

Furthermore, the Board of Education spends only $4 per student on school library books, which is a quarter of the cost of the average hard cover.

A survey by The New York Post found that in many schools where a high percentage of fourth-graders flunked a recent state reading test, there are shabby - if any - school libraries.

At PS 108 in Queens, the library has only about two books each for the school's 1,500 students. The Post cited experts as saying that a good school library should have at least ten books per child.

Wage Gap Widens

In 1980, the ratio of top executive pay to factory wages was 42-to-1. By last year, it had mushroomed to 419-to-1.

If workers' incomes had kept pace with the rise in their bosses' pay, the average production worker would be making more than $110,000 a year (compared to the actual figure of $29,000). Further, the minimum wage would be $22.08 an hour.

The figures were released as part of the sixth annual survey of executive compensation by two liberal economic policy groups, the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.

According to the survey, the average annual compensation for a chief executive of a large company was $10.6 million last year. Michael Eisner, of Walt Disney Co., made $575 million last year, much of it in stock options.

Forgotten Poverty

When President Clinton paid a whirlwind visit to the Oglala Lakota Sioux Indian reservation in Pine Ridge, SD, this summer, it was the first time a President had visited an Indian reservation since Franklin Roosevelt stopped at a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina in 1936 while on vacation.

Wisconsin: 'Extreme Poverty' Rises

The number of families living in "extreme poverty" more than doubled in Wisconsin in the last decade, according to a recent study.

Using food stamp data, the Institute for Wisconsin's Future found that the number of Wisconsin households with children who are "extremely poor" rose to 17,183 in 1997, up from 7,731 in 1989.

Extreme poverty is defined as having an income less than 50% of the federal poverty line, which in 1997 meant living on less than $6,665 for a family of three.

The Wisconsin figures mirror national trends. The number of extreme poor nationally rose to 14.6 million in 1997 from 13.9 million two years earlier, according to Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown who resigned from the Department of Health and Human Services to protest the 1996 welfare reform law.

Milwaukee: White Flight

Wisconsin has had the second highest increase in segregated schools from 1980-1996, according to a recent study.

The report this June by Harvard professor Gary Orfield and doctoral student Jon Yun said the increase in black-white segregation nationally is largely due to the abandonment of court-ordered integration and public indifference.

In Milwaukee, the increasing segregation is also due to white flight from the city following a federal court desegregation order in 1976.

Even though there was no mandatory busing of white students in Milwaukee, roughly 14,500 white students left MPS between 1975, the year before the court order, and 1977. By 1980, the number of white students dropped another 14,700.

There are currently fewer than 20,000 white students remaining in MPS, down from more than 50,000 in the mid-1970s.

Quotable Quotes

A: Only if you want to kill public education. That sucking sound you hear is the sound of public schools collapsing with the voucher system.
- From an interview on education and writing with retired high school teacher Frank McCourt, author of "Angela's Ashes", in the Sept. 12 New York Times Magazine.

"The real problem is that our priority is tax cuts, and their priority is education."

- Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (R-Town of Brookfield), explaining why Republican members of a budget conference committee were at odds with Democratic members. Due to the impasse, Wisconsin, which is supposed to pass its budget by July, was still without a budget in mid-September.

"The education industry represents, in our opinion, the final frontier in private participation in public programs."

- From the report, "The Book of Knowledge," released last spring by the investment firm Merrill Lynch & Co.

"Everyone is trying to keep the low-scoring kids out of the testing, even when it is not high-stakes."

Jim Ysseldyke, former director of the national Center on Educational Outcomes at the University of Minnesota, commenting on the temptation for schools to boost test scores by excluding special-education students.

Fall 1999