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High Standards or Stupid Standards?

It’s never too soon to prepare kindergartners for college.

In the proposed “Balanced Literacy Framework” being developed by the Milwaukee Public Schools, these are some of the expectations for students in five-year-old kindergarten:

• “Student can identify the difference between narrative and expository text.”
• “Student prepares to study expository text by using text aids and choosing a note taking method.”
• “Student identifies important ideas and relationships in expository text through text structure patterns and graphic organizers.”
• “Student uses the glossary, dictionary, thesaurus, and atlas appropriately.”
• “Student responds to the reading experience through research projects, and by writing in similar style/genre.”

Youth More Accepting

Two-thirds of this year’s high school graduates favor legal recognition of gay marriages, a view shared by just one-third of the adult population. At the same time, homophobia remains a significant problem in our high schools and about half the graduates reported that they have heard classmates use anti-gay insults against other students.

The results are from a Hamilton College telephone survey of 1,000 high school seniors. While teens were generally more accepting than older Americans on gay issues, the poll also found “a solidly anti-gay minority” of about 30 percent of the high school graduates polled. The anti-gay minority consists largely of highly religious Christians who view homosexuality as a sin.

Private School Scare Campaign

A private school in New York is using a leaflet of a gun pointed at the head of a boy to frighten public school parents, according to the New York Post.

“Do you think your child is safe in public school?” asks the leaflet’s headline. “Are you waiting for your child to be a victim?”
The poster was part of an informational campaign by the Nefesh Academy in Brooklyn and is being stapled to lampposts and distributed to homes.

Foreign Aid For Schools

School employes in Round Lake, IL are seeking foreign aid to help fund their cash-starved schools.
More than 200 letters were mailed this August to heads of state and embassies around the world requesting donations and financial aid for the Round Lake School District.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” said Kim Kearby, president of the Education Association of Round Lake.
The district serves about 6,000 students. Kearby said the school board has rejected requests for a tax increase to help fund the schools.

Notable Quotes

“During the Reagan Administration, the Department of Education stopped collecting data that would allow lawyers to document inequities. … Anything that had to do with equity reforms … was terminated in the early Eighties.’”
— Phi Delta Kappan,

“Leadership in Education: Five Commonalities,”
June 2001.

“If the state wanted to promote equality in our schools, then it would adequately fund all schools in Colorado. We don’t believe one test should be used as a main measurement of a school.”
— Boulder, CO student, as quoted in the Sept. 9 Denver Post. The students planned a protest against the Colorado state tests on Sept. 13, burning their test results in a tactic explicitly modeled on the draft card burning protests from the anti-Vietnam War era.

“An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind."
— Poster at Milwaukee Peace Memorial on Sept. 13.

Fall 2001