Franklin Schargel’s Blog

On August 31, 2016 Dr. Myron Tribus died. Myron was a mentor, a guru on Quality Education and a friend.

RIP my friend.

You can learn about Myron here:

Today marks the beginning of Attendance Awareness Month.

Each year, as many as 7,500,000 students across the country miss nearly a month of school in both excused and non-excused absences. These absences is frequently a prediction of future scholastic failure and a warning sign of students not graduating from high school. The problem of chronic absences is that they disproportionately affects children from low-income families and communities of color, creating graduation gaps.

School completion is even more critical in the 21st century than it was in all previous centuries.  As nations move out of the agrarian and industrial centuries into the service and technology era, education will and is playing a greater role. This does not mean that agriculture and manufacturing are not important but the primitive ways of farming and the increased dependence on robotics indicate that there will be fewer jobs for people as machines replace them.

According to an article appearing in the Washington Post, since 1980, spending on prisons has grown three times as much as spending on public education. (“State and Local Expenditures on Corrections and Education”)

By Emma Brown and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel July 7

State and local spending on prisons and jails has grown three times as much over the past three decades as spending on public education for preschool through high school, according to a new analysis of federal data by the U.S. Education Department.

From 1980 to 2013, state and local spending on public schools doubled, from $258 billion to $534 billion, according to the analysis. Over the same period, the number of people incarcerated in state and local prisons more than quadrupled, and spending also increased by more than four times, from $17 billion to $71 billion.

In September, King’s predecessor, Arne Duncan, called on states and cities to dramatically reduce incarceration for nonviolent crimes and use the estimated $15 billion in savings to substantially raise teacher pay in high-poverty schools. “With a move like this, we’d not just make a bet on education over incarceration, we’d signal the beginning of a long-range effort to pay our nation’s teachers what they are worth,” Duncan said at the time. “That sort of investment wouldn’t just make teachers and struggling communities feel more valued. It would have ripple effects on our economy and on our civic life.”

The new report found wide variation in spending on prisons and schools among the states: Total corrections spending grew 149 percent in Massachusetts, for example, compared with 850 percent in Texas. Total education spending rose from 18 percent in Michigan to 326 percent in Nevada.

Even taking population and enrollment changes into account, there were striking disparities in the rate of spending increases. The rate of increase in per capita corrections spending outpaced the rate of increase in per-pupil education spending in every state but two, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 23 states, per capita spending rose more than twice as fast as per-pupil spending.

 

 

The NY Times contacted 2,987 subscribers and asked them whether they physical and/or electronic books.  The results were:

• 38% only read physical books;
• 4% only read electronic books
• 58% read both physical and books on electronic devices.

Since the subscribers were people older than school children, this was a distorted results.  It would be interesting to ask your students “outside of school, do your read books electronically or physically?”

How do the results differ or not from the above percentages?

 

Authorities have charged a total of 20 students following a sexting investigation that centered on two schools in Cape May County, New Jersey. The prosecutor’s office charged 19 juveniles and one 18-year-old student from the Lower Cape May Regional High with invasion of privacy.

Investigators say that a female student told school officials that boys were passing around naked pictures of her friend by text. During the course of the investigation, authorities seized and analyzed 27 cell phones.

Officials say nude and partially nude photographs of female students were being exchanged between male students through text message and social media. Passing nude photos is potentially committing a crime. The distribution of child pornography is a 2nd degree crime.

“The girls know that the boys trade them and it’s kind of a game that the girls want to be involved in,” the parent said. A parent of one of the charged boys says it was several girls who shared the photos.

Why do children sext? They do not understand the long and short tem ramifications of doing so. These photos have a way of reaching parents, colleges and employers. Part of the responsibility of schools is to educate them before it is too late.

 

The Hispanic birth rate fell 51 percent – from 77 births per thousand Hispanic females ages 15 to 19.  The black rate fell 44 percent – from 62 to 35 per 1000. The white birth rate fell from 35 percent fell from 27 to 17 percent per 1000.

The teen birth rate fell nearly 50 percent in Arizona, Colorado and Connecticut, but only 13 percent in North Dakota and 15 percent in West Virginia. Arkansas, Mississippi and New Mexico have the higher teen birth rate while Massachusetts and New Hampshire have the lowest.

What are the implications of these statistics?  First, the country is becoming increasingly less white and more minority.  Second, schools in most places are seeing the increase in minority faces, first.  

We need to ask what has driven this decrease? is it being caused by the poor state of the economy? Or simply better education?

According the rankings of the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) the people in the U.S, and England are month the most literate in the developed world:

South Korea is #1, Poland is #6, Germany = 14, Italy = 20, U.S. = 20, and England =23.