Franklin Schargel’s Blog

According to the New York Times, African-American students were expelled at rates overwhelmingly higher than white children in 13 Southern states, according to an analysis of federal data. “The study was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania for the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. The study focused on states where more than half of all the suspensions and expulsions of black students occurred nationwide. While black students represented just under a quarter of public school students in these states, they made up nearly half of all suspensions and expulsions. In some districts, the gaps were even more striking: In 132 Southern school districts, for example, black students were suspended at rates five times their representation in the student population, or higher.

Last year, the Obama administration issued guidelines advising schools to create more positive climates, set clear expectations and consequences for students, and ensure equity in discipline.

Among the other findings in the analysis were that in 181 school districts where blacks represented just fewer than 60 percent of enrollment on average, all of the students expelled during 2011-12 were black. Within the 13 states, Louisiana and Mississippi expelled the highest proportion of blacks. Blacks were suspended or expelled at rates higher than their representation in the student body in every one of the 13 states analyzed. The report shows data for more than 3,000 districts.

Students are being suspended for such acts such as when a student is deemed disrespectful or defiant or violates a dress code. In Gwinnett County, Ga., a suburban school district near Atlanta, the new analysis showed that while fewer than a third of the students enrolled in the district were black, they represented close to half of all students suspended and more than half of all those expelled in the school year covered by the data.

The 13 states covered by the report were: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

In addition to missing out on in-school learning time, students who are expelled or suspended are more likely to have later contact with the juvenile justice system than similar students who are not removed from school, studies have shown.

 

 

 

The Australian Government has issued a series of articles entitled “Learning Potential”. Find more at https://www.learningpotential.gov.au/parent-engagement

Parents, families and carers are a child’s first and most important teachers. Parent engagement in education is about parents being positively involved in their child’s learning and school community – to help them learn and enjoy school.

As a parent, you and your family play an important role in supporting your child’s education. The earlier you and your family become engaged, the better it is for your child’s learning.

Parent engagement is more than being involved and informed about school activities. It is actively engaging with your child’s learning, both in the home and at school.
When schools and families work together, children do better and stay in school longer. For this reason “˜Engaging parents in education’ is one of the four pillars of the Australian Government’s Students First approach for quality school education.

What can parents do?
Being positively involved in your child’s learning can help them to do better at school, be more engaged with their school work, go to school more regularly, and have better behaviour and social skills.

There are simple things you can do to support your child’s education. It doesn’t take much to make a big difference! Research has identified five ways that you can make a big difference to your child’s learning:

set positive expectations
have regular conversations
support good study habits
encourage reading
build a partnership with your child’s teachers
Learning Potential is full of tips and ideas on how to put these ideas into practice, with specific suggestions depending on whether your child is under five, in primary school, or in high school.

I have always wondered how on-line schools insure that the person getting the credit for the course was the person taking the course. People who worked in or were in charge of “virtual schools” have assured me that enough safeguards had been built into their systems. But according to an article in Atlantic Magazine, “Cheating in Online Classes Is Now Big Business by Derek Newton. “The growth in courses available on the web has led to a growth in paid services that will impersonate students and do their work for them.”

Today, entrepreneurs and freelancers openly advertise services designed to help students cheat their online educations. These digital cheaters for hire will even assume students’ identities and take entire online classes in their place. One of these companies, named “No Need to Study”, was asked take an online English Literature class at Columbia University. The writer got an email response from someone on its customer-relations staff who told me that, not only could the company get a ringer to take my online class, it could also guarantee I’d earn a B or better. I was told the fee for such an arrangement was $1,225.15. No Need to Study even has handy reference videos that ostensibly show satisfied clients sharing how easy it was to pay someone else to take their online classes. A client named Muhammad who explains that he hired the company to complete his math lab courses for him. He’d taken these classes before, he notes, but “the quizzes were just way to difficult” so he searched for a solution. “They got it done, and they did really, really well,” he continues. “They absolutely killed my final math and app classes with a 90 percent, and I can definitely tell you I never got a 90 percent before on anything.”

More online classes mean more online students, which means more potential customers for cheating providers. According to the 2014 Online Learning Survey, roughly a third of all higher-education enrollments in the U.S. are now online””with almost 7 million students taking at least one online class. Either way, that’s millions of potential customers for ambitious providers of cheating services.

If online degrees and certifications achieve the same stature as traditional, on-campus ones, an online education marketplace could transform higher education and change the very meaning of going to college.

If a goal of online education proponents is to convince the public and employers that an online education is as official and prestigious as a traditional one earned in brick-and-mortar and Ivy classrooms, it’s hard to imagine anything more damaging than identity-fraud schemes in which students literally pay for grades but do no work whatsoever. At least with a traditional degree, the assumption is the recipient actually went to class personally. Even so, the growth in online-degree credibility is already happening as more and more colleges move classes and degree programs online. Arizona State University offers a complete bachelor’s degree in a variety of majors””entirely online.

Recently a Craigslist ad in Orlando, where UCF is located, effectively offered to cheat for students online. The ad read, “Between your busy work schedule and personal life, you may not get time for your online classes. We will provide you an excellent support for all your online classes needs such as discussion boards, tests, quizzes, and assessments. We are a team of highly qualified professionals who are experienced in writing all types of assignments. We offer 100% plagiarism free papers that assure top grades.”

With the availability of online-cheating services and more online degree options, it’s conceivable that someone could pay an extra $1,000 a class””about $40,000 for an entire 120-credit bachelor’s degree””to simply hire someone to earn the degree for them. Considering the already high cost of tuition and the boost in earning potential a degree affords, an extra $40,000 to never even go to class, even online, may be the deal of a lifetime for someone with means. An easy No Need to Study path through college for those who can literally pay extra should also fuel lingering questions of class and race bias in higher education. Elite education opportunities already skew to those most able to afford to them. But the ability to get a degree by opening a checkbook instead of a textbook does, at a minimum, complicate efforts to flatten the education-access pyramid.

A report by the Thomas B. Fordham institute estimated that colleges save more than 40 percent when they move classes online. Indeed, the cost savings are a key selling point of those encouraging a move from having students show up to simply asking them to log in.

But the fight isn’t hopeless. There are steps colleges and online education companies can take to cut down on online impersonation. Infusing online courses with more direct engagement between teacher and student””using video technology, for example””can help.

Imagine if this is carried out in the extreme and that medical schools used on line courses instead of face-to-face classes.

I have just returned from a visit to Italy and Greece. The media has been reporting on the economic trouble of both of these countries as well as those in Spain and Ireland. I visit Spain in November 2014.

 

What I have not seen in the media is the reports about the unemployment rate of people below the age of 25. While Greece has posted an unemployment rate of 25.6 percent, those below the age of 25 have an unemployment rate of 49.7 percent. In Italy, the unemployment rate is 12.4 percent but the unemployment rate for those under 25 is 46 percent. In Spain, it is 49.6 percent for those under 25. Thanks to the European Union, children are leaving their home countries because of the inability to find work. One young person I spoke to in Greece said that 17 of her friends had moved out of Greece and she was the last “survivor” in her group. She didn’t believe that they would ever return to Greece. My friend in Spain’s son moved to Wales to find work.

Add to this the rapidly aging population in most of the Western World. In 2013, Italy’s already low birthrate broke the 1995 record with 12,000 fewer babies born across the country, according to Italy’s national statistics agency, ISTAT. Italy’s population continues to be one of the oldest anywhere in the world, with 151.4 over 65’s for every 100 under 15’s. Fewer Italians across the country are attending university, and an increasing number of those who do, according to ISTAT, are dropping out. In 2012-13 academic year, 56 of every 100 university students finished their degree. The consequence of all this is that young people have lost faith not only in the institutions, but also in the value of education.

In the United States, the unemployment rate is 5.4%. But 22.9 percent of those under 25 cannot find work. It is higher for minority students. Will these unemployed young people leave the country in order to find work?

When young people leave a country, what happens to the taxes they would have paid? Who will pay for the social services that older or retired workers depend on? Something to think about!

 

A new report released by the student loan company Sallie Mae revealed that just 48 percent of American families with at least one child under 18 has set aside money for college education in 2014, down from 51 percent in 2013 and 62 percent in 2009. Families average $13,408 in 2014 college savings balances also fell by 25 percent, to $10,040 in 2015.

At the same time, the average annual cost of a private U.S. colleges including tuition, fees and room and board, is more than $42,000 up 21 percent since 2009. Even public university costs are skyrocketing, nearly $19,000 in in-state students a 24 percent jump in just five years.   

• The School dropout problem is a global one and impacts countries around the world.

• 1 million primary-school pupils worldwide dropped out of school. An additional 32 million repeated a grade. According to UNESCO, 61 million primary school-age children were not enrolled in school in 2010. Of these children, 47% were never expected to enter school, 26% attended school but left, and the remaining 27% are expected to attend school in the future.
• In the sub-Saharan, 11.07 million children leave school before completing their primary education. In South and West Asia, that number reaches 13.54 million.
• While girls are less likely to begin school, boys are more likely to repeat grades or drop out altogether. Women who are less educated are having more children, on average 2.5 children, over the course of their lifetime when compared to more educated women, on average 1.7 children. Women with a primary school education are 13% more likely to know that condoms can reduce their risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. An education can help decrease the spreading of this virus by promoting safer sexual practices. Education empowers women to make healthy decisions about their lives. For example, women in Mali with a secondary level education or higher have an average of 3 children, while those with no education have an average of 7.
• 53% of the world’s out-of-school children are girls and 2/3 of the illiterate people in the world are women.
• Children living in a rural environment are twice as likely to be out of school than urban children. Additionally, children from the wealthiest 20% of the population are 4 times more likely to be in school than the poorest 20%. In developing, low-income countries, every additional year of education can increase a person’s future income by an average of 10%.
• The youth literacy rates in South America and Europe are among the highest with 90-100% literacy. The African continent, however, has areas with less than 50% literacy among children ages 18 and under

• Source: https://www.etscouncil.com/post/article/Educational-Facts–Around-the-World?

The United States has an extremely high rate of incarceration and that trend carries over to our young people. Many experts blame zero tolerance policies that require suspension or expulsion on the first offense for a variety of behaviors. Also, many schools now have law enforcement officers handling discipline, rather than school personnel. Across the country, male students of color and those with disabilities are more likely to arrested, referred to the justice system, suspended or expelled.

Nationwide, we pay nearly $8.2 billion each year to confine young people. The resulting costs are fewer high school graduates who will earn less, possibly commit crimes in the future and rely on public assistance.

According to the 2013 National Report Card, only 18 percent of Black and 20 percent of Latino fourth-graders were proficient readers. Math results were equally dismal with 18 percent of Blacks and 26 percent of Latinos scoring at or above grade level. In the 8th grade scores had little or no improvement, with reading proficiency dropping to 17% for Blacks and 22% for Latinos. Eighth grade math scores found only 14% of Blacks and 21% of Latinos had proficient skills.

What do you think would be the country’s reaction if 80% of low-income Latino and Black students lacked “proficient” food, housing, clothing and health care?

Just asking.