Franklin Schargel’s Blog

From Linda-Darling Hammond

The promise of equal opportunity, most especially in education, is at the heart of the American dream: If you study and work hard, the promise goes, you can achieve your aspirations.

Yet our schools are among the most unequally funded

in the industrialized world, with some states spending more than double what others spend per pupil, and some districts within each state spending double or triple  what others can allocate.

Proper funding can, in many cases, eliminate the gap in adult outcomes between those raised in poor and in non-poor families.

Worse still, many states spend less in school districts that serve low-income students and new immigrants who need more support to succeed. While some students attend spacious, well-outfitted schools with extensive libraries, science labs, computers and small classes, others attend crumbling, overcrowded buildings where they lack access to basic textbooks and trained teachers.

More than 40 states have experienced school funding lawsuits about these unjust conditions, and in each case, defense attorneys bring in experts who argue that money doesn’t make a difference. Yet money that is properly spent on the right educational resources for students who need them the most “” especially on well-qualified educators and keeping classes at reasonable sizes “” can make a huge difference.

A  recent study  of school funding reforms over the last 40 years or so shows just how much of a difference money can make: For low-income students who spent all 12 years of school in districts that increased their spending by 20 percent as a result of court-ordered reforms, graduation rates rose by 23 percentage points and adult poverty rates fell by 20 percentage points. The students’ family incomes were about 52 percent higher than they would have been without the greater education investment. The effects were large enough in many cases to entirely eliminate the gap in adult outcomes between those raised in poor families and those raised in non-poor families.

When young people are gainfully employed rather than in prison or on welfare, when they are earning higher wages and paying greater taxes that support the retirement, health care and social needs of other citizens, everyone wins. Money, invested well in education, makes an enormous difference to the welfare of everyone in our society.

 

For those who missed it, here is my interview with Education World https://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/school-violence-prevention-schargel.shtml

Preventing Youth Violence and Risk Behavior

EducationWorld is pleased to present this e-interview with Franklin Schargel, EducationWorld contributor and author of Creating Safe Schools: A Guide for School Leaders, Teachers, Counselors and Parents.
Do risky and antisocial youth behaviors relate to each other, or share a common origin? (Behaviors include bullying, cyber-bullying, substance use, unsafe Internet activity, violent school incidents, risky sexual activity, suicide, truancy and youth gambling.)
Risky and antisocial behaviors are interrelated. When schools focus on a single behavior, let’s say bullying, there is also a need to connect bullying to truancy and then to suspension and then to dropping out.
What can schools do to address the root causes of these problem behaviors? (What can they do to address and diminish student safety problems?)
Schools are dealing with an increasing number of disaffected, disconnected young people. They are disconnected from their families, from society and school. They exist in all economic and social classes. An increasing number of students come from non-traditional families and learn in non-traditional ways. Traditional discipline techniques do not work with these non-traditional learners. Schools need to adjust the way they deal with disruptive students with problem behaviors. Suspending students who are habitual truants simply rewards students who wish to be out of school and results in placing these young people in unsupervised homes or in the street. Properly supervised in-school suspensions where students do assigned work is one answer to the problem. Many young people have emotional and psychological problems that families and society are not addressing. We need more mental health workers in school to address these young peoples’ needs.
Are most schools getting things right or wrong when it comes to preventing and responding to students’ violent and risky behaviors? How can schools improve what they’re doing?
Times have dramatically changed and many schools haven’t adjusted to these changes. Traditional discipline based on “˜do what I say or I will suspend you’ doesn’t work on children who have been abused, threatened, bullied or have seen loved ones killed. School violence is no longer taking place in the inner cities. It has occurred in rural and suburban areas. Few people heard of Sandy Hook, Columbine or West Paducah Kentucky before violence struck. People say, “I didn’t think it could happen here.” Schools and communities need to be prepared for preventing violence. (I am not only addressing issues like gun violence but suicide and bullying as well.) School safety plans need to be in place and reviewed regularly to ensure that the best current practices are in place. We leave in an age of meanness ““ politicians are mean to each other. Football players are accused of being paid bonuses to injure and perhaps end the careers of their opponents. Some families experience violence as a daily occurrence. Schools reflect society. So is it unusual for students to be mean to each other? Our society has become more violent.
Why did you feel the need to write Creating Safe Schools: A Guide for School Leaders, Teachers, Counselors and Parents? What help does the book offer schools?
I was a classroom teacher, school counselor and school administrator who worked all of my professional life in New York City high schools. In one school where I worked, 50 students were killed on their way to school or on the way home. A student was shot and paralyzed by an intruder. In another school, a student was killed as he fought to protect his jacket. Fortunately, most educators and most schools do not experience what I did. But our students are the most vulnerable innocents in any society. We need to protect them from any violence.
Education World®           Copyright © 2014 Education World

Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas as per the Human Development Index.  The 2010 earthquake exacerbated the already constrained parameters on Haiti’s educational system by destroying infrastructure and displacing 50-90% of the students, depending on locale. The World Factbook reports a shortage of skilled labor, widespread unemployment and underemployment, saying, “more than two-thirds of the labor force do not have formal jobs”, and describes pre-earthquake Haiti as “already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty.” Most Haitians live on $2 or less per day.

Over 50% percent of Haiti’s population is school age yet over half the population is illiterate. Many children cannot afford the costs of education in Haiti because the average family makes less than $1 a day. The enrollment rate for primary school is 67%, of which less than 30% reach 6th grade. Secondary schools enroll 20% of eligible-age children.

The government does not provide adequate funding for public schools and most families cannot afford the costs of private education, which can be as little as
$20 a year. Hope for Haiti assists families who do not have the means to educate their children. We believe the best way to help fight poverty is to help the poor help themselves through educational opportunities.

Adult literacy is variously reported as 52.9% [World Factbook] and 65.3% [United Nations], and the World Bank estimates that in 2004 over 80% of college graduates from Haiti were living abroad, with their remittances home representing 52.7% of Haiti’s GDP. Poverty has forced at least 225,000 Haitian children to work as restavecs (unpaid household servants); the United Nations considers this to be a modern-day form of slavery.

Access to quality education remains key to Haiti’s social and economic development. The current state of education in Haiti, however, is not sufficient for the task. Surveys conducted by the UNDP indicate that Haitians who are 25 years and older received on average only 4.9 years of education and only 29 percent attended secondary school. These statistics show that a generation of Haitian youth is at risk for not having the necessary knowledge and basic skills to succeed in the labor force and contribute to the continued development of the country. Most schools in Haiti have minimal government support, lack qualified instructors, and are relatively expensive. Nongovernmental organizations, churches, communities, and for-profit operators, with minimal government oversight, privately manage more than 80 percent of primary schools. School expenses are often a significant financial burden for low income families. Half of public sector teachers in Haiti lack basic qualifications and almost 80 percent of teachers have not received any pre-service training

Formal education rates in Haiti are among the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti’s literacy rate of about 53% (55% for males and 51% for females) is below the 90% average literacy rate for Latin American and Caribbean countries.The country faces shortages in educational supplies and qualified teachers.

The rural population is less educated than the urban.^[1] Haiti has 15,200 primary schools of which 90% are non-public and managed by communities, religious organizations or Non-government organizations (NGOs).

 

Research has found that children consume up to 50 percent of their total daily calories at school.  Children who rely on school breakfast and lunch programs for nourishment are often left with enough to eat during weekends and evenings.  During the summer or spring and winter breaks, many families are unable to obtain the meals that their children need. Many of the existing summer food programs say the only way children can benefit from food at a summer food site is if they consume the meal on site. But many school systems fail to supply transportation during these breaks and the cost of round trip fuel costs may exceed  the cost of the lunch that the child receives.

We know that hungry children are distracted from learning.  Hunger in children is linked to delayed development, learning difficulties and a high risk of health conditions like asthma. Hungry children also are a greater risk of behaviorl and social difficulties.  This can lead to truancy, school tardiness and and dropping out.  Instead of requiring that children travel to a site each day to eat a meal, what if families receive a card to purchase the food that is needed during the school breaks?

Columbine and Sandy Hook have turned school safety on its head.  We know about the use of surveillance cameras in subways, airports, in shopping malls, banks, gas stations but and other public places for decades, but now, they are becoming a standard fixture in school hallways.  Since the Sandy Hook massacre, state legislatures have introduced more than 400 bills to upgrade school security including school surveillance cameras.

Once installed in schools, though, surveillance cameras are used not only for security from outside invaders, but also for monitoring inside threats and student behavior. Cameras also mean that surveillance footage can be easily shared with police. The footage from these newer cameras is stored centrally on a school’s information-technology platform. Because the county or state, in the case of public schools, owns this platform, police departments also have access to this platform ““ which might be a drawback in terms of student security.

While progress in the way cameras operate and their abilities to monitor the halls where children spend a large portion of their days seems to create a sense of increasing safety for some communities, there are limits to the security they can actually provide in a crisis, some experts noted.

It seems that the use of cameras have been accepted throughout the public, both socially and politically, and that cameras are an acceptable way to monitor students.

Hidden Costs?

There are social costs associated with school surveillance cameras. The first results from submitting students to a constant state of surveillance. Many would argue that this is a substantial invasion of students’ privacy rights, especially because states have mandatory attendance requirements, so students are essentially required to be subjected to constant monitoring. While questions about the effects of policies incorporating surveillance cameras might arise, their continued presence in schools has legal footing.

Mr. Stephens, of the National School Safety Center, explained that the basic expectation of schools is that they provide reasonable care in establishing safety policies. It is up to local school boards to decide what their security practices will be in meeting that standard. These standards can be different depending on the kinds of risks and threats schools face. School safety is a function of place, threat, and circumstance.

A potential legal tripwire for use of surveillance cameras comes from the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Cameras may be placed in schools so long as they aren’t placed in areas where students and staff would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as locker rooms or bathrooms. In one case where cameras were found to be illegal, the devices were embedded in school-issued laptops that were used out of school.

Despite such concerns, security cameras may now be in schools to stay. These measures, offer little protection against a determined killer with powerful guns.

 

 

In 2009 a report from Chronicle Research Services sounded the alarm, warning that the vast majority of traditional four-year private colleges were heading down the path to extinction unless they shifted demographic gears. Along with highlighting the dwindling numbers of affluent white high-school students in most of the country, and the growing number of financially strapped teens from diverse ethnic groups, “The College of 2020: Students found that “the adult-­education market will be the fastest-growing one in higher education for the foreseeable future.”

And yet, five years later, little has changed. Higher education as a whole has yet to focus on this seismic change””including the exponential increase in potential students in their 50s and beyond. By 2030, 112 million Americans will be over 55, up from some 76 million today. Today, one in 10 Americans is older than 65; in 25 years, more than one in four will be over 65.

Colleges need students, and a growing underserved population needs supportive educational pathways into a new life chapter, precisely what colleges have historically provided.  One reason is the traditionally conservative nature of higher education in the United States and its reluctance to change. To be sure, higher education is not entirely to blame. We live in a nation where youth is celebrated and aging is associated with decline and thus, almost by definition, is not seen as a market for education, which is designed to prepare students for the future. According to that outdated construct, older people have nothing to contribute because their working lives are in the rear-view mirror.

And while most colleges now offer programs for adults, whether in the form of continuing education, alumni activities, or customized programs for executives, those offerings have remained for the most part marginal, the stepchildren of a higher-­education system oriented toward youth.

What’s generally missing is a willingness to follow where the data lead, without preconceptions. What are the key drivers of the market for adult learners? What are their learning needs, interests, and styles? We have yet to answer such questions; indeed, there has been a dearth of comprehensive research  on those issues. As a group, colleges will need to remedy this if they hope to remain relevant””and solvent.

Especially vulnerable are the vast majority of institutions that fall somewhere between elites such as Harvard and Stanford (both of which, incidentally, have launched pioneering programs for public-service-­minded adults at midlife and beyond) and the community colleges and for-profit schools already focused on students who lack the time, money, or inclination for a traditional four-year college experience. As the Chronicle Research Services report made clear, such institutions must find new business models or risk going the way of once-­profitable businesses, like Kodak, that foundered when they failed to respond to changing demands.

“The university of the future may be one that serves all ages. Colleges will reposition themselves economically as offering just as much to the aging as to the adolescent: courses priced individually for later-life knowledge seekers; lots of campus events of interest to students, parents, and the community as a whole; a pleasant college-town atmosphere to retire near. In decades to come, college professors may address students ranging from age 18 to 80.” So writes the journalist Gregg Easterbrook in a recent issue of The Atlantic. The vision Easterbrook puts forward is the one to which we must aspire in a society where lives are longer and healthier than ever. Change is happening quickly. The clock is ticking. The alternative is not business as usual””it’s obsolescence.

Source: An Aging America: Higher Education’s New Frontier, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Author: Barbara Vacarr

Franklin will be interviewed on “Performance Excellence USA”. The topic is “Building Quality Education in New Mexico.” The show will be broadcast on Sunday, June 28 at 7Pm on KKOB-AM  

According to the ASCD website:

“Both chambers of Congress have passed spending blueprints to guide the federal government’s spending for FY 2016 and beyond””and both chambers propose severe cuts to education funding. Although the blueprints set the overall spending caps for federal programs, they do not specify program amounts. However, Congress’s plan to keep sequestration in place means no increased funding in any education program””including Title I, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and professional development for educators””regardless of need.

The House funding blueprint would slice education spending by $135 billion from 2016 to 2025 (20 percent below current funding levels), and the Senate proposal would cut education spending by $63 billion (8 percent below current funding levels) during the same period. Education has already sustained $80 billion in cuts since 2010, and additional reductions will make spending allocations more difficult for state and local leaders. Congress’s latest proposals would drop preK”“12 per-pupil funding to its lowest level since the turn of the century, according to a White House fact sheet.

The Senate passed an amendment that would allow states to opt out of the Common Core State Standards without penalty, meaning they could keep their Elementary and Secondary Education Act waivers and Race to the Top funding, but rejected an amendment that would have established and funded federal-state partnerships to expand access to high-quality preschool programs.”

What is wrong with these people?