Franklin Schargel’s Blog

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fewer U.S. teens are smoking cigarettes, but more are getting a nicotine fix from waterpipes and electronic cigarettes, Overall tobacco use among middle- and high school students last year “” 6.7% and 23.3%, respectively “” was about one percentage point lower than in 2011, mostly due to a decline in teens smoking cigarettes, according to CDC’s analysis of the 2012 National Youth Tobacco Survey.

The survey using sixth- through 12th-graders, found a notable increase in those who’ve used hookahs, also known as waterpipes, and e-cigarettes “” both of which aren’t federally regulated and taxed as are cigarettes. Last year, about 5.4% of high school students said they used hookahs at least once a month, up from 4.1% in 2011, and 2.8% tried e-cigarettes, up from 1.5%.

The CDC attributed the increase to lower prices for these products as well as their increased marketing and availability, and the perception that they are safer alternatives to cigarettes. It also found a slight uptick in high school students who smoked pipes and cigars, including the little ones that look like cigarettes but cost a lot less and come in candy flavors.

Unlike cigarettes, these products are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which has said it plans to expand its authority to include e-cigarettes and other tobacco products. E-cigarettes don’t burn tobacco, but users inhale a liquid that contains nicotine, which is derived from the tobacco leaf.

The CDC report, published in this week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, reported that 14% of high school students smoked cigarettes last year, down from 15.8% in 2011 and 28% in 2000. It notes that smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States, and nearly 90% of adult smokers began smoking by age 18.

 

 

 

I have always believed that For- Profit schools are an oxymoron. 

“I saw students who never should have been there, students with whopping gaps in learning abilities and major psychiatric problems who were just not capable of doing the work,” said Ms. Amaya, an administrator at Harris’s Linwood campus, and then at its Wilmington, Del., campus, from 2009 to 2011. “The bosses were always like, “˜Stop asking why they’re enrolled, just get them to graduation however you can.’ “ Her charges are part of a federal lawsuit filed by seven former employees against Harris and its parent company, Premier Education Group, which owns more than two dozen trade schools and community colleges operating under several names in 10 states. Premier had 17,000 students in 2012.

The suit contends that while charging more than $10,000 for programs lasting less than a year, school officials routinely misled students about their career prospects, and falsified records to enroll them and keep them enrolled, so that government grant and loan dollars would keep flowing.

Though they vary widely in quality, for-profit schools have drawn scrutiny in recent years for aggressive recruiting, high prices, low graduation rates and heavy borrowing by students who often have poor job prospects afterward. In a separate case in New Jersey, dozens of former Harris students say that the school lied about what professional certifications they would qualify for after completing their courses; some were given a brochure saying they could sit for a dental assistant certification exam “” an exam that had not been offered for years. Premier settled a similar case a few years ago before it went to trial.

The former employees’ federal suit also charges that the school enrolled people who should not have been in its programs “” like a student enrolled for massage therapy, though he had been convicted of a sex crime, which would prevent him from being licensed. They say the schools enrolled students who had not graduated from high school, though their programs required it, including some who presented diplomas from known fraudulent “diploma mills.”

The company’s lawyers and executives flatly denied many of the charges, and said others, like phony diplomas, reflected only isolated instances resulting from having a hard-to-serve clientele.

Some of the complaints against Harris, which has eight campuses in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, echo those made against other for-profit schools, and were documented in investigations directed by the Government Accountability Office. Those include high-pressure enrollment tactics and misleading promises about job prospects upon graduation.

Compared with traditional, nonprofit schools, both public and private, for-profit schools disproportionately enroll low-income and minority students who qualify for significant government aid, and the schools rely far more on that aid for revenue. Federal records show that in 2011-12, Premier collected $112 million in federal Pell grants and federal student loans. For-profit schools also spend heavily on advertising, their students are far more likely to borrow money to pay for tuition, and those who borrow rack up more debt and are more likely to default.

Students at for-profit schools often do not realize that cheaper alternatives exist through public community colleges and trade schools. A study published by Public Agenda found that the majority of people who had attended for-profit colleges and trade schools did not understand the distinction, learned of their schools through advertising and did not consider any other schools.

The most striking allegations against Premier involve students who were not capable of doing the work because they lacked the mental stability, academic skills or English proficiency, yet were kept on the books so the schools could collect their federal aid, which requires that a certain percentage of students make progress toward completion. When teachers gave them failing marks, the former employees charge, administrators changed the grades and falsified the attendance records.

The former employees contend that school executives often skewed aptitude tests used to screen applicants by giving students extra time, letting them keep smartphones that could be used to help answer questions, and faking the scores by filling in correct answers after students had turned the tests in.

Several students interviewed outside Harris campuses said that when they took the tests, they were told not to worry because the results did not matter, and one said that she was surprised that she was accepted because she had not understood or answered most of the questions. Most of the students said they found Harris through ads or by word of mouth, then met with recruiters who sometimes pressed them to enroll immediately, saying that space was limited.

Premier’s lawyers noted that no government agency requires the use of any aptitude test. “Maybe what they want is for Premier to discriminate based on disability,” Mr. Farrell said. “We deny passing anyone who didn’t deserve to be passed at a Premier school.”

The lawsuit is unusual in that it is filed under the federal False Claims Act, charging that the conduct of Harris and Premier defrauded the federal government. Under that law, a defendant can be found liable for triple the actual damages, potentially enough to put Premier out of business, and the whistle-blowers can reap hefty paydays, collecting as much as 30 percent of any verdict award, which Premier’s lawyers say is a motive for the suit.

The case against Premier was filed in 2011, but was unsealed and available to the public last fall.

Premier is bigger than most for-profit chains but its name is not well known; it operates under eight different school names like Harris School, Branford Hall and Salter School, each relatively small and operating and recruiting in a limited region. And Premier, like most for-profit school companies, is privately held, making information about its structure and finances hard to come by. The company is controlled by a single family based in the Philadelphia area; it is a limited partnership whose members are family trusts and individuals.

This investigation should not be considered an indictment of all for-profit  schools.  But there needs to be a better job of education potential students of the dangers of those that are fraudulent.

 

There are 7,000 Catholic parochial schools in America according to  the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA). The Roman Catholic schools are facing increasingly adverse economic and demographic conditions, which have undermined their finances and sapped their enrollment. Researchers and supporters say those schools face one of their most complex challenges yet: the continued growth of charter schools. Since they first opened two decades ago, charter schools have emerged as competitors to Catholic schools for reasons connected to school systems’ missions, their academic models, and the populations they serve.

Charter schools have their strongest presence in urban centers, traditional strongholds of Catholic education. Many charter schools have attributes similar to those offered by the church’s schools, such as disciplined environments, an emphasis on personal responsibility and character development, and distinctive instructional and curricular approaches.

Catholic schools are unable to compete with charter schools that look like them, have a longer school day and  are free.

The nation’s first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, the number of those independently managed public schools has risen steadily. Today, some 5,600 charter schools serving about 2 million students, operate in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Meanwhile, the number of students in Catholic schools has fallen. Since 2000, 1,942 Catholic schools around the country have shut their doors, and enrollment has dropped by 621,583 students, to just over 2 million today.

Many of the woes of Catholic schools can be traced to the exodus of middle-income families from the cities. Catholic schools’ finances were also hurt by the costs associated with their increased use of lay teachers and a steep drop in the number of nuns, who had been the mainstay of the teaching force.

 

According to a Gallup poll77 percent of school principals report that they withhold recess as punishment, even as they sing the praises of recess as a factor in academic, cognitive, and social development. In that same report, eight in 10 principals acknowledge that time to play has a “positive impact on achievement,” and two-thirds of principals state that “students listen better after recess and are more focused in class.”

Despite overwhelming evidence that periods of unstructured play and social interaction are a crucial part of children’s cognitive, academic, physical and mental wellness, schools continue to take away recess privileges as a penalty for academic or behavioral transgressions. When students fail to hand in assignments or when a child acts up in class, teachers have taken their recess privileges hostage.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a policy statement,  “The Crucial Role of Research,” In response to this common disciplinary practice, as well as the overall declining rates and duration of recess. Their stance is that: “recess offers cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits that may not be fully appreciated when a decision is made to diminish it.” In other words, schools should keep recess on the schedule. The physical benefits of recess to all students, particularly the 17 percent of American children who are classified as obese, are clear. In our increasingly sedentary society, it can be a challenge to ensure that children get the recommended 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity every day, and recess can help bridge that gap.

Research indicates that recess provides an opportunity to refill children’s reserves of self-control through play and expression that’s free from structure, rules, and rigorous cognitive tasks. Several studies have found that students who enjoy the benefit of recess are more attentive, more productive and better able to learn when they return to the classroom from a period of free play.

Memory is also enhanced by breaks because cognitive rest after learning new material allows that material to be retained for longer periods of time. For optimal cognitive processing and memory consolidation, therefore, children need a period of unstructured free time, even if it is simply in the form of socializing or daydreaming.

Finally, recess helps young children develop social skills, such as negotiation, social dynamics, and the use of subtle verbal and non-verbal communication cues. As our children’s schedules become more regimented and structured, and free-play time retreats indoors in favor of video games over kick the can and stickball, recess is the only opportunity many children have to learn these skills.

What does recess do for students?

1. Brain power. Instead of being refreshed and ready to learn, they are brain-drained, as they have lost out on the opportunity to regain the energy needed for focus.

2. Connection with peers. Not only does the benched kid gain a reputation of being a “bad kid,” they lose out on the opportunities to practice social skills, make new friends and strengthen existing friendships.

3. Relationship with teachers. When a teacher holds a student out of recess, she undermines her relationship with that student. Consequently, student will tune that teacher out just when she should be tuning in and learning.

4. Opportunities to learn a different behavior. Being left out of recess “doesn’t help a child understand what she did wrong, and even more importantly, doesn’t help her learn how to make it right the next time. Without that instruction, she becomes a repeat offender, and a self-perpetuating cycle of bad behavior and punishment takes over.”

If we truly want our children to function at their academic, physical and mental best, teachers need to stop withholding recess, and schools need to protect it. Cutting into or taking away recess time is counter-intuitive and self-defeating. When we deprive our children of the cognitive rest and physical activity they need to perform at their best, teachers undermine the very education we seek to impart.

Research clearly indicates that taking away recess as a punishment for behavior problems or academic lapses won’t help, and might hurt. Students and teachers need time to unwind.  The increased demands of high stakes testing has led to the decline of recess, physical education and the “fun things’ that schools have the ability to provide.  Schools cannot have it both ways.

 

According to a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) in a survey of 2,420 teacher preparation programs at the 1,130 institutions that prepare 99 percent of America’s the new teachers, it is far too easy to get into a teacher preparation program.

Three out of four elementary teacher preparation programs aren’t event teaching the methods of reading instruction that could lower the number of children who never become proficient readers.  “Just 7 percent of programs ensure that their student teachers will have uniformly strong experiences such as only allowing them to be placed in classrooms taught by teachers who are themselves effective.”

Could this be the reason why so many of the public schools are failing?  It is more complicated that finding a singular causation for failure but this is obviously one of the causes.  If we want our nations schools to be high performing than we need to insure that the institutions that are preparing them are high performing.

 

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More than a third of parochial schools in the United States closed between 1965 and 1990, and enrollment has fallen by more than half.

 

If sitting in a prison cell was a job, it would be one of the most common jobs in the United States. In 2012, there were

some 1, 570,000 in  in state and federal prisons in the U.S., according to data from the Justice Department.

By contrast, there were about 1,530,000 engineers in America last year, 815,000 construction workers, and 1 million high school teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What is this saying about the cost of education and the cost of prisons?  America is now the most imprisoned nation in the world.  I guess it shows our priorities. 

President Barack Obama has announced that he will be launching an education initiative to help African American students. The president plans to sign an executive order to create a new office, the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. This new office will be in charge of coordinating efforts to provide African Americans “a complete and competitive education from the time they’re born all through the time they get a career,” said the President.

This cradle-to-career plan is the first ever executive order to help African Americans, but not an unprecedented step to help a minority group. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush issued an executive order on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans which was renewed by presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.

After the announcement about the education initiative for African American students, Obama’s demeanor got more serious. He stressed that students also need to fulfill their end of the bargain.