- Following student complaints, Northwestern Prof. Laura Kipnis investigated by her university over an essay she wrote on campus sexual politics [Jonathan Adler and more, Chronicle of Higher Ed (Kipnis cleared amid nationwide furor), Glenn Reynolds] Flashback: How NPR, the Center for Public Integrity, and federal officials fueled the campus sex assault panic [Christina Hoff Sommers, The Daily Beast, January] Harvard lawprof Janet Halley, who battles for rights of Title IX accused, is anything but conservative [Harvard Crimson] “The pretense of ‘neutrality’ … has its roots in privilege.” Popehat’s wicked satire of academia looks so real;
- Throwing Skittles on a school bus = “interference with an educational facility” [Louisiana, Lowering the Bar]
- To reduce stigma, or so it’s said, Maryland will serve free school breakfast and summer meals to more children whether they’re poor or not. Why cook for your kids when the state will do it? [my Free State Notes post]
- Will high school football still be around in 2035? “Iowa Jury Awards Injured Ex-High School Football Player $1M” [Insurance Journal]
- “Maryland’s ‘free range’ parents cleared of neglect in one case” [Washington Post, earlier]
- St. Paul, MN schools in recent years embraced latest progressive nostrums on discipline, mainstreaming, cultural difference. Results have not been happy [Susan Du, City Pages]
- “Two-Thirds of Risk Managers Say Frats Are Major Liability” [Inside Higher Ed] California trend spreads as Connecticut Senate passes affirmative consent bill for college disciplinary policies [West Hartford News/CT News Junkie]
Posts Tagged ‘school discipline’
Children and schools roundup
- Story of free-range Meitiv kids goes national, cont’d: “Bystanders are forced [sic] to step in and enforce discipline because the parents aren’t around.” [Slate via @bibliographing] Yes, the cited “National Association to Protect Children” is a real group, I looked it up [Washington Jewish Week] “Epidemic of moms getting arrested for leaving children in car 5 mins to run into store.” [Kim Brooks, Salon via @Lorettamalakie]
- What got buried in a WaPo column arguing that standardized tests for schoolkids are “a civil right.” [Ann Althouse] Testing issue allows teachers’ unions to make friends on the conservative side [NYT via same]
- Legal costs exceed $100 per student at some Chicago-area public schools; $23 billed for one lawyer’s phone message [Tribune via ABA Journal]
- Maintenance of Effort laws, meant to insulate school budgets against local voter control, might backfire [Free State Notes post by me, channeling my letter to the editor]
- A dissent on liberalizing school discipline policies [Paul Sperry, New York Post]
- Colorado school shootings: why is GOP leading push for emotion-driven, public-fisc-endangering lawsuits? [John Frank, Denver Post]
- Expensive new playground mandates [Paul Best and Lenore Skenazy, more from Skenazy, Tim Gill via Common Good]
Long after the accusation
Seven-year-old accuses teacher of shoving him, teacher is jailed and fired, a big lawsuit follows. But ten years later their lives once again intersect…. [Marc Fisher, Washington Post Magazine; Josh Kaplowitz; Raynard Ware; and particularly recommended, Fisher’s 2003 story (“He began his teaching stint with idealism. And ended it in jail”)]
Schools roundup
- National Education Association has spent estimated $35 million on politics this year [Jason Hart, Watchdog]
- Not everyone in academia admires the federal law entitling tenured professors to stay on “until they’re carried out of the classroom on a gurney” [Laurie Fendrich, Chronicle of Higher Ed; my earlier]
- Montgomery County, Md.: “The School Religious Holidays Problem is Really a Public Schooling Problem” [Neal McCluskey]
- “Concussion Lawsuits Hit High School Level” [AP; Cook County, Ill.]
- Reminder: much-quoted “one in five college women is raped” statistic is not real [Christina Sommers, Time; the Washington Post’s contribution (not to forget this); and a very important new piece by Emily Yoffe in Slate]
- Ousting bad cops, ousting bad teachers: parallel obstacles [RiShawn Biddle, Dropout Nation]
- George Leef on federal pressures behind Minneapolis school-discipline initiative [Forbes, earlier here and here]
- DoJ “feigning concern about access for disabled children” in suit challenging Wisconsin school choice [George Will]
School discipline quotas, cont’d
I was a guest on Ray Dunaway’s program on Hartford-based WTIC discussing (audio) the new Minneapolis plan for race-conscious school discipline, which is likely to be replicated around the country as more cities and states fall into line with the new Department of Justice policy. Earlier here, and a somewhat different view from Coyote, who writes: “By the way, in today’s legal environment, any private employer who says they don’t put extra scrutiny on terminations of folks in protected classes, or don’t increase the warnings and documentation required internally before firing someone in a protected class, is probably a liar.”
Prodded by feds, Minneapolis will consider race in school suspensions
The groundbreaking move follows negotiations with the federal government, which sent out a letter to school systems warning that disciplinary patterns with “disparate impact” were under suspicion. There is of course a reformist cast for rethinking some harsh aspects of school discipline systems, zero tolerance policies being one, but not the only, example. Such reforms might well have the effect of narrowing disproportionately high rates of discipline for students in some minority groups. But the Minneapolis system’s move (apparently encouraged by Washington) to consider race explicitly in the suspension process, with minority kids getting an additional layer of review, raises the likelihood of a challenge under the Constitution’s equal protection clause, as does the setting of an enforceable compliance objective of achieving identical suspension rates from one demographic group to the next independent of whether misconduct rates are identical. [Tom Corbett/Star Tribune, Hans Bader/CEI, John Steele Gordon/Commentary, RiShawn Biddle/Dropout Nation (a different view)].
Schools roundup
- New report: “Schools Cut Back as Litigation Costs Eat into Budgets” [California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, PDF] “Swings too dangerous for Washington schools” [AP; Richland, Wash.]
- “Appeals Court Ruling Paves Way for Gender Quotas in High School Sports” [Saving Sports, Ninth Circuit on Title IX] More: Alison Somin [Ollier v. Sweetwater Union School District]
- “College and university administrators demolishing freedom of religion and association” [Bainbridge]
- “Grenade Launchers: The Newest Must-Have School Supply” [Jason Bedrick/Cato, earlier]
- “It was against the school policy for elementary kids to have Chapstick” [Amy Alkon; Augusta County, Va.] “Mom Tells Therapist About Briefly Leaving Kids Alone, Shrink Calls Cops” [Lenore Skenazy]
- Disability and school discipline: “Wondering why a preschooler would ever need to be suspended? Here’s an explanation.” [Amy Rothschild, Greater Greater Washington]
- Civic education needed: some Greendale, Wisc. parents and educators wonder why non-parents are allowed to vote on school matters [Lenore Skenazy]
Maryland tells schools to stop suspending students for cursing out, disobeying teachers
And so the experiment begins. The politics are pretty interesting, with neither the teachers’ unions nor the voters in places like Baltimore city necessarily thrilled about this development. It’s far more popular with various legal services groups, liberal foundations, and of course the Obama Administration’s Department of Education and Justice Department. [Washington Post, earlier on similar Los Angeles initiative and on the race angle]
“Defiance” no longer grounds for suspension in L.A. schools
Under pressure from higher-ups, Los Angeles schools have sharply reduced suspensions of disruptive kids — or have they just reduced the rate at which they report suspensions? At any rate, no one seems to be happy. “Last year, the L.A. school board became the first in the state to ban defiance as grounds for suspension; legislation would expand that ban statewide. … those in the trenches say it hasn’t been easy to comply with the mandates.” [L.A. Times, with comments; more on school discipline]
Schools roundup
- California voters thought they’d reined in don’t-hurry-on-English “bilingual” instruction methods, but legislators have other ideas [Steven Greenhut, San Diego Union-Tribune]
- “Report: Too Much Regulation Is Hurting Scientists” [Inside Higher Ed via Instapundit; two earlier federal surveys “found principal investigators spend 42 percent of their time on administrative tasks”]
- This should end well: Mayor de Blasio hands keys to NYC school system over to teacher’s federation [NY Daily News]
- “How the Media Again Failed on the Duke Lacrosse Story” [KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr.]
- Chicago: “Teacher Shows Kids Carpentry Tools, Gets Suspended on ‘Weapons’ Charge” [Lenore Skenazy, Free-Range Kids]
- On school discipline and zero tolerance, Eric Holder draws the wrong lessons [Hans Bader, CEI “Open Market”] “Prior problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in school suspensions” [Wright et al., Journal of Criminal Justice, PDF]
- “The little secret of public higher ed: it’s a massive transfer of wealth from lower to upper classes” [Roger Pilon, 2Paragraphs]