Take time to get to know me

Take the time to get to know me

Yesterday I got in trouble because I did not do my homework.   Last night when I was supposed to be doing homework, my parents were fighting again.   My father said he was going to leave us.  My mother told him to go.  If my father leaves how will we live?  My mother does not have a job.  Please take the time to get to know me.

I am the girl in the second row.  I am not pretty and I don’t have a good body.  I am 14.  The other girls in my grade have boyfriends.  Boys don’t look at me and I know it is because I am not pretty.   I really want a boyfriend.  I could have a boyfriend if I let boys do some things with me.  I don’t want to do that.  Sometimes I get into trouble because I am sending notes to boys.  Please take the time to get to know me.

My parents are very smart.  They both have really good jobs but the jobs keep them very busy.  They don’t have a lot of time for me and my little brother.  We have a nanny to look after us.  When I get in trouble in school, you make my parents come to school for a meeting.  When I am in trouble in school, I get attention from my parents not the nanny.   Please take the time to get to know me.

I live with my mom and my brother and sister.  There are three of us and my mom.  We don’t have much money.  My mom loves us very much and she works long hours to make enough money for us to have food, a house, clothes and other stuff.  Sometimes our house is crazy.  It is hard for my mom to remember to sign all the forms from school.  It is hard for her to get off work to come to school meetings.  This makes you annoyed.  Please take the time to get to know me.

My parents love me very much.   I have a younger sister.   She is very smart.  She is smarter than I am.  She can do things already that I still don’t know how to do.  I try very hard but I have special learning needs and they make me have trouble learning.  I am way behind other kids my age.  My parents say I need to work hard and I will catch up.  I don’t think I will.  My parents love me but I think my special learning needs embarrass them.  They don’t talk about me to our family the way they talk about my sister.  Please take the time to get to know me.

I am the kid in your class that seems uncooperative.  I am the kid who does not do homework or bring in permission slips.   I am the kid who causes you a lot of extra trouble when you are just trying to do your job and teach your class.  There are things in the rest of my life that I wish you could understand.  Please take the time to get to know me in this new year.

Learning the hard way

Learning the hard way

Americans are learning about government the hard way.  The impeachment of an American president is about to happen for only the 3^rd time in our nation’s history.  Unfortunately, this is a very tough way for people to learn civics.

Turns out that Americans know very little about their government and about how it is organized and conducted.

It is really frightening.   Twenty-one percent of the people surveyed  recently could not name all three branches of government.  I am not talking about the people who are leading those branches; I am talking about just the generic name for the branch.   Foreign born people who wish to become U.S. citizens need to take a test on US history and government.  Ninety-one percent of the people taking the test pass it.  When the same test was given to native-born citizens, the majority of people taking the test in EVERY state failed it, with the exception of Vermont.  You go VERMONT!   Anecdotally, people in other countries know more about our history than our own citizens do.

And the situation is not any better in higher ed.  Should you desire, a student can get a bachelor’s degree from any college in our country without ever having to take a course in American history.  AND, in 80% of the colleges and universities you can major in history and still avoid taking a course in American history.  

Yet we expect people to vote and to make wise decisions on who is going to lead our country and on what direction we will be taken. Sometimes I think it is just as well that only about 37% of Americans vote since so many people do not know enough to make an informed decision.  Donald Trump regularly complains about fake news.  How are citizens even able to recognize what is fake or not in the news if they have so little knowledge about the history and current events of our own country.  

STEM skills are very important and they can even lead to high paying jobs.   Being an informed citizen in a democracy is also very important.  Without that informed body of citizens there won’t be those good jobs down the road because our country will be misled and there will not be informed voters to turn it around.

Our country’s history is our country’s story.  Like any story, it can be well told or not.  We have a responsibility to our children to make sure that our history is a well told story.  As Shakespeare said, “what’s past is prologue.”  And anyone not knowing our history could be stuck in a Groundhog Day and learning the hard way.

False Promises

False Promises

The Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) promises families choices if they believe the school has failed to provide the required free appropriate education at public expense.   Families have been told that they and their children will have the right of due process in fighting back against what they believe to be an inappropriate placement. 

Turns out that in practice, not all kids are getting those benefits.  Race and income level play a significant part in the question of “who benefits?”.

The nonpartisan investigation arm of Congress analyzed the data from five states (Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania) for the 2017-18 school year.  School districts in high-income areas were four times more likely to have at least one due process mediation as compared to less affluent areas.  Correspondingly, school districts with lower income families had many fewer due process claims.

There were multiple factors that led to these differences.  Obviously, lower income families did not have the funds for lawyers and expert witnesses.  A number of years ago, Congress passed legislation that requires school districts to pay the cost of a family’s attorney if they prevail at a hearing.  However, that does not include the cost for expert witnesses nor does it help a family put out the money in advance.  Given the limited success rate of families since the make-up of the hearing boards has changed, few attorneys are willing to accept these cases on contingency.  Add to the cost factor, the limited opportunity to take time off from work for lower income families and you can see why due process is not seen as a resort.

One U.S. Representative from Virginia has called the results of this investigation a “wake up” call saying that the civil rights provided to children under IDEA are not equally accessible to all students.  Of course, he is correct.  But since IDEA (and EHA before it), school districts have been hard at work to limit these rights.   Families initially did not need to be represented by attorneys.  They could be represented by lower cost child advocates.  That changed as school districts hired high powered attorneys to represent the school district.   Early on families won 90% of the hearings.  Hearing officers were, at that time, required to be knowledgeable in the areas of the child’s disability.  That too changed when court masters, with little to no knowledge, of children with special needs and/or what their educational needs were replaced the educational professionals as hearing officers.  To add to the insult, these masters were trained by the very boards of education who were appearing before the master.  Now families prevail in about 5% of the cases.

Read IDEA, the promises will warm your heart.   Sad to say, they are false.

You've Got to be Carefully Taught

You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught

That’s a line from the old musical, South Pacific.  The rest of it is… “to hate and fear, it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, to hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught.”   Turns out we aren’t teaching enough of anything and what kids are learning by omission because we aren’t teaching is that difference is bad, that is why we don’t talk about it.

Sesame Workshop did a broad range survey of over 6,000 parents of children ages three through twelve and over 1,000 teachers from pre-school to fifth grade.  Parents aren’t talking and kids are noticing.  They notice that people with certain skin tones live in places that are the same or different from their own.  They notice how people like them are featured in social media, the movies or TV.   They see lots of advertising.

The findings of the survey were interesting.  Only 10% of families discuss race with their children.  Does that mean if we don’t talk about something it won’t impact us?   Minority parents seem to be more on the job than majority families, but still not enough.   Twenty-two percent of black parents discuss race with their children but only 6% of white families do; and nearly 35% of all families say they never talk about race or social class with their children.  Fifty-seven percent of families say they never or rarely talk about gender with their kids.

These conversations aren’t happening in school either.  Although the majority of teachers say they would be comfortable talking about these topics, less than half think it is appropriate for them to be doing so!

We used to think we couldn’t do sex ed in schools because that would make kids sexually active.  Then we realized that hormones more than talk made kids sexually active and that failing to discuss sex just made it more intriguing.

Now families and teachers are saying talking about race will make kids more race conscious and even racist.   Turns out that is wrong too.  Research shows that by 3 months of age, babies begin to show preference for their own racial group.  I would be interested in knowing if that is the racial group of the caregiver and what happens when the caregiver is of a different racial group than the child or if the parents are of two different races.

Researchers recommend that we start early discussing differences in skin tone and that normal is really a statistical word meaning most prevalent not necessarily preferred.  Families should be open about privilege both racial and socio economic.  Failure to show diversity in ads, on TV or in movies should be pointed out to children and kids should be told that these depictions do not represent reality.

When we demonstrate by our behavior that certain topics are taboo, we are sending a clear message that these topics need to be hidden.  Turns out there are many ways to carefully teach kids to hate and fear.

So, What About the N word

So, What about the N Word?

Two kids are jostling in the hall.   One is calling the other kid the N word.    Does your reaction matter if both kids are white?   How about black?   How about one or two of several races?   For some reason the racial mix of the group will make a difference to how people will react.   How do families, school people and folks in the community treat the word?

Is it profane and always unacceptable as a racist slur?   If so then the make-up of the group of kids in the above example does not matter.

Should schools have absolute policies where the use of the word is just not allowed, period, end of sentence.

The Madison Wisconsin school district made an absolute rule.    The word was not to be used, no way, no how.   If staff used the word that staff member would be fired.   A school security guard who had been with the system for 17 years, was called the N word by a student.   The guard, who is African American, responded by saying to the student, “Do not call me a ‘nigger’.   That is not who I am.”   The guard was terminated!    Within in days, there were demonstrations, complaints, letter campaigns.  He was rehired.   Prior to the word being forbidden to be used by anyone, that event would have been followed up by a meeting in the principal’s office where the seriousness of the situation would be explained to the student, there would be a mediation and end with a handshake or a hug, and hopefully some education.

Managing the use of the N word is just one instance in which schools (and families) have shown their unwillingness to wade into the difficult discussions of bigotry around racist words.   While it may be true that this current political atmosphere has given license to the use of bigoted language and behavior, these problems have been beneath the surface for as long as we have had a country.   Outlawing the use of any profane word doesn’t solve the problem of why it is being used.  We just drive folks back into their hole in the ground.

We need to teach our kids empathy.   As the Native American proverb, do not criticize until you have walked a mile in someone else’s shoes.    Our students need to be taught the reasons why bigoted words are bad, and about the psychic damage they can do to the recipient of these words.  Then we can move on to conversations about how much alike we are and stop emphasizing how different we are.

Banning the N word, or any other bigoted racist word is really easy.   What is hard is trying to figure out why people want to use that word at all!

They Don't Notice Me When I'm Sad

They Don’t Notice Me When I’m Sad

Why do we have kids killing other kids by opening fire in a cafeteria or classroom?  Why is teen suicide one of the highest causes of student deaths in our country?   Why are students in our schools using profanity for everyday chats, posting sexual videos on SnapChat or texting sexually explicit photos and videos.   Maybe it is because “They don’t notice me when I’m sad”.

The high school student who wrote this sentence as part of a plea for his public school IEP committee to send him back to The Harbour School, a non-public special school for children with disabilities was desperate and accurate in his concerns about the public school.   The high school in question is widely considered one of the 2-3 best in the school district.   Its students are “good kids” from “good families”.   The student parking lot is filled with late model nice vehicles.  Yet here is the critique from a student.

“When the teachers are teaching, I can’t understand what they are saying because they are going too fast.  Whenever I tell the teachers that something is bothering me they rarely solve the problem or do nothing at all.”   Unfortunately, the teachers have a schedule to keep.  They cannot slow down or postpone progress.   The school pacing guides are designed so that all of the material will be covered by the time the school schedule dictates the state tests will be held.  “They don’t notice me when I’m sad”.

“The students are disruptive and I think they aren’t following the school rules.  They are swearing a lot and I don’t like the way the girls are dressed.  They wear clothes that expose body parts, it makes me feel disgusted.”  I am sure that swearing and dressing inappropriately are contrary to the school behavior code and to the dress code.   The problem is neither of these guides has any meaning at all unless school personnel enforce them.   So why don’t they?  There are multiple reasons.   People just don’t want the aggravation that goes with enforcing school discipline.  Parents will show up and support the misbehavior of the student and blame the teacher.  Teachers will be accused of being culturally insensitive, so why bother.  It used to be if a teacher had to call out a student for any behavior, the student knew that there would be another price to pay once he or she got home.   Not anymore.  Now the family is as likely to take the student’s side as not, because frankly, enforcing discipline is hard and there is going to be push back and, well, families just don’t have the time.  “They don’t notice me when I’m sad.”

“The kids make me feel like they are all above me.   I don’t feel safe and I feel like I don’t belong here.   I feel bad for the kid from my media production class, the kid who committed suicide.  I think he felt what I am feeling here overwhelmed, disappointed and frightened”

Violence is becoming endemic in our schools.    Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among adolescents in the U.S.  Maybe it is time we noticed when our kids feel sad.

Get the Lead Out

Get the Lead Out

Most of us have read about the lead in Flint Michigan schools when the city decided to save money by switching its water source from one of the Great Lakes to a local source that allowed lead to leach into the city’s water supply.   The full extent of the damage to Flint children is still not known.

Here is what is known.   Four years after the crisis was discovered, one in five students in Flint public schools is eligible for special education. The Superintendent has stated that 28% of Flint students have disabilities that warrant an IEP.   That is more than double the national average.  The school system is buckling under the cost of providing services and meeting federal requirements for children with disabilities.

While Flint may be best known of cities with lead in the drinking water, it is not alone.  Many other urban areas are using water facilities with lead pipes that are old and leaching into drinking water.   The situation may foreshadow issues that will be showing up in other older urban areas.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Education Law Center and the New York-based firm of Case & White have joined to represent Flint families suing the school system, the Michigan State Department of Education and the Genesee County Intermediate School District alleging failure to meet the needs of special education students.  Families with the resources to do so, have moved out of town. Leaving behind people who are disproportionately poor and in need of support services.  The district is unable to recruit and retain special education teachers.   It has resorted to using long term substitutes just to put a body in the classroom.  As many as 25% of the classrooms are staffed with temporary people.  It is going to take a great deal more money to provide these children with an appropriate education but the fact remains, all of the education in the world isn’t going to fix the cognitive damage to these children who will become cognitively damaged adults, more dependent on taxpayer support. 

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 98,000 public schools and half-million child care facilities are NOT regulated as to the amount of lead in the water.  In fact, there is no federal policy that mandates lead testing in schools.   Maryland has recently required all public-funded schools to submit water samples from multiple drinking fountains and faucets throughout the school.  The state health department is evaluating the samples for lead levels shutting down those water supply areas that don’t pass the test.  In Baltimore City, multiple schools provide bottled water to students because the fountains are unsafe.  Get the lead out means more than get moving.  We need to get moving before more kids are brain damaged by our neglect.