Education

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

How 'Deferred Action' Will Affect Classrooms

The new year could bring new challenges to the nation's schools and students. Host Michel Martin discusses what's ahead with NPR Education Correspondent, Claudio Sanchez. He says immigration policy and the demand for Pell Grants could have a huge effect on American education in 2013.

View the original article here

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Why A Principal Created His Own Currency

David Kestenbaum/NPR

Shawn Rux took over as principal of MS 53, a New York City middle school, last year. At the time, 50 or 60 kids were absent every day. You could understand why they stayed away: The school was chaos.

Twenty-two teachers had quit, the entire office staff had quit, and hundreds of kids had been suspended. The school was given a grade of F from the city's department of education.

"It was in a bad place," Rux says.

Rux decided he needed to create incentives for kids to come to school. Incentives that were more obvious to middle-school kids than, "If you come to school you'll be better off 20 years from now."

He handed out raffle tickets to anyone who showed up to school on time. One of the prizes was an Xbox. And he threw in an element of randomness: The first kids in line when the doors opened might get 20 tickets.

It worked. Kids started showing up early.

"It was ... like, 'Get out of my way, I'm trying to get into school,' " Rux says. "It was nice."

Rux also created his own currency. He called it Rux Bux. Teachers hand them out when kids are well behaved. They can be traded in for school supplies, or special lunches. A sixth-grader named Wander Rodriguez is trying to save up 5,000 Rux Bux — enough for a personal shopping spree with Rux.

The principal also stands outside school every morning, greeting the students as they show up. This recognition is another, subtler incentive to come to school.

"I like this school," Wander Rodriguez says. "They treat me like home, they treat me nice, they always give me stuff. ... They always say 'hi' in the mornings."

The school went from an F to a C. Daily attendance went up to over 90 percent. Then the hurricane hit.

The school is in Far Rockaway, Queens — one of the areas hardest hit by the storm. Some kids' homes were destroyed. One student who stayed at home through the storm told a teacher, "My apartment complex was in the middle of the ocean." Rux's car was destroyed. The first floor of his house was flooded.

After the storm, after school started up again, Rux's goal was to get attendance back to 90 percent. Every day, his staff texts him the attendance numbers. The day I visited last week, 89.2 percent of students attended school. Close, but not close enough for Rux.

The storm has been tough on everyone, he says. But that's no excuse. Kids have to be in school.

View the original article here

Schools Re-Examine Security After Newtown Shooting

The Connecticut shootings were on the minds of many at schools around the country on Monday. Some school officials re-examined their security procedures over the weekend, while parents dropped off their kids with a new sense of unease.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

In the aftermath of Newtown, school officials and parents across the country were asking themselves the same question today: How safe is my school? NPR's Claudio Sanchez has that story.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ, BYLINE: In Nashville, Tennessee, Ruth Rosenberg asked her daughter's first-grade teacher what school was going to be like today. Teachers there were told to downplay any discussion of the Newtown shooting since many kids still don't know what happened, including her 7-year-old daughter, says Rosenberg.

RUTH ROSENBERG: It's a 50-50 chance if she does find out, it's going to be from another child - which I wouldn't love, but I also trust the teacher 100 percent to handle it, if that happens; and then I could handle it at home.

SANCHEZ: Rosenberg says she's fought back tears, thinking about Newtown. After she dropped off her daughter this morning, she broke down on the way home. Another parent, Wehsong Zhou, walked his third-grade daughter to school. He's decided not to talk to his child about the shooting. She's just too young to be exposed to such tragedy, he says.

WEHSONG ZHOU: We cannot understand why this has happened, like this. It should not happen. It's against human nature.

SANCHEZ: Across the nation, parents debated whether to keep their kids home. Police departments deployed officers to patrol schools. Administrators reviewed their lockdown procedures; and psychologists and social workers were on standby, to help teachers talk to students who want to discuss the shooting in Newtown. Will Keresztes is associate superintendent of the Buffalo Public Schools.

WILL KERESZTES: Our social workers, and our school psychologists, are really stepping up. They're sharing a lot of information with each other. They're disseminating really good information to teachers with regard to students; and how to talk to students, and how to keep a sense of normalcy as best you can, in a situation like this.

SANCHEZ: In Hamden, Connecticut, just 30 miles east of Newtown, School Superintendent Fran Rabinowitz says nothing feels normal. She's called for a greater police presence on campuses indefinitely, and scheduled a district-wide meeting with parents and staff today.

FRAN RABINOWITZ: Because I felt that there was a feeling of helplessness out there about, so what's going to happen in the schools? And I wanted to bring people together. And it unfolded over the weekend, to the point where we said we need some comfort, too.

SANCHEZ: In Oakland, California, where an average of 20 school-age children are shot and killed outside school every year, district officials are also reviewing lockdown procedures. But district spokesman Troy Flint says most of the focus, for the next few days, will be on students' emotional well-being.

TROY FLINT: Our counselors are onsite. They are always on alert. I think what you need to understand is that we cope with violence on a daily basis here, so we have these procedures in place.

SANCHEZ: In many communities, though, school officials who may have once thought they were immune, are now stressing the need for armed police officers on campuses. Mo Canady is with the National Association of School Resource Officers, which trains most of the nation's 10,000 school police officers. He says arming teachers or administrators, as some have suggested, is another matter.

MO CANADY: There's a part of me that just kind of cringes at the liability of a school district doing that. Now, as of Friday, there are certainly some advocates for that. But it is a dangerous and slippery path to be on.

SANCHEZ: But Francisco Negron, legal counsel for the National School Boards Association, says the Newtown shooting could change some people's minds about that.

FRANCISCO NEGRON: It is a turning point. Now, the focus is on an external shooter. And so I think schools are going to try to understand whether or not they need to change their policies accordingly.

SANCHEZ: What those changes will be, Negron says, it's hard to say. But school safety policies, in the short term, will probably shift to more sophisticated surveillance technology, and a greater law enforcement presence in all schools. Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

Among Schools With Shootings, A 'Tragic Fraternity'

Melissa Block talks to Chris Dunshee, former principal of Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn. In 2005, a student shot and killed seven people on the school's campus.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

In 2005, Red Lake High School in northern Minnesota was the scene of another school shooting. In all, 10 people died, including the 16-year-old shooter. When I went to Red Lake soon after the attack, I talked with the school principal, Chris Dunshee. He told me Red Lake had joined what he called a tragic fraternity along with schools in Columbine, Colorado, and Paducah, Kentucky. When I reached Dunshee today, he sad the Newtown shooting had brought painful memories flooding back.

CHRIS DUNSHEE: I mean, the pain never stops, but the interval between the pain just gets longer. And I think that's kind of the message that I would share with Newtown, that don't look for the pain to ever go away, but it will - the time between will grow longer. It's, you know, like a scab that grows over the wound, and you become numbed to some of that until something like this happens again.

BLOCK: Mm-hmm. You had told me back in 2005 that there were a couple students from Columbine who came to Minnesota to try to be of some help. You didn't know they were coming. They just came.

DUNSHEE: No, they just showed up. And I was reading on one of my Facebook pages last night that some of the kids from the 2008 class, or the class that had those students - the students were in their class that were killed here at Red Lake are actually trying to raise money to go out there and be with the people in Newtown. And, yeah, they remembered those students from Columbine. They remembered how much that helped them, and they're looking and turn now to see if they can do anything that would ease the pain.

BLOCK: You know, I was thinking, Chris, that the date of these tragic events becomes indelible in these communities: for you in Red Lake, March 21, at Virginia Tech it's April 16, and now for Sandy Hook it's going to be December 14. Does that date for you ever come around, March 21, when you don't immediately remember what happened there?

DUNSHEE: No, March 21 is a date that I'll always be aware of.

I was thinking this morning, you know, as kind of an aside - we just got a couple little puppies here not too long ago, and their birth date was March 21. And I told my wife, I said, I'm not sure I can get them. And she made a good point. She said, you know, it's time something good happened on March 21. And so we got the puppies. We're really happy about it.

(LAUGHTER)

BLOCK: Something good coming from that date.

DUNSHEE: That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

BLOCK: Well, I know this is - it's a very different community in Connecticut from yours there in Minnesota, a very different school, very different ages of the kids. But if you could talk to people there in Newtown, what would you tell them? What would you want them to know?

DUNSHEE: Well, there comes a time when you just become so weary that you just don't want to think about it anymore. You just want to smile and laugh again and - but you're almost afraid that someone will think you're callous or unfeeling if you do that. But I know they're going to feel the same way. They're going to be so saturated with this for so long. I just hope that somehow these tragic events don't get tied to the season so that these people will, again, be able to feel that peace and understanding that, you know, that the holidays are supposed to bring.

BLOCK: Well, Chris Dunshee, it's very good to talk to you again. Thank you so much.

DUNSHEE: Thank you, Melissa.

BLOCK: Chris Dunshee was the principal of Red Lake High School in Minnesota during the school shooting there in 2005.

View the original article here

Profiling A Shooter: 'Needle In A Haystack'

After an elementary school shooting in Connecticut, Americans continue to struggle to understand why it happened and how to prevent future tragedies. Host Michel Martin discusses the shooting with author Paul Barrett, journalist Craig Whitney and psychiatrist Carl Bell. They talk about the politics and psychology of America's gun culture.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. Later in the program we are going to revisit a story that caught our attention about poverty in a place that often seems overlooked. We'll hear about a young woman in the Rust Belt trying to figure out a path to a better life.

But first we want to talk about the story that no one can overlook: the shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, last Friday, where 27 people, including 20 small children, were killed by a gunman who then took his own life. It is, sad to say, not the only mass shooting in recent memory in this country; it is the latest. It has the president calling for action.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Can we honestly say that we're doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm? Can we claim as a nation that we're all together there, letting them know that they're loved and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?

I've been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we're honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We're not doing enough. And we will have to change.

MARTIN: There's already been a lot of talk about exactly what kind of change, if any, should come after Friday's shooting. And we'll talk about that, but we also want to talk about how we got here in the first place. So we're joined by three people who have thought and written a very great deal about the relationship Americans have with guns and with violence.

Craig Whitney is the author of the book "Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment." He spent more than 40 years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor at the New York Times. Dr. Carl Bell is a psychiatrist and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He's also the founder of the Institute for the Prevention of Violence and he joins us from time to time to talk about important issues like this.

Paul Barrett is the author of the book "Glock: The Rise of America's Gun." He's also an assistant managing editor and senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. And I want to thank you all so much for joining us.

DR. CARL BELL: Thanks for having us.

PAUL BARRETT: Thank you.

CRAIG WHITNEY: Thank you.

MARTIN: Before I get to my questions, I just wanted to ask each of you briefly, what strikes you about what just happened? And Dr. Bell, I'll start with you.

BELL: Well, what strikes me is that this is another suicide preceded by mass murder, but the dynamic of suicide is being overlooked. And the notion that the more you publicize this, the more copycat phenomenon you get as a result.

MARTIN: Interesting. Craig Whitney, what strikes you?

WHITNEY: Well, it is a fact that more than half of all the gun deaths in this country every year are suicides. What strikes me about this incident, though, is that it's so horrific that if anything can change the paralysis that we've seen in the ability to talk about what might be done to stop or make less frequent awful things like this, this is it, the Newtown massacre.

MARTIN: Paul Barrett, what about you?

BARRETT: I'm struck by the consistency of the psychological and demographic profiles of the young men who pull off these horrendous crimes. You know, it seems like they practically come from Central Casting in terms of what we learn about their lives, what we learn about the warning signs the people saw in the months and years leading up to these horrible events, and what we learn about their relatively easy access to firearms.

MARTIN: Paul Barrett, tell me more about that. What do we - tell me what you think those elements are. And then, of course, I want to hear from Dr. Bell on that as well. And I do have to say, from the standpoint of us as a news organization, we don't feel that we know as much as we would like to know at this juncture...

BARRETT: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...about this young man and what we can actually confirm. So with that being said, Paul, what do you mean by that?

BARRETT: Well, you know, young men in their late teens, early 20s, who, you know, seem to have considerable intellectual interests of one sort or another, have various talents. These are not complete losers and yet have deep psychological problems of some sort that people have been kind of murmuring about around them for some substantial period of time and then, as the doctor said, decide that they're going to commit suicide and bring down a lot of other people with them as a show of their pain.

BELL: Yup.

BARRETT: That to me seems to be quite a consistent profile for the people, particularly in these school shootings.

MARTIN: Dr. Bell, what about that? Does that sound right to you?

BELL: No, that's absolutely right. The problem is, is that if you get into trying to profile and identify, you're looking for a needle in a haystack. Because a lot of people have those characteristics, and that makes it all the more difficult to try to identify that unique individual.

You know, we've been doing suicidology and trying to prevent suicide for the last 30 years and we haven't decreased it at all. And these suicides preceded by mass murder are even more rare. And so it's an extremely difficult challenge.

MARTIN: Craig Whitney, I wanted to pick up on something you said, which is that if anything could force us as a country to take a serious look at all these things that we need to think about, it could be it. Is that really true? I mean I remember covering a number of these stories - too many - and at every turn I remember thinking, well, this is the moment in which it changes.

I'm thinking about the story where the young kids, the other kids at a school in Boone, Arkansas killed other kids. And I'm thinking, of course, about Columbine, as everybody does. But is there really any evidence that these kinds of things change policy, Craig Whitney?

WHITNEY: Well, we'll find out in coming days and months, but it's been a long time since we've had the mass slaughter of 20 first-graders by gunfire in a classroom. And I think picking up on what the doctor and Mr. Barrett said, it's certainly true that if we had better ways of identifying people with problems of mental instability, that would've kept the shooter in the Aurora movie theater massacre from buying the guns that he was able to buy and use in that incident.

You're not ever going to be able to stop these things completely, but we could do things that might reduce their frequency and I think doing nothing is just not an acceptable alternative anymore.

MARTIN: We're speaking with journalists Craig Whitney and Paul Barrett, and Dr. Carl Bell, a psychiatrist. We're talking about the shooting at Newtown, Connecticut. Dr. Bell?

BELL: Well, you know, one thing that we could do is to try to figure out how to follow the guidelines about reporting on suicide. Now, I know that's difficult because this is such a huge media event. But if you look at the guidelines around individual suicide, the journalists are very clear that you shouldn't report details about how this was done.

So it seems to me that the more we report that this sort of an assault weapon was used, that this person had this kind of bulletproof vest, that this person entered the school this way, that gives other people who are depressed and suicidal and want to take a whole bunch of people with them the knowledge on how to pull it off. And so that could be changed fairly easily.

MARTIN: Really? Well, talk more about that, if you would. I mean you're suggesting that people...

BELL: We know that for individual suicides - this was work done by Phillips in 1974, when papers were local and a newspaper would publicize a suicide event, an individual suicide event, and then two, three weeks later you'd find cluster and copycat suicides. So the Vandenberg School of Journalism at Columbia said, well, we've got to stop this so let's not put it on the front page, not on how you do that with this.

But let's not describe with accuracy how it was done so other people who are thinking in the same way won't be able to replicate the event.

MARTIN: That's a difficult question, of course, as you're surrounded by journalists in this conversation.

BELL: I know.

MARTIN: Of something of such public interest and significance. How would one do that without addressing other important values in our country? But, you know, to that end of a question of what can be done, I wanted to ask the two journalists about the kinds of things that you've reported on over the years and the deep reporting that both of you have done about what exactly can you do.

I know Craig Whitney, your book - I just quoted it very recently, in fact, where you pointed out that there are already, what is it, something like 300 million guns in circulation in the United States now, and 100 million handguns?

WHITNEY: Mm-hmm.

MARTIN: So, Craig, given that there are that many guns in circulation in the United States right now, what can one do?

WHITNEY: Well, the problem that we have is how do you keep guns out of the hands of people whom everybody agrees shouldn't have them, like Adam Lanza? He stole his guns, I guess, from his mother before he shot her to death. Perhaps she transferred them to him. That isn't known at this point. If she did, she broke the law.

We can tighten up laws that, for instance, make it a crime to buy a gun from somebody who is on the national instant check system database as being barred from buying a gun from a dealer. We should tighten up regulations like the requirement, I mean, that now doesn't exist, if you buy a gun from a private owner, your name doesn't have to be checked with the database.

This wouldn't stop all incidents like this horrific one in Newtown, but it would stop a lot of routine gun violence that happens in our cities with other kinds of weapons.

MARTIN: Paul Barrett, I want to hear from you, as well. And we're going to need to take a short break in just a minute, and we'll continue this conversation after that break. But Paul Barrett, what about that?

BARRETT: Yeah. Well, I do not disagree with anything Craig said. I would just emphasize something different, which is that we're in a fix. We've got the 300 million guns out there. We are not going to confiscate those guns. And as a result, the presence of that armory will intersect with mental illness. It will intersect with criminality. And tinkering with the rules for how new guns are acquired will have only marginal effects, at best, at controlling these crimes. So that's the kind of grim reality that I would emphasize.

MARTIN: We need to take a short break, but when we come back, we'll continue this conversation with our guests. They are journalists Paul Barrett and Craig Whitney. They've both been deep reporting about the place of guns in American life and the politics of that. And we're also joined by psychiatrist Dr. Carl Bell, who has focused quite a lot on the prevention of violence and the aftermath of violence.

I'll ask all of you to please stay with us as we take a short break. This is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin.

View the original article here

Ct. Teacher Struggles With What To Tell His Students

Kyle Mangieri teaches 7th grade social studies in Fairfield, Ct. On Friday, he found out about the school shooting while he was at work. Mangieri lives very close to Sandy Hook Elementary School. He goes back to his classroom on Monday while deciding what to tell his students.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Now, across the country today, teachers and students are heading back to school, three days after the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. And this won't be an easy day for anyone in the school setting - parents, children, school administrators. For one Connecticut teacher, it will mean talking about what happened just a few hundred feet from his home.

From member station WNYC, Brigid Bergin has his story.

BRIGID BERGIN, BYLINE: Kyle Mangieri loves his job. This is the first year the 27-year-old has been teaching Social Studies to seventh graders in Fairfield, Connecticut full-time. Mangieri is also the basketball coach and literally gives his middle schoolers something to look up to.

KYLE MANGIERI: Yeah, I'm 6'5".

BERGIN: On Friday, he was in his classroom in Fairfield, about half-an-hour from Newtown, when he found out about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. As details trickled out all day, he started to lose his focus.

MANGIERI: At 12:30, when I had a break, I looked at my phone again and I had a bunch of missed texts.

BERGIN: Finally, he told his principal where he lived and said he needed to leave. While Mangieri teaches in Fairfield, he lives in Sandy Hook, right at the base of the hill that leads up to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

When he got home Friday, he saw frantic parents rushing up that hill to the school. Many walked back with their children, often in tears. Others returned alone.

MANGIERI: They looked like zombies. They looked like they'd just been given the worst news of their life.

BERGIN: Yesterday, across from his porch, police officers were directing traffic at the intersection. The road to the school is still blocked off. But a steady stream of mourners and media go back and forth from a makeshift memorial at the school's entrance. The school itself is still a closed crime scene.

Mangieri made a banner that hangs from his window that says: God Bless Sandy Hook. His family also turned the front yard over to a church group so its members could set up a display in Christmas lights that reads: Faith, Hope and Love.

His father, Chris, came to town yesterday so they could watch the Giants football game at a local bar and get a bit of a reprieve. But Mangieri, Sr. mainly just wanted to hang out with his son.

CHRIS MANGIERI: I'm a Dad, you know. I remember him and his sister being in middle school. And if this ever happened when they were there, I don't know what I would have done. I mean I would have - the panic would have been ridiculous.

BERGIN: Today, Kyle leaves his home in Sandy Hook and heads back to his Fairfield classroom. His superintendent sent out an email over the weekend telling teachers things will be a little different. He has to go to school extra early so teachers can meet first with guidance counselors. Then all the teachers will meet the students at the front door.

MANGIERI: And once school begins and all the students are in, every single door will be locked. And that was never the case before.

BERGIN: His class is currently studying geography, but Mangieri plans to set that aside today. His students know where he lives. And he knows they'll have questions.

For NPR News, I'm Brigid Bergin in Newtown, Connecticut.

View the original article here

Teenager's Faith At Odds With Locator Tags In School IDs

A federal court in Texas on Monday will take up the case of a high-school student who refuses to wear her location-tracking school ID.

The 15-year-old sophomore says the ID badge, which has an embedded radio frequency identification tag, is a violation of her rights. The student, Andrea Hernandez, believes the ID is "the mark of the beast" from the Book of Revelation.

Steven Hernandez says his daughter was alarmed this summer when John Jay High School in San Antonio informed families that new IDs would include the chips, which would help the school know electronically if the student was on campus.

"And she says, 'Daddy, I'm not going to do this.' And I said, 'Why aren't you going to do this, honey?' She says, 'Dad, that's exactly what it talks about in the Book of Revelation that you were teaching us about taking the mark of the beast. This is the exact same thing,' " Hernandez says.

The Hernandez family is evangelical Christian and attends John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in San Antonio.

"The mark of the beast is what the Antichrist is going to use so he can track the people," Hernandez says.

The Antichrist in his daughter's situation, Hernandez says, is Northside Independent School District.

This is where many parents would part ways with the Hernandez family. But even if they don't view school administrators as the Antichrist, some other parents do have privacy concerns about the tracking chips.

John Whitehead is a lawyer with the Rutherford Institute in Virginia, which fights government infringement of individual rights. Whitehead is representing the Hernandez family in federal court.

"They're just not going to do it. I deal with a lot of religious folks. Anything endorsing something they feel is unconstitutional or that violates their religion, they're just not going to do. So the easiest thing for the school here is to opt out," Whitehead says. "The problem is, when we got involved in the case and a lot of publicity erupted and a lot of other people have joined in now, so the school is probably going to fight this or the program itself is going to be up for grabs."

When Whitehead says the school should opt out, he means the school should let Andrea Hernandez opt out of having to carry the locator chip. That's something the district has offered as long as Hernandez still wears the new ID badge with no chip inside. But Andrea doesn't want to do that either. She wants to wear her old school ID.

For the school district, this is all about money. The state of Texas slashed funding to public schools by more than $5 billion. Districts all over the state, rich and poor alike, many exploding in population, are desperately underfunded.

"The school district receives federal funding based upon the number of students who are in attendance each day at school," says Craig Wood, the lawyer for the Northside Independent School District. "Given that we've got a crisis in educational funding in the state of Texas, we're trying to recapture every dollar that we can in order to try to do more and more with fewer and fewer resources."

The chip program is costing Northside $500,000, but the district expects to recover about $1.7 million more from the federal government. So that's $1 million worth of teachers Northside doesn't have to let go. The chips have been successfully introduced in a school district near Houston without fanfare.

View the original article here