Drawing the Line on Drug Testing….A mother of three, in this article, explains to readers that her oldest daughter, last year, when she was a senior, came home after drinking heavilya few times, and explains that she talked to her daughter, “I made it clear this upset me,” Ms. Evelyn said. “ I didn’t expect this to be a regular thing.”

What she believes in is called “suspicion-based testing” — testing students if they appear to be impaired at school. “Kids shouldn’t go to school drunk or high,” she said. “It’s not just the school’s right to test, it’s the school’s responsibility.”

What she does too believe in is the schools limit on how far they should go with testing. “Last year officials at Ridge High here tested 23 students suspected of being impaired at school, with 15 testing positive for drugs or alcohol, according to Chad Gillikin, a school counselor. This year, seven have been tested, with three registering positive, he said. She states, “Any more testing is an invasion of privacy,”.

The co-chairman of a study commitee states that “Schools we’ve visited that do random drug testing, it’s very impressive,” said Mr. Gillikin. “They say it’s changed the youth culture in their communities.”

The parent believes that it is up to the parents, and not the school. “This is a parent’s responsibility, not the school’s. It shows an unwillingness to teach kids the real-life skills they need to resist drug and alchol abuse And it doesn’t even get at the bigger problem — which is alcohol, not drugs.”

The proposed random drug testing plan for Ridge High is similar to ones already in place at the 27 other New Jersey school districts. Any students wanting to play a sport, join a club or get a parking permit — about 80 percent of Ridge High’s 1,600 kids — would have to consent to random testing or would not be able to participate.

About seven kids a week would be selected by computer and called to the nurse’s office to urinate in a cup. Students testing positive would not miss school, nor would results appear on their transcripts. They would have to take part in counseling with their parents and miss two weeks from their team or club.

I think this issue is a sensitive one to talk about. If i oppose the issue i don’t want people to think that i am all for kids experimenting with drugs but if i support random testing, then i don’t want to be looked at as someone who is trying to punish children for thier experimental ways. I believe that its up to the parents to teach thier kids about drugs and the reasons why one shouldn’t do it. I also believe that being a professional athlete in school and getting certain privleges such as a parking permit would keep kids from staying away from the drugs. Im my school we had drug sniffing dogs come in randomly and bust people that had possession of drugs in thier lockers. What this system in the article states is that they would be randomly drawn into the office by a computer to take the drug test. I still don’t know where i stand with all of this. Like i said, it has its ups and downs. GRRR!!!

Letter Grades Look Simple, but Realities Are Complex is the article that i picked. It explains how the “A-through-F grading system for New York City schools is billed as a public information tool, helping people sort out which schools are teaching children and which schools are just moving them along. Instead of inscrutable education jargon and endless score charts, the letter grades act like billboards broadcasting achievements and failures.”

When parents shop for schools for thier children, they run into the dilema that they are determined largely by how much progress students make year to year rather than how well their skills stand up against objective standards.

“While the question of how effective teachers are at moving students forward is a critical one for their bosses, many parents are equally interested in which schools are most likely to, say, have students reading at grade level or ensure that sophomores are mastering algebra”.

One such man in the article explains that the problem “is that the public rarely looks beyond the letter grade even though the reports contain a variety of other guideposts. It is possible, for instance, to see what percentage of the weakest students improved by at least one grade level, and what percentage of higher-performing students improved on state tests from one year to the next”.

“The number of schools that received A’s increased significantly across the board this year, to 38 percent from 23 percent last year, but such progress masked the fact that many of these schools were filled with students who were struggling to do the basics”.

What this article shows is that beyond the letter grade, other factors are as important that the grade itself. It doesn’t matter that a child has an A, for all we know the child could have mastered cheating or may have gotten help from others. What matters the most is how a child improves throughout the years and is learning. People have forgotten why children go to school and the simple fact is, to learn.

In this article called, ‘Good Deeds: The Backlash’, it explains how high school students are “engaged in the relentless pursuit of community service hours”. The article coniues on explaining how five students from Horace Mann, a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, are spackling and painting a half-gutted, partly bullet-riddled home on Porach Street so that a new family can move in. (Three hours.)

On the other side of town, students from Lincoln High School, a public school in Yonkers, are raucously demolishing the basement of a thrift store on Riverdale Avenue, to create space for storage. (Four hours.)

On ”East 27th Street in Manhattan, a hostess at the upscale barbecue restaurant Blue Smoke is turning away the fifth person who showed up a day early looking to make crafts for underprivileged children. The restaurant’s Web site had the right date, she insists, but students these days seem pretty desperate to volunteer. (Come back tomorrow; two hours.)”

All this volunteering, especially during the holidays are for the requirments that students have to meet for graduation. A lot of high schools are now cutting the requirments because they believe it is meaningless and that its “a form of forced altruism”.

Schools were finding that the fixation was more on hours and less for the service. What was begining to happen was wealthy families were knocking out the community service requirment all in one trip, such as a summer thing.

What has happened in one NY school is that “Ms. Swierczek abolished Riverdale’s requirement that students perform more than 100 hours of service before graduation. Instead, she decreed that all “naturally formed communities” at the school — sports teams, the school newspaper and adviser groups, to which all students belong — must tackle a community service project each year that is approved and supervised by her.”

“The result, she said, is a renewed focus on the charitable experience itself. “The message we want to teach our children is to live in a world bigger than their own,” she said. “It’s provided real camaraderie within the school community.”

I think the article is true. I think that students become so worried about the 100 hours and less worried about the good deed they are actually doing. In my student council in high school, we arranged a trip to the soup kitchen, not for graduation requirments, but for our own interests. I never felt so moved from my experience. It taught me a lot and made me realize, like stated in the article, that there is a world bigger than my own.

In this article, “Schools See Pain Ahead if the State Cuts Aid”, schools in New York staff reductions, larger class sizes, and fewer sports and extracurricular programs due to the governor’s proposed midyear reductions in state aid.

Under the proposal all of New York’s 697 districts would see a reduction in their expected aid from the state. The actual amount is based on a formula that takes into account each district’s wealth, the number of students receiving free and reduced-price lunches, and the portion of the district budget already covered by local taxes.

The New York City schools had been expecting a $705 million increase, but under the proposed 3.5 percent reduction would receive $450 million — or $255 million less, for a total of $8.1 billion.

Mayor Bloomberg said at a news conference that the city’s Education Department had already reduced spending by eliminating 350 positions, mainly in administration. “But at some point in time you have to have administration,” he said, “and we’re getting down to the point where it’s very difficult.”

“So you can see the wiggle room is small,” he said, adding that midyear cuts would most likely have to come from not filling vacant staff positions, and curtailing or deferring purchases of supplies, equipment and maintenance repairs.

Even districts that were in relatively good shape because of conservative budgeting expressed concern about what could be very lean years ahead.

With the tough economic times, and the need to reduce spending in all aspects of life, education is a tough pill to swallow. The problems that face with reducing the spending is the large classroom sizes which lead to poor learning on the students behalf, less administration which leads to more violence possibly and less class offerings and less school supplies which leads to poor education. Cutting costs in schools is an issue that is delicate because changes need to be done and the consequences are not always good.

This article, “Women Gain in Education but Not Power, Study Finds”, starts off by stating, “Women still lag far behind men in top political and decision-making roles, though their access to education and health care is nearly equal”.

In its 2008 Global Gender Gap report, the forum, a Swiss research organization, ranked Norway, Finland and Sweden as the countries that have the most equality of the sexes, and Saudi Arabia, Chad and Yemen as having the least.

Using United Nations data, the report found that girls and women around the world had generally reached near-parity with their male peers in literacy, access to education and health and survival. But in terms of economics and politics, including relative access to executive government and corporate posts, the gap between the sexes remains large.

The United States ranked 27th, above Russia (42nd), China (57th), Brazil (73rd) and India (113th). But the United States was ranked below Germany (11th), Britain (13th), France (15th), Lesotho (16th), Trinidad and Tobago (19th), South Africa (22nd), Argentina (24th) and Cuba (25th).

“The world’s women are nearly as educated and as healthy as men, but are nowhere to be found in terms of decision-making,” said Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum

The report said the inequalities in those countries were so large as to put them at an economic disadvantage.

What my favorite quote of the piece was “A nation’s competitiveness depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its female talent. To maximize its competitiveness and development potential, each country should strive for gender equality.” This gender equality is something that is still debated on today. The fact that women lag in the work force shows how this country, although moving forward, is taking its time in doing so. Seeing the rankings of the US (27), i believe it should be higher since our country is advanced, but apparently, not advanced enough.

In this article called ‘Enrollment Surges in Quick Prep Courses’, the topic of prep colleges arises. With the story of Robin Griffen, readers are able to see ‘what brought her to the community college classes’. ‘It was not the usual quest for an associate’s degree. Instead, in August Ms. Griffin, 46, was promoted to an entry-level management position overseeing three departments and nine people, boosting her salary 25 percent. “Without the classes, I would have been held back from this job,”

The article shows that “students across the region, and the country, are swelling the rolls of community colleges, seeking a two-year associate’s degree as a bridge to a four-year university or as a way to retrain after a job loss. But in these shaky economic times, more students are skipping a degree and heading straight for the colleges’ noncredit training and certification programs — courses that end in months or weeks, designed to propel them swiftly into the job market or better their prospects at their companies.”

Although the classes meet in college buildings and are administered by the college, the teachers are paid through the noncredit class tuition and the programs are not subject to the same lengthy state accreditation process required for degree programs. As a result, courses are sometimes set up in weeks.

Courses in health care, high-skills manufacturing, management, hospitality and culinary arts, and — as always — computers are booming, regionally and nationally. But so are many other programs tailored to the needs of the surrounding community.

What i found interesting in this article was that we future teachers try hard to give students the proper college preparation throughout high school. What seems to be happening now is that students, due to the economic troubles and the need for a job, are opting out of college and getting their certificates in prep courses offered at the community colleges. The times are changing and so is the desire to go to college. If i knew years ago that i would be paying a tuition that was constently rising, i myself would have considered prep courses to help me go back to college years later after i have saved money from the job i recieved with my prep certificate.

While coming across this article i found it to be important in that there is a major problem with the high school dropout rate. What i learned from reading it is that high school graduation rates are universally seen as a barometer of success, or failure, in education. Parents, college admissions officers, even real estate agents rely on  statistic to tell them if a school is any good.

But just as it takes a village to raise a child, graduation rates in New Jersey and elsewhere have also become a measure of the larger community outside the school and whether its politicians, civic leaders, business executives and even police officers are all doing their job as well.

Last week, Gov.Corzine and state officials announced a yearlong, multiagency initiative to boost the state’s graduation rates. Called the New Jersey High School Graduation Campaign, it will be led not by the state’s Department of Education but by the state attorney general’s office, with funds from businesses like Verizon and Prudential, among others.

The idea is to keep young people in school not just for their own good, but also as a pre-emptive strike against violence and gang activity.

As Governor Corzine put it in a news release, “the aim is to ensure that kids are headed in the right direction and not falling into the trap of a life of crime. Staying in school is one of our best crime prevention tools, and it requires the collaborative efforts of all of us to make it happen.”

New Jersey has one of the lowest dropout rates in the nation, with 2 percent of the high school population reported as dropping out of school in 2007, according to the State Education Department. Even so, that leaves thousands of students every year who do not finish school.

The New Jersey campaign, which is expected to cost about $150,000, will be financed entirely by donations and grants from a cross-section of foundations, businesses and civic groups. Verizon gave $35,000; other supporters include P.S.E.&G., Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, State Farm Insurance, Prudential and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce.

“What the suburbs don’t understand about their success is that it is the whole community that’s making their school successful,” she said. “They have a lot of involved parents, and they have parks and recreational programs. Urban students are dependent on their schools to deliver things that are delivered by others in the suburbs.”

This article was interesting in that the aim is to build the community around the school that will in turn help booste the high school percentage of graduation rate. The suburbs do usually have an advantage in that they are a closer knit society that helps thier students excell. If the trickle up effect would grow to the cities, the rates in turn would become more successful.

I came across this article that i thought was interesting. The title stated: Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs. When i began to read the article that was based on New York i found interesting that the number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.

So then i thought to myself, why have the numbers dropped so dramatically since last year. Well the answer is that the policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes.

In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.

In his 2005 State of the City address, Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised to maintain all of the city’s existing gifted programs while creating more in “historically underserved districts.”

Department of Education officials said this week that they had not intended to reduce gifted enrollment radically, but were satisfied in the knowledge that all children in the programs had cleared the same hurdle. Previously, the city had a hodgepodge of programs with varied admissions requirements; in 2007, when the city required applicants to take the same tests but did not set a uniform cutoff, some were filled with students who had scored extremely low.

City officials said that in an effort to broaden next year’s gifted enrollment, they planned to create citywide programs based in Brooklyn and Queens — currently, the three such programs that have a higher admissions standard are all in Manhattan — and begin all gifted programs in kindergarten; 38 percent now begin in the first grade. But they have no plans to change the tests or the 90th percentile cutoff (which was lowered from 95th percentile because too few children met the higher standard).

Problems with the new admissions policy surfaced in June showed that children from the city’s poorest districts were offered a smaller percentage of gifted slots than in the previous year, while children in the city’s wealthiest districts captured a greater share. The new data and analysis go further by looking at actual enrollment and the race of students, information the city could not previously provide.

The incoming gifted class is 9 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 28 percent Asian. Their kindergarten and first-grade peers in the city are 41 percent Hispanic, 27 percent black and 15 percent Asian. Students admitted to gifted programs under the previous policies are 15 percent Hispanic, 31 percent black and 20 percent Asian.

What i also found  to be some useful information from this website to help me make out the article was that gifted programs are located in schools with fewer minority students, and there are fewer blacks and hispanics enrolled in them. The disparity has grown under a revised testing requirment. It seems that in this country a minority has a larger struggle to find success. Why is it that gifted programs and various other programs as well, go to those who are not of minority. The system has flaws and i don’t believe that it will be fixed for years and years to come, if that.

With the election soon approaching it was important for me to see where education issues stand for presidential candidates. In this article, the focus is on Senator Barack Obama and his national education plan.

This article starts off by stating that Senator Obama has learned how hard it can be to solve America’s national education problem. It says that with his experience in Chicago, where a decade ago his drive to solve the education problem, he spent $150 million on Chicago’s troubled schools and barely made a dent.  Presidential Democratic nominee, Barack Obama is campaigning on a plan that promises $18 billion a year in new federal spending on early childhood classes, teacher recruitment, performance pay and dozens of other initiatives.

Another important factor to this education crisis happening in America is the issue of President Bush’s- No Child Left Behind law. Senator Obama will retain the emphasis on this law but “he would rewrite the federal law to offer more help to high-need schools, especially by training thousands of new teachers to serve in them, his campaign said. He would also expand early childhood education, which he believes gets more bang for the buck than remedial classes for older students”.

What i found to be fascinating is when the article stated “In the two decades since Mr. Obama arrived in Chicago, its public schools have undergone a sweeping turnaround, from an education wasteland to a district that, while still facing major challenges, is among the most improved in the nation”. The turn around that he can do to a city in education trouble is remarkable.  The city of Chicago has closed many failing schools and reopened them with new staffs, making this problem a success.

There is no doubt thier is a problem with education in this American system. Many schools are failing and teachers are loosing thier jobs. I believe the government needs to do a better job because schools are where the elite are developed and neglecting schools will create a burden to the future of this country.

It sparked my attention and made me wonder how these schools were getting more A’s. What the article had started to say was the with Mayor Bloomberg’s signature accountability program, grades have improved since last year in the New York area.

The article continues on by stating that “between federal and city assessments — 30 percent of the schools deemed failures under the No Child Left Behind act earned A’s from the city on Tuesday, while 16 of the city’s 18 failures are in good standing under the federal guidelines. And again, schools that had enviable reputations received less than enviable grades, like Public School 8, a respected and popular Brooklyn Heights elementary school, whose F stunned parents”.

Mr. Haney, a college professor, said that it was “likely that relatively small schools — of which there are an increasing number, because of the Bloomberg administration’s breaking larger schools into smaller thematic programs — would show the most change, since any fluctuation in performance among even a few students would have a sizable impact”.

This article sparked my interest for a few reasons. I found it kind of ironic how these New York schools were doing so much better grade wise since the previous years. While i was reading to find out about more i realized that the same schools that were recieving A’s were categorized as failing schools under the No Child Left Behind Act. This shows the problem with the NCLB act and how unclear it is to many readers who do not understand the act. Federal and City/State assessments are set at differing levels which make it very inconsistent and very confusing in terms of school’s and student’s progress. There has to be a better system for evaluating students and tweaking the flaws from the NCLB might be the final solution to such mess.

Under Mayor Bloomberg’s new signature accountability program, many student’s and schools seem to be doing better. Is that because the assessment of the school is easier than the federal assessment? I wonder how other major cities would compare to New York if they all implemented an assessment that made thier cities look just as good as New York.

Maybe i’ll read one day….. Detroit school’s get more A’s????