Do NOT Play Russian Roulette with Our Lives – No In-Person Schooling During a Pandemic

July 6, 2020July 6, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Donald Trump, Education, Guns, Healthcare, history, Labor, Learning, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Republican, school closings, School Funding, school violence, Schools, Students, Teachers, Technology, Unions, Violence Against Children Accountability, child safety, Commonwealth v. Malone, coronavirus, COVID-19, distance learning, education, in-person classes, liability, Pennsylvania, Politics, reopening, responsability, risk, Russian Roulette, safe schools, schools, Supreme Court, teachers

Are you responsible for gambling with another person’s life?

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court says “yes.”

Back in 1947, James Malone, 17, and William Long, 13, played a version of Russian Roulette during a sleepover.

Malone stole a revolver from his uncle and Long sneaked into his father’s room and got a bullet.

They put the cartridge in a chamber, spun the cylinder and then took turns pointing the gun at each other and pulling the trigger. On the third try, Malone put the gun to Long’s head, pulled the trigger and the gun fired, killing Long.

Malone was convicted of second degree murder even though he said he hadn’t intended to kill his friend.

The case, Commonwealth v. Malone, eventually went to the state Supreme Court where justices upheld the conviction.

They ruled:

“When an individual commits an act of gross recklessness without regard to the probability that death to another is likely to result, that individual exhibits the state of mind required to uphold a conviction of manslaughter even if the individual did not intend for death to ensue.”

Lawmakers and school administrators better pay heed to this and similar nationwide decisions.

Reopening schools to in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic is tantamount to Russian Roulette with the lives of students, teachers and families.

Every day with this virus in the physical classroom is like spinning the cylinder and pulling the trigger.

You might survive, but every time you enter the building your chances of getting sick increase until the law of averages will come for someone… perhaps many someones.

The safest course is to continue with distance learning in the fall despite the numerous academic problems with that method of instruction.

With Coronavirus cases rising by about 50,000 a day in the United States, there is simply too much virus out there to ensure anyone’s safety in the physical classroom.

Students inevitably will get sick and spread the disease to adults – teachers and their own families.

We can’t take such chances with people’s lives.

But don’t just take my word for it.

Decisions makers are taking the possibility seriously enough to try to change the laws to reduce their liability.

They want to ensure they won’t end up in court if they reopen schools and people get sick.

In May,Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for schools to be legally protected from lawsuits that could arise due to resuming classes.

Along with fellow Republican Senator John Cornyn, McConnell proposed new liability laws protecting schools and businesses from Coronavirus-related lawsuits.

McConnell told reporters:

“Can you image the nightmare that could unfold this fall when K-12 kids are still at home, when colleges and universities are still not open? That is a scenario that would only be further aggravated in the absence of some kind of liability protection that reassures school administrators that they can actually open up again… Without it, frankly that’s just not going to happen as soon as it should have.”

The Kentucky Senator went on Fox News in late April saying that such legal protections would be necessary for Republicans to even consider any new Coronavirus relief bills.

And it’s not just lawmakers. In May, 14 college presidents from around the country teleconferenced with Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asking for the same thing.

According to those who were either on the call or were knowledgeable about the conversation, the college presidents said they needed to know their institutions would not get sued if people got sick – which they thought was almost a certainty.

One way the federal government can help “is to have some kind of liability protection,” said University of Texas at El Paso president Heather Wilson, who was on the call. Wilson is a former Republican congresswoman from New Mexico.

Big business is also calling for liability protection. Groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been asking to be freed during the pandemic from being held liable if workers, customers or others get sick on their property. Notably, a lawyer for Texas Christian University told senators such a situation is “foreseeable, perhaps inevitable.”

All of which begs the question of what we mean by safety.

Is it our responsibility to make sure customers, workers, students and teachers are safe from the virus? Or is it our responsibility to make sure businesses and schools aren’t sued for taking chances with our lives?

There are things we can do to increase safety.

We should not reopen schools until the county where it is located reports zero new Coronavirus cases for two weeks. That would be taking safety seriously.

And it shouldn’t be too much to ask because other countries have been able to do such things.

Other nations have been able to test for the virus and identify those who have the disease. They have been able to trace these people’s contacts and isolate them from the rest of the population.

But that requires a vast expansion of our testing ability through coordinated federal action.

The problem is our lawmakers don’t care enough to do this.

Nor are they willing to provide us with federal relief checks, personal protective equipment (PPE), protection from evictions, and universal healthcare so that were can weather the storm.

It’s much easier to protect business from consumers and protect schools from the kids, teachers and families who make up the community.

Some will say the danger is overblown.

Children, in particular, are less susceptible to COVID-19 than older people.

And while it’s true that young people have shown fewer symptoms and include the lowest numbers of deaths, this virus has been around barely more than a year. We simply don’t know much about it and its long term effects.

A recent study from the journal the Lancet found that teenagers are just as susceptible to the disease as older people.

Researchers found few children 5-9 (the youngest included in the study) who had contracted the disease but those ages 10-19 were as likely to contract it as people ages 20-49 – and more likely than adults older than that.

So even if young people remain mostly asymptomatic, it is entirely possible they can spread the disease to older people who have a more difficult time fighting it off.

The only consensus about children and COVID-19 is that we don’t know enough about how it affects young people.

We certainly don’t want to end up like countries that have opened schools too quickly with too high infection rates.

In May, two weeks after Israel fully reopened schools, there was a COVID-19 outbreak. There were at least 130 cases at a single school. Students and staff were infected at dozens of schools causing a rash of renewed closings.

We should not be taking chances with schools.

Any action comes with some level of risk, but we should err on the side of caution.

 Our government needs to serve us.

Representatives who do not serve our interests need to be sent packing.

And anyone who gambles with our lives needs to be held liable.

Anyone who demands we place our heads against the barrel of a loaded gun as a prerequisite to jump start the economy, needs to be held responsible for that decision.

The chances of dying during the first round of a game of Russian Roulette using a standard six-shot revolver is 1/6. With each pull, the chances increase – 1/5, 1/4, etc.
The average number of consecutive pulls before the gun fires is 3.5.

We know more about that than the Coronavirus.

In effect, we don’t know how many chambers are loaded, but we know there are bullets in the gun.

There are too many hidden factors to be able to say for sure what our chances are exactly. And in the presence of such ignorance, we should assume the worst.

That’s exactly what decision makers are doing by trying to protect themselves from responsibility.

We should take that as seriously as a loaded gun put to our temples.

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Teachers Are More Stressed Out Than You Probably Think

September 29, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Badass Teachers Association, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, principals, School Funding, school violence, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Unions Data, education, health, labor, Politics, public schools, Respect, salary, schools, stress, Students, teacher appreciation, teacher autonomy, teachers, teaching, unions, work load

When I was just a new teacher, I remember my doctor asking me if I had a high stress job.

I said that I taught middle school, as if that answered his question. But he took it to mean that I had it easy. After all – as he put it – I just played with children all day.

Now after 16 years in the classroom and a series of chronic medical conditions including heart disease, Crohn’s Disease and a recent battle with shingles though I’m only in my 40s, he knows better.

Teaching is one of the most stressful jobs you can have.

You don’t put your life on the line in the same way the police or a soldier does. You don’t risk having a finger chopped off like someone working in a machine shop. You don’t even have to worry like a truck driver about falling asleep and drifting off the road.

But you do work a ridiculous amount of hours per day. You lose time with family, children and friends. And no matter how hard you work, you’re given next to no resources to get it done with, your autonomy is stripped away, you’re given mountains of unnecessary bureaucratic paperwork, you’re told how to do your job by people who know nothing about education, and you’re scapegoated for all of society’s ills.

Not to mention that you’re expected to buy supplies for your students out of your own pocket, somehow magically raise student test scores but still authentically teach, convince parents not to send their children to the local fly-by-night charter or voucher school and prepare for an unlikely but possible school shooter!

Oh! And the pay isn’t competitive given the years of schooling you need just to qualify to do the work!!

That causes a mighty amount of stress.

One in five teachers (20%) feels tense about their job most or all of the time, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in England. In similar professions, only one in eight feel this way (13%).

But those are conservative estimates.

A representative survey of more than 4,000 educators conducted in 2017 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Badass Teachers Association (BATs) found even more stark results.

Educators and school staff find their work “always” or “often” stressful 61 percent of the time. Workers in similar professions say that their job is “always” or “often” stressful only 30 percent of the time.

That kind of tension among teachers has consequences. More than half of educators reported that they have less enthusiasm now than at the beginning of their careers.

One respondent commented:

“This job is stressful, overwhelming and hard. I am overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, questioned and blamed for things that are out of my control.”

WORK LOAD

The most obvious cause of teacher stress is the workload.

Though the details vary slightly from study to study, the vast majority highlight this as the number one factor.

The NFER study concluded that teachers work longer hours than people in other professions though a less number of official days. This is because of the school year – classes meet for about 9-10 months but require far more than 40 hours a week to get everything done. In fact, teachers are putting in a full years work or more in those limited days.

For instance, an average American puts in about 260 days at work a year. Teachers average 70 less days but do the same (or more) hours that other employees put in during the full 260 days. But teachers are only paid for 190 days. So they do roughly the same amount of work in a shorter time span and are paid less for it. The result is a poor work-life balance and higher stress levels.

But exactly how many hours do teachers routinely work? It depends on who you ask.

The University College London Institute of Education estimates that one in four teachers works 60 hours a week or more – a figure that has remained consistent for the past 25 years.

According to NFER, teachers work an average of 47 hours a week, with a quarter working 60 hours a week or more and one in 10 working more than 65 hours a week.

Four in 10 teachers said they usually worked in the evenings, and one in 10 work on weekends.

Both of these studies refer to British teachers but estimates are similar for teachers in the United States.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that teachers in both countries are among those who work the most hours annually. The average secondary teacher in England teaches 1,225 hours a year. The average secondary teacher in the United States teaches 1,080 hours a year. Across the OECD, the average for most countries is 709 hours.

Finally, a study focusing just on US teachers by Scholastic, found that educators usually work 53 hours a week. That comes out to 7.5 hours a day in the classroom teaching. In addition, teachers spend 90 minutes before and/or after school mentoring, tutoring, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Plus 95 additional minutes at home grading papers, preparing classroom activities and other job-related tasks.

And teachers who oversee extracurricular clubs put in an additional 11-20 hours a week.

No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of extra hours.

According to the NFER study, two out of five teachers (41%) are dissatisfied with their amount of leisure time, compared to 32% of people in similar professionals.

This is a prime factor in the exodus of trained professionals leaving the field in droves, sometimes miscalled a teacher “shortage.”

It’s why one in six new teachers leave the profession after just a year in the classroom.

SALARY

Another contributing factor is salary.

Teacher pay in the United States (and many other countries) is not competitive for the amount of training required and responsibilities put on employees.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, teachers in the United States make 14 percent less than people from professions that require similar levels of education.

Sadly, it only gets worse as time goes on.

Teacher salary starts low, and grows even more slowly.

According to a report by the Center for American Progress, on average teachers with 10 years experience only get a roughly $800 raise per year. No wonder more than 16 percent of teachers have a second or third job outside of the school system. They simply can’t survive on the salary.

They can’t buy a home or even rent an apartment in most metropolitan areas. They can’t afford to marry, raise children, or eke out a middle class existence.

BACK TO WORKLOAD

This mixture of refusing to pay teachers what they’re worth and expecting them to do more-and-more with less-and-less is unsustainable.

Today’s public schools employ at least 250,000 fewer people than they did before the recession of 2008–09. Meanwhile enrollment has increased by at least 800,000 students.

So if we wanted our kids to have the same quality of service children received in this country only a decade ago, we’d need to hire almost 400,000 more teachers!

That’s how you cut class size down from the 20, 30, even 40 students packed into a room that you can routinely find in some districts today.

The fact that we refuse to invest in our schools only increases the workload of the teachers who are still there. They look around and see students in desperate need and have to choose between what’s good for them, personally, and what’s good for their students.

THAT’S why teachers are working so many unpaid hours. They’re giving all they have to help their students despite a society that refuses to provide the necessary time and resources.

And make no mistake, one of those resources is having enough teachers to get the job done.

RESPECT

For a lot of teachers, the issue boils down to respect – lack of it.

Teachers are expected to do everything and then denigrated when they can’t accomplish miracles every single day.

The fact is teachers are extremely important – the most important in-school factor for student success.

However, that doesn’t make them the most important factor in the entire learning process.

Roughly 60% of academic achievement can be explained by family background – things like income and poverty level. School factors only account for 20% – and of that, teachers account for 15%. (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

Estimates vary somewhat from study to study, but the basic structure holds. The vast majority of impact on learning comes from the home and out-of-school factors. Teachers are a small part of the picture. They are the largest single factor in the school building, but the school, itself, is only one of many components.

The people who know teachers the best—parents, co-workers and students—show much more respect for teachers than elected officials and media pundits, many of whom rarely set foot in a classroom, according to the 2017 BATs and AFT Quality of Work Life Survey.

While educators feel most respected by their colleagues, they also indicated that their direct supervisors showed them much more respect than their school boards, the media, elected officials and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. A total of 86 percent of respondents did not feel respected by DeVos.

Most educators said they felt like they had moderate to high control over basic decisions within their own classrooms, but their level of influence and control dropped significantly on policy decisions that directly impact their classroom – such as setting discipline policy, performance standards and deciding how resources are spent.

“This lack of voice over important instructional decisions is a tangible example of the limited respect policymakers have for educators,” the report concluded.

Sometimes this lack of respect leads to outright bullying.

A total of 43 percent of respondents in the public survey group reported having been bullied, harassed or threatened at work in the last year. Of these reports, 35% included claims of having been bullied by administrators, principals or supervisors, 23% by co-workers, 50% by students, 31% by students’ parents. Many claimed to have been bullied by multiple sources.

This is a much higher rate of bullying, harassment and threats than workers in the general population.

I, myself, have experienced this even to the point of being physically injured by students multiple times – nothing so serious that it put me in the hospital, but enough to require a doctor’s visit.

And to make matters worse, one-third of respondents said that teachers and faculty at their schools did not felt safe bringing up problems and addressing issues.

CONCLUSIONS

Teacher stress is a real problem in our schools.

If we want to provide our children with a world class education, we need to look out for the educators who do the actual work.

We need to drastically reduce the workload expected of them. We need to hire more teachers so the burden can be more adequately sustained. We need to increase teacher salary to retain those already on the job and to attract the most qualified applicants in the future. We need to stop blaming teachers for every problem in society and give them the respect and autonomy they deserve for having volunteered to do one of the most important jobs in any society. And we have to stop bullying and harassing them.

As a nation, our children are our most valuable resource. If we want to do what’s best for the generations to come, we need to stop stressing out those brave people who step up to guide our kids into a brighter tomorrow.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Pennsylvania Law Meant to Forbid Arming Teachers May Have Done Just the Opposite

August 8, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Democrat, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Harissburg, Labor, Local Control, Mass Shooting, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Police, Politics, Republican, school violence, Schools, Shooting, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Unions, Violence Against Children child safety, education, Gun Control, gun sense, Gun Violence, Guns, Guns in Schools, Harrisburg, law enforcement, legislature, Mass Shooting, Pennsylvania, police, Politics, public schools, safe schools, school shootings, schools, security guards, teachers, Tom Wolf

Pennsylvania teachers, don’t forget to pack your Glock when returning to school this year.

A new law meant to close the door on arming teachers may have cracked it open.

Despite warnings from gun safety activists, the bill, SB 621, was approved by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Tom Wolf this summer.

The legislation explicitly allows security guards – independent contractors who are not members of law enforcement – to carry guns in schools if they go through special training.

And that’s bad enough.

Why you’d want glorified rent-a-cops with guns strapped to their hips running around schools full of children is beyond me.

That’s not going to make anyone safer. It’s going to do just the opposite.

But that’s not even the worst of it.

Commonwealth law already allowed for armed police and school resource officers in school buildings.

The new bill just adds security guards to the accepted list – so long as they go through special training.

So some observers are asking what happens if teachers and administrators go through the same training? Wouldn’t they then qualify as “security personnel” and thus be eligible to be armed as part of their jobs?

Some say yes.

But others go even farther.

The bill only says who may be armed in schools. It doesn’t say anything about who may not be armed.

So if a district were to arm teachers – even without that special security guard training – it wouldn’t be specifically breaking the law. It would be operating in a huge loophole left open by the legislature and Gov. Wolf.

In fact, the original version of the bill would have covered just such an ambiguity. It included language saying that ONLY the people specifically mentioned in the law (police, resource officers and security guards) were allowed to be armed. However, Wolf could not get legislators to agree on it, so this language was stripped from the bill that was eventually passed.

This isn’t just theoretical.

Several school administrators have already taken advantage of it.

A handful of superintendents in rural parts of the state have already gotten permission from country law enforcement officials and are now carrying guns to school, according to a lawyer representing 50 Commonwealth districts.

Attorney Ronald Repak, of Altoona-based Beard Legal Group, gave a presentation at a school safety conference saying that his firm had secured permission from local district attorneys for administrators to carry firearms as part of their jobs. They cited ambiguity in the law that allowed for different interpretations.

Repak said that fewer than six superintendents had been approved, but he would not say which ones or which districts employed them.

Meanwhile, a district in the eastern part of the state between Hershey and Allentown has already passed a policy to arm teachers and staff.

Tamaqua Area School District in Schuylkill County, approved the policy last year but suspended it following litigation from the teachers association and a parent group.

Since Harrisburg passed this new measure, school board members and administration have been going back and forth about how it pertains to their policy and whether they can legally reinstate it even with pending litigation.

SB 621 was supposed to fix the ambiguity of previous statutes on the matter.

Title 18, Section 912 of the Pa. Crimes Code says that no one except recognized security personnel may bring a weapon onto school grounds, unless it is for a supervised school activity or “other lawful purpose.”

But again that leaves a huge loophole.

Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera wrote in 2016 that the Pennsylvania Department of Education considers “the scope of ‘lawful purpose’…unclear and unsettled.”

That’s what originally prompted Tamaqua school directors to pass their policy to arm teachers – the first of its kind in the state.

The Republican majority in the legislature has been trying to pass a law explicitly allowing teachers to be armed for years.

In June of 2017, the state Senate even passed just such a bill but it got nowhere in the House. Moreover, Gov. Wolf threatened to veto it.

And that has been the pattern in Harrisburg on most matters – a gerrymandered GOP-controlled legislature narrowly passing far right legislation checked by a popularly elected Democratic governor.

However, Republicans may have gotten one passed the goal with SB 621.

Wolf had hoped the bill would end the matter once and for all. When he signed it into law, he released a statement saying:

“The students, parents, and educators in this commonwealth can now be secure in the knowledge that teachers can dedicate themselves to teaching our children, and that the security of school facilities rests in the hands of trained, professional security personnel.”

Ceasefire Pennsylvania, a statewide gun safety organization, saw the danger and warned against it. The organization urged the legislature not to pass the bill and the governor not to sign it.

In a letter sent to lawmakers, the group wrote:

“…adding security personnel who do not have the same law enforcement background, training and experience of those personnel already authorized to serve as school security in the School Code is misguided.

[In addition] …although we understand that the legislation initially was intended only to address security personnel, we believe SB 621 could be manipulated by school districts intent on arming teachers as a ‘security’ measure… We hope you will Vote No on SB 621.”

The matter is bound to wind up in the courts where it will ultimately be decided.

Concerned citizens should probably go to their local school board and let directors know they don’t want school personnel – security guards or others – packing heat.

To be clear, the new bill doesn’t require security guards to be armed, but it does allow districts to arm them if they go through the necessary training.

The instruction outlined in the law required before guards can be armed costs less than $500 per person.

It includes lessons on developing relationships with diverse students, understanding special needs students, how to deal with violence, victimization, threat response and the prevention of violence in schools. It also includes Act 235 lethal weapons training on specifically how to carry and use lethal weapons.

Some legislators wanted security guards to have to go through the same training as police officers – a 900-hour municipal course. However, since this would include instruction school security officers would not need such as lessons on traffic laws and the vehicle code – not to mention its hefty cost of $9,000 per person – it was scrapped.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against security guards. There are several good ones at my district.

However, putting guns in their hands doesn’t make me feel any safer.

A few years ago, a security guard at my school lost his job because he slammed one of my students into a lunch table.

The child in question was certainly difficult and could be defiant. But he was a middle school age child. He didn’t deserve to have his head slammed into a table – nor would I want someone with so little impulse control to have to police his trigger finger during tense confrontations with students.

Arming security guards is just plain dumb. Heck! So is arming teachers and administrators!

This isn’t the wild west. It’s a classroom.

In real-world shootings, police officers miss their targets about 4-in-5 shots, according to Dr. Peter Langman, a psychologist who’s studied school shootings. Do you really expect rent-a-cops and teachers to be more accurate?

Even armed police don’t do much to stop school shootings.

The four high-profile school shootings in 2018 — including the one in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas — had armed guards. All failed to stop the gunmen.

But research consistently shows that increasing the number of guns in schools increases the likelihood that students will get hold of them.

What we need are sensible gun regulations to limit the number of people who have access to firearms. We need mandatory background checks and a ban on assault weapons – the murder instrument of choice for mass shooters. We need buy back programs to reduce the ridiculous numbers of guns available.

This new law does none of that. It was a Faustian bargain at best – and like always happens when you try to best the Devil, you end up losing.

Only this time, the losers are our teachers and school children.

Teaching Through Lockdown

January 27, 2019January 28, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Local Control, Mass Shooting, nonviolence, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, school violence, Schools, Shooting, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Violence Against Children education, firearms, Gun Control, gun sense, Gun Violence, Guns, Guns in Schools, lockdown, public schools, schools, teachers, teaching

“Excuse the interruption. We are under a lockdown.”

That was it.

Not an explanation of what caused it.

Not any idea of how much danger we were in.

Not any idea of how long it would last.

Just a vague warning that teachers knew meant to keep all their students in class until further notice.

As an educator, you’re expected to teach.

It doesn’t matter what’s happening around you. There can be yelling or screaming. There can be a scuffle in the next room. The lights may flicker off and on.

None of that matters.

If you have students and aren’t in immediate danger, you’re expected to teach them.

And that’s what I did. Even then.

I teach mostly poor and minority students in a western Pennsylvania school near Pittsburgh.

My 8^th grade language arts class was in the middle of taking a final exam on The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.

Most of my students were finished, but it was still quiet as two or three students struggled through their last responses.

Then the announcement came over the PA.

“…lockdown.”

The voice was the high school secretary. Since the middle and high school are connected, she rarely makes announcements in my building – only when something is important happening for both buildings.

The kids looked up at me with worried faces.

“What’s going on, Mr. Singer?” one of them asked.

I told them the truth – I really had no idea. There were no drills planned for today. In fact, it would have been a really poor time for one. We had just had ALICE training the day before where the resource officer and the principal had met with students to go over what to do in case of an active shooter. The program is named for the courses of actions it recommends – Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate.

So we were apparently in the L.

During the assembly, the resource officer had said quite bluntly that there would be no coded messages. If a school shooter entered the building, officials would tell us in plain language what was happening so we could make an informed decision what to do.

But there was no additional message over the PA. That was it.

I went over to my computer to see if there was an email. Nope. Nothing.

I pressed refresh a few times. Nothing.

I asked the students to hush and just listened.

It was extremely quiet. Even the hallway was silent and it’s never that silent except during standardized testing.

My room has no windows to the outside. It’s a brick box with one wooden door containing a sliver of window.

The door was already closed and locked. We’re told to keep it that way just in case. But there’s an additional deadbolt you can click to make it even harder to gain access to the room.

“It’s probably nothing,” I said as I walked over to the door and surreptitiously clicked the deadbolt.

I asked student to finish their tests.

It seemed the best course of action. We could either worry about an unknown that was extremely unlikely or else just take care of our business.

It was hard getting the students to calm down. They were scared, and, frankly, so was I.

But this seemed the best thing we could do – Seek normalcy but stay vigilant in case things changed.

“Mr. Singer, may I use the bathroom?” asked one child.

“I’m sorry, but no.” I said. “Not until the lockdown is over.”

Somehow I quieted them down and the remaining students finished their tests.

It seemed to take them forever.

I stood by those who were finalizing answers in the hope that my physical presence would get them to concentrate.

For the millionth time I pondered the wisdom of grouping kids into classes based on test scores. All you end up doing is sorting them by poverty, race, trauma and behavior problems.

But they were soon done.

So they handed in the tests and we went over the answers.

“May I use the bathroom?”

“No. Not yet. Sorry.”

For about five minutes things went as they would on any other day.

But as soon as there was a lull in the activity, the fear and worry returned.

Students wanted to take out their cell phones and call or text home.

I told them not to.

“Why?” asked a boy in the front.

I knew the answer. We had nothing we could tell parents other than that there was a lockdown. We didn’t know what caused it or what was happening. If there was something bad going on, having parents come to the school would only make things worse.

But I just told him to put it away. I didn’t want to debate the situation. I didn’t want them (or me) to think about what might be happening.

We hadn’t finished watching the movie version of “The Outsiders” so I quickly put that on.

We only had about 15 minutes to go. And watching Dally get shot down by police probably wasn’t the best choice under the circumstances.

Still, the kids were focused on the film and not the lockdown.

We discussed how the movie and the book differed for a few moments.

But inevitably there was a lull.

We all got quiet and just listened. Nothing.

No. Down the hall we could hear something. Maybe a scuffle. Voices. It was hard to tell.

I started thinking of options, what to do if someone tried to enter the room. But it got quiet again.

Still no email. No message. Nothing.

I could call the office on my school phone, but that just might make things worse.

“Mr. Singer, I’ve GOT to use the bathroom!”

I looked around. I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t let him out there. It would literally be better if he peed his pants.

He must have seen my confusion. “Can I just pee in a bottle or something?”

“Do you have a bottle?”

“No.”

I was about to tell him to take the garbage can into the corner and pee into it but there was no empty corner in the room.

Before I could remark any further, he said, “It’s okay. I’ll just hold it.”

That’s when I noticed the time. We had already spent more than the 40 minutes in the allotted period. The bell should have rung to get students to move to another room. That meant the bells were off.

The students noticed, too.

I kept telling them that everything was probably fine and that I wouldn’t let anything happen to them.

Then we noticed something weird out of the window in the door.

One of the school custodians was standing right outside the room.

He didn’t seem alarmed. He appeared to be looking for something.

Then another custodian walked up to him and they conferred in the hall.

We heard talking. Perhaps the principal in the distance.

Whatever was happening they seemed to have it under control and didn’t appear worried.

I had nothing planned for my students to do. We were well off book here. I couldn’t just start a new unit. I had no idea how long we’d be here.

So I asked them to take out their self-selected books and read.

They groaned.

“How are we going to concentrate on that?” someone asked.

I didn’t really have an answer but it was better to try than to worry needlessly.

So after some cajoling, they dutifully took their books out. Most just stared around the room listening to every nonexistent sound. But some at least appeared to be reading.

“Mr. Singer…”

“NO YOU CAN’T USE THE BATHROOM!”

Then not long after, the announcement came that the lockdown was over and students could move to their next class.

There was no explanation. Kids just breathed a collective sigh and went to their classes.

I let anyone use the restroom who asked. And I tried to teach through another class.

I truly expected a printed letter from the superintendent to be hand delivered to the room so the kids could take it home. But no. Perhaps there hadn’t been enough time to write, print and disperse one.

After the students were dismissed, I expected administrators to announce a staff meeting to let the teachers know, at least, what had happened. But there was nothing.

I went into another teacher’s room and saw a group talking. THAT was when I found out about what had happened.

A group of students in the high school had been fighting.

Apparently it was pretty bad – almost a riot. One child had been knocked cold and taken out of the building on a stretcher. The others had been removed by police.

When teachers had broken it up, some of the kids had run and were hiding in the building. That’s why the lockdown.

There was more on the 11 O’clock News. Some of the kids had filmed the fight with their phones and put it up on Snapchat.

We eventually got a letter from the superintendent and an email from another administrator saying that it had just been a minor fight.

Parents were on the news saying that administration hadn’t handled it properly, but no one showed up at the next school board meeting to complain.

And so life goes on.

The threat of violence always hangs over our heads.

It probably won’t ever come down to the worst case scenario. Yet the fact that it might and that no one really seems to be doing much of anything to stop it from getting to that point – that changes what it means to be in school.

We live with this reality everyday now.

It’s not fair to students. It’s not fair to teachers or parents.

But when you live in a society so broken that it can’t even begin to address its own problems, this is what you get.

Still can’t get enough Gadfly? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Public School Students are Being Erased From TV, Movies and Other Media

January 9, 2019January 10, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Guns, Learning, Local Control, Media, Obama, Parents, Police, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school violence, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Shooting, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized bias, books, comic books, education, Marvel, media, Miles Morales, movies, Privatize, propaganda, public schools, schools, Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse, Starr Carter, The Boy Who Would Be King, The Hate U Give, TV

Ninety percent of America’s students go to public schools.

But you wouldn’t know that if you opened a book, turned on the TV or went to a movie.

The media is engaged in a disinformation campaign erasing public schools and public school students from our entertainments.

It’s another way marketing and advertising is forced down our throats and into our leisure hours.

Not only do the multi-billion dollar corporations who fund these entertainments want to convince us we need this pill, that appliance, those technological doo-hickeys — they need to cajole and inveigle us that we need school privatization, too.

And what better way to do that than to give us heroes that – what-do-you-know – just happen to go to charter, voucher and private schools?

No one takes Betsy DeVos, the billionaire heiress who bought her position as education secretary to tear down public schools, seriously. But we certainly do when it comes to Hollywood, the Boob Tube and Young Adult literature.

Take Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino Spiderman, who just made his big screen debut in Marvel’s “Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse.”

It’s refreshing to see the iconic Spideysuite worn by a character of color, but why change his alma mater, too?

The original webslinger, Peter Parker, was an everyperson teen who went to a public school. But Morales goes to a private school in the movie and a charter school in the comic books on which the film is loosely based.

Then we have “The Kid Who Would Be King” a modern day retelling of the King Arthur legend. In the film, Alex finds Excalibur and becomes king – while attending a British academy, the U.K.’s version of an American charter school.

And let’s not forget “The Hate U Give.” In both the book and the movie, the protagonist, 16-year-old African American Starr Carter, deals with a white police officer murdering her black friend. And her struggle is worsened by the incomprehension she meets at her mostly white, privileged private school.

Why are all these stories taking place where a tiny sliver of kids are educated?

What happened to all the public school students?

It’s not like privatized education has ever been starving for representation in the mass media.

If anything, private schools have historically been overrepresented – Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, Dead Poets Society, Catcher in the Rye, etc.

At least in the past you could count on the default setting for kids to be public school. Unless it was an integral part of the plot, it was just assumed that everyday kids went to everyday public schools.

John Travolta and Olivia Newton John dreamed of those summer nights, but they went to Rydell High.

Molly Ringwald and the rest of the Breakfast Club attended Saturday detention, but during the week they were in class at Shermer High.

Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy and co. fought off vampires, but they had homework at Sunnydale High.

Even Bella Swann navigated her vampire-werewolf love triangle at Forks High!

But today’s fictional teens wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those traditional institutions.

And nothing could be more unrealistic!

We’re whitewashing the reality to make America’s children and parents feel deficient for the schools they actually attend and – for the most part – are quite satisfied with.

It’s not about representation for the 10 percent enrolled in privatized schools. It’s about expanding the market to get more children and families to abandon public schools and pony up the dough (or siphon off the taxes) to enroll in these institutions, too.

Or at least TRY to enroll.

MILES MORALES

Back in 2011, when writer Brian Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli created Morales for Marvel comics, he was a reaction to the election of Barack Obama. As such, even his schooling had to reflect that.

In Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, he is shown winning the last spot in a charter school lottery to enroll in Brooklyn Visions Academy.

The comic book panels mirror almost frame-for-frame the school privatization propaganda film “Waiting for Superman.” Pro-charter school Obama becomes pro-privatization Spider-man.

It’s almost like the big corporations who own the super heroes can’t tell who the good guys and the bad guys are anymore.

Here we have an American icon hawking a solution to child education that increases segregation, does away with duly-elected school boards, does away with the kinds of regulations that protect kids’ rights and instead allows unscrupulous charter operators to reduce services for children and pocket the difference.

It’s like watching Mickey Mouse explain how your folks should invest all their money with Bernie Madoff.

For some reason, in the movie version Morales’ charter school is rewritten as a private school for smart kids. I wonder why they made the change. It’s almost like there’s no appreciable difference between private schools and charter schools. And there isn’t!

THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING

Speaking of which, let’s examine the strange case of “The Kid Who Would be King.” The movie is technically not out yet, so it’s hard to see if it will make much use of its apparent Academy setting.

However, the trailer includes lots of shots of kids in traditional prep school dress with a stylized formal crest on blazers and pants. It almost seems like the setting is little more than an excuse to embrace a certain aesthetic in the costumes more than a plot point.

Or perhaps the marketing department just wants moviegoers to associate the film with the Harry Potter movies.

After all, Hogwarts is the ultimate in quasi-privatization. Special kids go to a special school where they are taught special classes. It’s never quite clear how it’s all paid for, though the kids do have to buy their own supplies.

Would “The Kid Who Would Be King” be any better if the kids in it went to public schools? They certainly would be more relatable to the average child.

First conceived in the early 2000s, British academies are not bound by national rules for staffing and curriculum, and receive more money from the government for administration while reducing funding to the traditional schools nearby. However, according to a new peer-reviewed study by the London School of Economics, primary academies have not been able to meet the promise of increasing test scores.

The authors conclude:

“The English government has radically restructured its school system under an assumption that academisation delivers benefits to schools and students. There is neither any sign of a positive effect nor any suggestion that benefits might be increasing with years of exposure. If anything, the opposite is the case.”

Oh whatever! The blazers look nice!

THE HATE U GIVE

And that brings me to “The Hate U Give.”

Starr’s private school does at least seem to be important to the plot. After her best friend is gunned down by a gangbanger, a 10-year-old Starr is sent to Williamson Prep, a private school in the white suburbs. The family remains in the neighborhood and even takes great pride in living among other black people. But for some reason the idea of public school and the trauma of this event are entwined in their minds. They want more for Starr than just a public school experience.

Consider this bit of narration:

“The high school is where you go to get jumped, high or pregnant. We don’t go there. Williamson is another world. So when I’m here, I’m Starr version 2. Basically Williamson Starr doesn’t give anyone a reason to call her ghetto. And I hate myself for doing it.”

Years later, she’s one of very few African American students at the private school. When another black friend is subsequently murdered by the police before her eyes during a traffic stop, her white privileged classmates don’t understand what she’s going through.

I wonder if things would have been different at a public school. I wonder if by enrolling her in private school her parents hadn’t taken away the kind of support system she could have used to help deal with the tragedy.

Starr overcomes it all, and symbolically pulls a “Rest in Peace Khalil” T-shirt over her school uniform signaling her refusal to be a divided person any longer. It might have been even stronger had she re-enrolled in her public school, too.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying these are bad movies, books or comics. I actually quite like most of them. But I wonder if most people realize that when they consume this stuff they’re getting something a little extra with their entertainment – corporate propaganda.

It doesn’t seem to be an accident that so few schools are being so overrepresented in the mass media.

The global conglomerates are always looking for a way to make a buck, and product placement has always been a surefire way to do it.

Unfortunately, such underhand tricks can have a large impact on the cultural landscape.

If we continue to be bombarded by unsubstantiated images of public schools not being good enough and privatized education as the savior for our children, we will lose our system of public education.

Schools will no longer be funded by tax dollars. Parents will have to pay for them out of their own pockets.

At very least this will result in an even more stratified education system where wealth not only buys comfort and resources but knowledge, as well.

Yellow Vest Protests Include Resistance to School Corporatization

December 19, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bill Gates, Budget, capitalism, Censorship, Civil Rights, college, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, G.E.R.M., Journalism, Labor, Media, Obama, Police, Politics, Poverty, school violence, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, standards, student action, Students, Teachers, Unions Civil Rights, common core, corporate, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, education, France, G.E.R.M., Global Education Reform Movement, Macron, neoliberal, protest, revolution, schools, Students, Yellow Vests

If you want to know what the French Yellow Vest Protests are all about, just refer to the arrest of 153 teenage students this month near Paris.

The kids at a high school in Mantes-La-Jolie were forced to kneel down, hands on their heads or secured behind their backs with zip ties as riot police circled them with assault weapons.

Why did law enforcement take such extreme measures? The students had been protesting their government’s education policies.

“What a well-behaved class!” French police commented ironically on a video documenting the arrest on social media by Violences Policières, a watchdog group.

Yes, how well behaved!

Of course! Children should be seen and not heard. Speaking out for yourself is a definite faux pas.

So is detaining minors without a lawyer, which the officers did and which is illegal in France.

But C’est la vie!

Unfortunately such scenes have been repeated throughout the country since November. Despite police opposition, high school students from a number of French schools have joined the Yellow Vests to protest French President Emmanuel Macron’s education policies – inaccurately dubbed “reforms” – among other austerity measures resulting in stagnant wages and a high cost of living.

Macron was elected in 2017 on a neoliberal platform much like that of Barack Obama. And though he was praised for his demeanor, especially in comparison to the boorish Donald Trump, his policies at first met with criticism and then outright protests in the streets.

Citizens took issue with new labor laws, the rail system and taxes. You can’t save the environment by cutting taxes for the wealthy and raising them for the poor to discourage them from driving. You can’t stomp on workers rights in order to create more low-paying jobs.

Protestors repurposed the yellow vests they are required to keep in their cars in case of an emergency into an iconic image of resistance to the gas tax. Hundreds of thousands demanded not just a repeal of Macron’s policies but a new platform to bolster social services and the economy.

The Macron administration has met these demands by at first violently stifling them and then agreeing to individual points before returning to suppression.

Perhaps it is the administration’s insistence that it is beset by violent “hooligans” while most protestors do no more than block traffic that has resulted in a continued rejection of Macron. Protestors even spray-painted a demand that Macron resign on the Arc de Triomphe, the arch on the Champs-Elysées.

Though the American media has mostly ignored the situation, critics blame widespread police brutality including the use of tear gas and clubs for at least four deaths and 700 people wounded in weeks of political challenges that some have compared to the French Revolution.

In particular, students take issue with at least three components of Macron’s plan: (1) changes to the high school graduation exam, (2) changes to college admissions and (3) a new requirement that all students participate in a lengthy volunteer national service project.

First, protestors oppose changes to the end-of-school exams known as baccalaureate or ‘bac.’ Though the proposal includes positive reforms such as reducing the number of exams and providing a longer time frame to take them, it also changes focus from academics to careers.

Much like Common Core did in the United States, the exams would be revised and rewritten. Instead of being tested on broad subjects such as science, literature or social sciences, students would be assessed on much narrower content.

Macron seems to be taking his queue from US philanthrocapitalists like Bill Gates in order to make French students more “college and career ready.”

The new assessments would push students toward specific degrees sooner. Before their final undergraduate year, high school students would have to choose two specific majors and two specific minors alongside the standard curriculum – similar to American colleges.

Students are against this because of what they call “hyper-specialization.” They say these changes would deprive them of exposure to a wide range of disciplines and force them to make life-long choices too early. This would be especially harmful for poor students because, as Liberation editorialist Laurent Joffrin put it, “Those who have more, know more.” In other words, wealthier students would probably be better prepared to navigate the choices open to them than those in poorer areas.

Next, students also want the repeal of stricter selection criteria to universities – a law passed just last year – which they say increases economic inequality between rich and poor schools.

The government provides free college to any student who passes the high school exit exams. However, just like in the US, corporate interests complain that college students struggle with the increased workload and pressures at universities. The new measure solves this by ensuring that fewer students are admitted.

Students say Macron has it backwards. The government shouldn’t be undermining free access to higher education. It should be investing more in the country’s universities and helping students succeed.

Finally, students want to get rid of a mandate that all 16-year-olds will have to participate in a national civic service program scheduled to begin in 2026.

French youths would have to volunteer in fields like defense, environment, tutoring or culture. During the long school breaks, they would have to undergo a one-month placement, consisting of two weeks in collective housing to promote a “social mix,” and then another two weeks in smaller, more “personalized” groups.

The measure doesn’t go as far as Macron wanted. He originally proposed mandatory military service.

Students object to the plan because they say it’s unnecessary and extremely expensive. The program is estimated to cost $1.8 billion ($1.6 billion Euros) with a $1.98 billion ($1.75 Euro) investment up front.

In addition to these demands, some have included limits on class size. Protestors have demanded no more than 25 students per class from nursery school through high school. Low class size ensures each student gets more personal attention from the teacher and a better chance to ask questions and learn.

What we’re seeing in France is extremely important for those living in the US.

It shows that as terrible as the Trump administration is, there are many flavors of bad government. When your representatives are more interested in seeing to corporate whims than the will of the people, chaos can ensue.

Perhaps the US media has been so adverse to reporting on the Yellow Vests because of corporate fear that protests will jump the pond and land on our shores, as well. We have many similar neoliberal and neofascist policies in the US of A, some passed by Republicans and others passed by Democrats.

Here’s hoping that we all can establish legitimate governments that seek to further the ends of liberty, equality and fraternity.

The Holiday Season Brings Fear and Resentment for Many Students

December 4, 2018December 4, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Healthcare, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, School Funding, school violence, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, Violence Against Children behavior, Childhood Trauma, Christmas, education, Holidays, Politics, Poverty, schools, social safety net, teachers

“I hate Christmas.”

Teachers hear that with surprising regularity around this time of year.

I hate Christmas. I hate Thanksgiving. I hate every holiday.

America’s public school students are living under tremendous pressure.

The social safety net is full of holes. And our children are left to fall through the ripped and torn fabric.

The sad fact is that one in four students in America’s classrooms have experienced a traumatic event.

So if your classroom is typical, 25% of your students have witnessed violence or been subject to a deeply distressing experience.

That could be drug or alcohol abuse, food insecurity, severe beatings, absent caregivers or neglect.

These figures, provided by Neena McConnico, Director of Boston Medical Center’s Child Witness to Violence Project, are indicative of a truth about this country that we don’t want to see.

Our Darwinian public policies leave many children to suffer the effects of poverty – and our society doesn’t want to deal with it.

In impoverished communities, these percentages are even higher and the results more devastating.

The Center for Disease Control’s comprehensive Adverse Childhood Experiences study links the toxic stress of unaddressed trauma to heart disease, liver disease, and mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders.

Young children exposed to more than five adverse experiences in the first three years of life face a 75 percent likelihood of having delays in language, emotional, or brain development, according to McConnico.

This translates directly to negative behaviors in the classroom.

Children who witness violence often have trouble in school because they suffer from post-traumatic stress, which can manifest as inattention, distractibility, hyperactivity, insomnia, aggression, and emotional outbursts.

Or, alternately, these children can sometimes withdraw and appear to be unfazed by their experiences. In some ways, that’s even more dangerous because while they avoid negative attention, they often get no attention at all.

It’s bad enough in the everyday. But it gets worse around the holidays.

Some of it is due to the structure and safety of school being removed. During holiday breaks, children are left to the mercy of sometimes chaotic and uncertain home lives.

Some of it is due to unrealistic expectations inevitably conjured up by the holiday season, itself. Even grown adults have trouble with depression around this time of year. But when you’re a troubled child, the unrealistic expectations and disappointments can be doubly impactful.

Loved ones are missing due to incarceration, divorce, abandonment, health issues, or death. Talk of family gatherings or a special meal can trigger hurt feelings for children who know their caregivers can’t or won’t provide them.

And it’s not always neglect. Sometimes there just isn’t the money for these things. We live in a gig economy where many people work multiple jobs just to survive. All it takes is missing one paycheck or one illness to disrupt holiday celebrations.

Even when parents have enough money, some just don’t bother to buy their kids anything. Sometimes families get to a better financial point but children have had to live through a period of food insecurity and are haunted by it. So even though the household is stable now, kids eat all their treats on the way to school because they always are fearful that the food will run out.

When kids have these sorts of fears, the ubiquitous holiday movies, TV shows, Christmas songs and commercials can set them off further.

It’s the most wonderful time of year for some, but not for all. For many students, the holidays are a time of dread and resentment.

That’s why it’s so important for teachers to be aware of what’s happening to their students.

For the quarter of American children who experience trauma at home, school may be their only safe harbor in a world of storms. Teachers may be the only people they see all day who offer a safe place, a stable environment and a friendly word.

For some kids, teachers are the only adults in their lives who make them feel valuable and supported.

We offer our students so much more than reading, writing and math. We’re allies, mentors, protectors and role models.

I wish we could save them from all the terrors of this world, but we can’t.

Let me be clear – I am in no way a super teacher.

But here are a few things I do in my classroom to help alleviate some of the stresses of the season – and often year round.

1) Prioritize Relationships

Let your kids know you care. The student-teacher relationship is sacred. Nourish it. Be reliable, honest, and dependable.

As Teddy Roosevelt famously said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

2) Listen to Them

Sometimes the best thing a teacher can do is just listen to students’ problems. You don’t always have to offer a solution. Our kids are dealing with so many adult pressures. Offering them the ability to get it all out in the presence of a caring adult can be a treasured gift.

“It’s really that simple,” McConnico says. “Listen, reflect back to them that they have been heard, validate the child’s feelings without judgment, and thank the child for sharing with you.”

3) Create Opportunities to be Successful

Some people see teaching as essentially an act of evaluation and assessment. We observe students and then tell them what they did wrong.

This is extremely narrow-minded. When you get to know your students, you can offer them tasks in which you expect they’ll succeed. It’s the kind of thing we do all the time – differentiating instruction and offering choice so that students can achieve the goal in the manner best suited to them.

Sometimes you really have to work at it. If a child has extreme behavior issues, you can observe closely to find the one thing he or she does right and then praise them for it. This doesn’t always work, but when it does, it pays off tremendously!

Positive experiences lead to more positive experiences. It’s like putting training wheels on a bike. It scaffolds learning by supporting kids emotional needs before their academic ones.

4) Routines

I am a huge fan of routine. Kids know exactly what we’re going to do in my class everyday – or at least they have a clear conception of the normal outline of what happens there.

I try to have very clear expectations, timelines and consequences. For kids who live in chaotic homes, this is especially comforting. It’s just another way of creating a safe place where all can learn.

5) There’s Nothing Wrong With Downtime

I know. Teachers are under enormous pressure from administrators to fill every second of the day. But sometimes the best use of class time is giving students a break.

Let students finish assignments in class, read for pleasure, draw, even just daydream and relax. You can overdo it, but everyone can benefit from a little R & R.

This is especially true for traumatized children. Give them time to regroup from the mental and emotional stress. I find that it actually helps motivate kids to work harder when assignments are given.

The holidays can be a stressful time in school.

Kids get overexcited, they can’t concentrate, they’re torn left and right by the various emotions of the season.

As teachers, it’s our job to understand the full scope of what’s going on with our kids and make our classes as nourishing and safe as possible.

The Best Way to Prepare for School Shootings is to Reduce the Chances They’ll Happen at All

September 28, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Congress, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Mass Shooting, nonviolence, Parents, Pennsylvania, Police, Politics, Poverty, protest, Republican, School Funding, School to Prison Pipeline, school violence, Schools, Shooting, Students, Teachers active shooter drill, education, Gun Control, gun sense, Gun Violence, Guns, Guns in Schools, NRA, public schools, school shootings, schools, teachers, teaching

I participated in yet another active shooter drill at my school this week.

“Death to the infidels!” shouted Mr. O’Grady, one of my fellow teachers, as he stormed the classroom with a Nerf blaster rifle.

I had stuffed myself under a table in another teacher’s reading nook.

But it did no good.

One of the soft yellow balls came sproinging out of the gun and bounced off the carpet into my groin.

Then someone blew a whistle and the scenario was over.

The classroom full of teachers collected ourselves from behind overturned tables and under desks before uncertainly getting to our feet.

“Who got hit?” asked the principal as he poked his head into the room.

A flurry of hands went up including mine.

The students had been dismissed about an hour earlier. The body count was made up entirely of faculty and staff – teachers, administrators, security guards, substitutes, lunch ladies, etc.

The lesson we were supposed to take away from the activity was that hiding was a losing strategy.

“Do something,” one of the police officers conducting the drill said.

They wanted us to swarm the shooter, throw things at him (Nerf balls in our scenario) or make a run for it. Anything but simply staying put and being sitting ducks.

It made me wonder why our lawmakers don’t heed the same advice.

Do something?

Yeah. Why doesn’t Harrisburg do something? Why doesn’t Washington?

That’s where you can make a real difference to keep our schools safe.

Instead of making the world safer for our kids, we’re trying to lock them up in a castle and keep the violence out.

But it’s impossible. You can’t keep out human nature.

The same things that cause shooters to enter the school and go on a killing spree are already in our classrooms.

O’Grady may have imagined he was a member of Al-Qaeda as he pretended to blow his co-workers away, but if a shooter ever enters our building, he’s more likely to be a co-worker, parent or student.

We don’t need more ways to keep them out. We CAN’T keep them out and still do our jobs!

All we can do is try to alleviate the pressure, to counsel mental distress, heal physical trauma, guard against societal hurts.

And if that doesn’t work, we can lower the stakes and limit the amount of damage done.

Turning the school into a prison will not help. Turning teachers into guards (armed or otherwise) will not solve anything.

Back in 1999 in the wake of the Columbine school shooting, the Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education warned against all the things we’re doing now – police officers in the schools, metal detectors, cameras, etc.

Instead, they advised us as follows:

“Specifically, Initiative findings suggest that [school] officials may wish to consider focusing their efforts to formulate strategies for preventing these attacks in two principal areas:

developing the capacity to pick up on and evaluate available or knowable information that might indicate that there is a risk of a targeted school attack; and,

employing the results of these risk evaluations or “threat assessments” in developing strategies to prevent potential school attacks from occurring.”

That means prevention over disaster prepping. Homeland Security and education officials wanted us to pay close attention to our students, their needs and their struggles.

We keep our schools safe by looking to the humans in them and not new ways to barricade the building or watch the whole disaster unfold on closed circuit TV.

The fact is that our schools are actually much safer than the communities that support them. Numerous studies have concluded that students are more secure in school than on the streets or even in their own homes.

If we want to make the schools safer, we need to make the communities safer.

And, no, I’m not just talking about high poverty neighborhoods populated mostly by people of color. I mean everywhere – in our society, itself.

There are too many guns out there. We have more firearms than people!

According to the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Americans now own 40 per cent of all guns in the world – more than the next 25 countries combined. And with every mass shooting and the hysteria trumped up by gun manufacturers with each surge in profits, that number continues to climb.

You can do whatever you want to the schools, but you’ll never increase safety until you deal with THAT problem.

The fact is countries with more guns have more gun deaths. States and Countries with more rigorous gun control have fewer gun deaths.

(If you doubt it, see Florida’s “The Geography of Gun Deaths,” and a 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews.)

We need sane, sensible gun regulations. We need government buyback programs. And we need to smash the NRA’s stranglehold on our political process.

These ridiculous safety drills are simply whistling in the dark.

They’re not harmless. They’re HARMFUL.

They actually make our schools less safe.

Metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and resource officers do not create safer schools. According to a study released by the National Association of School Psychologists :

“There is no clear research evidence that the use of metal detectors, security cameras, or guards in schools is effective in preventing school violence (Addington, 2009; Borum, Cornell, Modzeleski, & Jimerson, 2010; Casella, 2006; Garcia, 2003). In fact, research has shown that their presence negatively impacts students’ perceptions of safety and even increases fear among some students (Bachman, Randolph, & Brown, 2011; Schreck & Miller, 2003). In addition, studies suggest that restrictive school security measures have the potential to harm school learning environments (Beger, 2003; Phaneuf, 2009).”

At this week’s active shooter drill in my school, one of the student aides asked the principal when he thought the state would be arming teachers.

For him, it wasn’t a matter of if. It was a matter of when.

And if you listen to the cowardly garbage spewing out of our lawmakers mouths, you can certainly understand why he believes that.

However, arming teachers or even adding more armed police to the school will not make our classrooms more secure.

There is overwhelming evidence that it will do just the opposite.

As Melinda Wenner Moyer reports in Scientific American, “guns are associated with an increased risk for violence and homicide”—but not with greater safety.

Just look at the facts.

Security cameras were present at Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech. They didn’t stop anything from happening.

Armed resource officers were present at Columbine and Parkland. That didn’t stop anything from happening.

All these measures do is criminalize our students. It turns them from prospective learners into would-be prison inmates – and as we know, our prisons are not exactly the safest places to be.

“How’d I do?” asked Mr. O’Grady, my co-worker who had posed as the shooter during the last scenario.

“You shot me in the dick,” I said.

He laughed. And I laughed.

But it was the kind of laugh that dies in your throat and leaves a taste of ashes.

School safety is a joke in 2018. Not because of what teachers and districts are doing.

When society fails to meet its obligations – as it does time-and-again – it’s our schools that continually step up to take the slack.

The problem is that we can’t even pretend to do this one on our own.

We can’t keep the schools safe if you won’t do anything about the community – if you won’t reduce poverty, violence and trauma.

We can’t keep the schools safe, if you won’t do something about the river of guns that flow through our nation like a high caliber Mississippi.

Do something?

Take your own advice, America.

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Public School is Not For Profit. It is For Children.

August 29, 2018August 30, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Labor, Local Control, Mass Shooting, Media, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, private schools, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school violence, school vouchers, Schools, Shooting, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Value Added Measures, VAM, Violence Against Children Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, education, Greed, philanthrocapitalist, Politics, public schools, Purpose of Education, teaching

Betsy DeVos doesn’t get it.

But neither did Arne Duncan.

Whether right or left or somewhere in between, the person sitting at cabinet level tasked with advising the President on education matters invariably knows nothing about the purpose of public schools.

Duncan thought it had something to do with canned academic standards and standardized tests.

DeVos thinks it involves vouchers to religious or private schools.

But they’re both as wrong as two left shoes.

Public schools exist for one reason and one reason only – to meet the needs of children.

They aren’t there to enrich the private sector or even provide the job market with future employees.

They exist to teach, to counsel, to inspire, to heal.

And all these other schemes favored by Dunce Duncan and Batty Betsy that purport to meet kids needs while somehow enjoying the totally unintended side effect of enriching wealthy investors completely misses the point.

Public schools serve one purpose – to help the kids enrolled in them.

That’s all.

If someone is getting rich off that, there’s a huge problem somewhere.

Unfortunately, the Secretaries of Education of Donald Trump and Barack Obama aren’t the only ones to get it wrong. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have lost sight of this fact.

So have pundits and media personalities on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. So have CEOs and tech entrepreneurs and economists and anyone – really – whom our society seems to take seriously.

Don’t believe me?

Take the latest pronouncement from DeVos, our Secretary of Education.

She announced recently that she was looking into using federal funds to buy guns for teachers to better protect their students from school shooters.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is not in the best interests of children.

Teachers with guns mean a MORE dangerous environment for children, not less.

It means escalating the chance of friendly fire much more than boosting the possibility of a kindergarten teacher turning into an action hero.

It means heightening the chance of children getting their hands on these firearms and doing themselves or others harm.

And given the disproportionate murders of people of color even at the hands of trained professionals in the police force, it means children of color being legitimately terrified of their mostly white educators – or worse.

The reason given by DeVos may be to make children safer. But the measure she’s proposing really has nothing to do with them at all.

It’s a boondoggle for private industry – one private industry in particular – gun manufacturers.

Instead of sensible regulations on a product that’s at least as dangerous as items that are much more heavily controlled – such as cold medicine and automobiles – DeVos is doing the only thing she can to protect what she really cares about – corporate profits.

She is using money earmarked “safety” to increase danger.

Or as she sees it – she’s using a government apparatus that could harm the gun industry to instead pad its pockets.

You’ll hear some progressives and moderates decry this move with passion and fervor – and for good reason – but what many fail to realize is that it’s not new.

It’s really just a continuation of a sickness that has crept into our society about how we conceptualize the very idea of school.

We have moved away from the proposition that everything must be done in the student’s best interest and have replaced it with an imperative to benefit business and industry.

After all, what is the push for academic accountability through standardized tests and Common Core but corporate welfare for the testing and publishing industry?

What is the push for charter and voucher schools but government subsidies for school privatization?

High stakes standardized testing isn’t about helping students learn. Neither is Common Core, value-added measures or a host of top-down corporate policies championed by lions of the left and supply-side patriots.

They are about creating a problem where one doesn’t exist: accountability.

“How do we make sure students receive a quality education?” As if this has ever been hard to determine.

In general, the schools with greater needs than funding are where students struggle. The schools where everyone has more than they need is where they excel.

But they try to sweep the issue of inequitable funding and resources under the rug by framing the question entirely about teachers and schools.

In short, instead of asking about an obvious inequality, they hide a preconceived answer in the question: “How do we make sure teachers and schools are actually educating kids?”

Wrong question. But here’s the answer, anyway: Administrators observe teachers and determine if they’re doing their jobs. And school boards evaluate administrators.

In general, the staff isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of resources we give them to work with – everything from crumbling buildings, large classes, narrowed curriculum to a lack of wraparound social services.

It doesn’t take much to see we’re shortchanging our neediest students.

You don’t need standardized tests to tell you that. You don’t need new academic standards. You don’t need to evaluate educators on things beyond their control.

But doing so creates a new market, a need that can be filled by corporate interests unrestrained by the conviction that public schools are not supposed to be a profit-making venture.

People providing services for schools are supposed to make a living – not a killing – off the public’s dime.

The same can be said for school privatization.

Public schools are in no way inferior to institutions that are privately managed. Tax dollars administered by duly-elected representatives in the light of day are in no way less effective or more corrupt than the alternative – letting bureaucrats behind closed doors dole out the money however they choose even into their own pockets.

In fact, just the opposite!

Nor have charter or voucher schools ever been shown to increase student learning without also selecting only the best academic students and shunning those most difficult to teach, providing fewer resources for students and/or operating with greater funding.

But pretending that privatization is a better alternative to democratic rule creates a market, it opens the door so the system can be gamed for profit at the expense of student learning and wellbeing.

That’s why we look in awe at LeBron James, an athlete who uses his fortune to open a school providing all the things society refuses for students of color. A basketball player who refuses to usurp the public’s leadership role in administering that fully public school.

He’s a shinning example of actual philanthropy in an age of bogus philanthrocapitalism. But he’s also proof that his solution is not reproducible large scale.

The rich – even if they are well intentioned – cannot save us. Only the public can support all public schools.

And to do that, we must understand the purpose behind these institutions.

Otherwise, we’ll continue to be trapped on a runaway train where the conductor seems to possess no sense of urgency about slowing down.

We would never have been in this situation – and in fact could right the course even now – if we just took the time to clarify what we were doing and why we were doing it.

We could save generations of children if we stopped cashing in on public schools and realized the reason for their existence.

We could ensure both our present and our posterity.

If only we remembered that one thing.

Public schools are not for profit.

They are for children.

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Wannabe Terrorist Attempts to Flood Our Schools & Public Spaces With 3D Printed Guns to Make Common Sense Restrictions Moot

August 3, 2018August 3, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Hillary Clinton, immigration, Mass Shooting, Media, nonviolence, Obama, Politics, Propaganda, Republican, school violence, Schools, Shooting, White Privilege 3D Printed Firearms, 3D Printers, Cody Wilson, courts, Donald Trump, Gun Control, gun sense, Gun Violence, Guns, Guns in Schools, Politics, technology

In the United States, we literally have more guns than people.

Yet we’re trying really hard to make even more available with the touch of a button.

It’s not enough that our right to kill is better protected than our right to live, we need to make it EASIER to commit murder. In the land of the drive-by shooting, slaughter needs to be as convenient as ordering a pizza.

Cody Wilson, a wannabe terrorist who apparently believes John Wayne westerns are documentaries, claims to have invented the first gun that can be made almost completely on a 3D printer. And he wants to post the plans on-line so anyone with access to the device can make one.

He was stopped by a U.S. District judge in Seattle who temporarily banned the plans from publication on the Internet this week following a last-minute lawsuit filed by seven state attorneys general.

They argued that 3D-printed firearms would be invisible to metal detectors and could bypass gun restrictions recently adopted after a string of school shootings in some states.

The issue will go back to court on August 10, when the sides will discuss whether a preliminary injunction is needed.

The whole matter was almost settled in 2013 when the Obama administration originally stopped Wilson from putting his plans online with a lawsuit. After years of back and forth, the federal case against the virtual arms merchant seemed like a slam dunk. Then Donald Trump came into office and not only stopped the suit but paid Wilson $40,000 in damages.

So the question remains – why would any sane human being want to post a do-it-yourself gun kit on the Internet where any criminal, psychotic or violent fanatic could easily access it?

Wilson says he’s not in it for financial gain. He wants to make a political point – to flood the world with so many cheap, untraceable guns that the idea of passing any kind of regulations on them would be impossible.

No, really.

As he told Wired:

“All this Parkland stuff, the students, all these dreams of ‘common sense gun reforms’? No. The Internet will serve guns, the gun is downloadable. No amount of petitions or die-ins or anything else can change that.”

Not only that, but the owner and founder of Defense Distributed, an Austin, Texas, based start up that pretends to be a nonprofit organization, says he is prepared to kill police and federal agents if the courts don’t continue seeing things his way.

In the same Wired interview, he says he wasn’t expecting support from the Trump administration. He expected Hillary Clinton would win the White House in 2016 and that she would continue to oppose his 3D printed firearms.

As Wired reported:

“If that happened, as Wilson tells it, he was ready to launch his [3D printed gun] repository, regardless of the outcome of his lawsuit, and then defend it in an armed standoff. “I’d call a militia out to defend the server, Bundy-style,” Wilson says calmly, in the first overt mention of planned armed violence I’ve ever heard him make. “Our only option was to build an infrastructure where we had one final suicidal mission, where we dumped everything into the Internet,” Wilson says.”

So let’s be clear about one thing – the guy pushing for 3D printed firearms is literally a terrorist imitator.

He is an American extremist. He is to us as Osama bin Laden is to mainstream Muslims.

Or at least he wants to be that.

While we’re rounding up brown people and separating them from their children without any workable plan to reunite them on this or that side of the border, we have a US citizen making terroristic threats with the means to carry them out and he’s walking around free.

Oh, but he’s a privileged white dude, so no harm no foul.

If Wilson’s little plastic death dealers do become widely available on-line, they won’t immediately make a huge difference.

It’s hard to make a 3D-printed gun. You need an expensive, top-of-the-line 3D printer and some knowledge of how to work it. And even then the result is a shoddy firearm at best. It may only fire a few bullets before falling apart.

A shooter would have to work extra hard to accomplish his goal with Wilson’s design. It would be much easier to use one of the billions of firearms already available – and much more deadly.

But it wouldn’t take much to make a 3D-printed gun more dangerous.

To comply with federal law, Wilson’s design requires a metal firing pin, which he claims would set off a metal detector. However, it may be relatively easy to bypass that metal part to make his design truly concealable from such devices.

Moreover, technology is always advancing – 3D printers will probably be able to create stronger and more deadly firearms in time. With these sorts of designs readily available, it is easy to imagine a school shooter accessing a device in a tech or computer lab and creating a weapon of mass destruction. He wouldn’t set off any alarms because he wouldn’t have the gun when he entered the building. He’d make it in school.

Some shrug at these dangers saying that they’re inevitable.

Even if we stop Wilson, these sorts of designs will eventually be available in some form on-line. That’s the double-edged sword of mass media – all information is available including easy ways to kill a large number of people.

However, I think this is a cop-out.

For instance, the Internet and computer technology make it fairly easy to mass produce currency as well as firearms. In fact, it’s theoretically much easier.

Yet we don’t see a major influx of counterfeit bills. The reason? Business and industry have collaborated with government to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Programs like Adobe Photoshop include software that restrict the printing of your own money. We could do the same with future 3D printers. We could recall those already in service and retrofit them with such code.

Oh, sure not everyone will comply. There will always be someone who breaks through the safety net. But if all we can do is greatly reduce the spread of 3D-printed firearms, that doesn’t make it futile.

There is a mountain of research proving that the more firearms you have in a country, the greater the number of firearm deaths.

We should be working to restrict guns to responsible people.

But the Wilson’s of the world don’t want to allow us that choice.

They want to force us all to live in a world where guns are even more pernicious than they are today.

Will we let them?

Human beings have such potential, but we seem determined to kill ourselves.

If intelligent aliens came to Earth today and landed in the USA, what would they think of us?

Would they see what we might become or would they only see a pitiful animal struggling to put itself out of its own misery?

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"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

school violence

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The Best Way to Prepare for School Shootings is to Reduce the Chances They’ll Happen at All

Wannabe Terrorist Attempts to Flood Our Schools & Public Spaces With 3D Printed Guns to Make Common Sense Restrictions Moot