Well, that isn't the headline that appears on the article, but it is certainly much more accurate than the one that did appear on the article.

Teacher under investigation for alleged liberalism

You see, it is the teacher's unwarranted injection of his political views into his classroom materials and vocabulary assessments that are the problem, not the views themselves.

"I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes," said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.

The question referring to the president asked students to say whether coherent or eschewed was the proper word. The sentence would be more coherent if one eschewed eschewed.

Another example said, "It is frightening the way the extreme right has (balled, arrogated) aspects of the Constitution and warped them for their own agenda." Arrogated would be the proper word there.

Chenkin claims, of course, that the quizzes are being looked at out of context. While he may have a point, I have a difficult time imagining a context in which these items would be appropriate -- and I say that as a social studies teacher who is also a certified English teacher (though not, as many of you have noticed, a typing teacher). I suppose if one were teaching a unit on propaganda or the use of biased language it would be possible to justify such assessment items, but I'm not sure that i would be comfortable using them in my classroom.

Do I want to see Chenkin fired for this lapse in professional judgement? No, I do not. I don't think he has crossed the line far enough for that. Do I think he needs to be cautioned and reminded that there are lines beyond which a teacher should not go? Yeah, I do.

I'll be watching to see how this situation plays out.

(HAT TIP: Michelle Malkin)

Posted by: Greg at 11:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Violating the First Amendment rights of a middle school student cost the Oceanport, New Jersey schools $117,500.

"While my parents and I are happy the case is resolved, most importantly, I'm hopeful this will help ensure that free-speech rights of students aren't trampled on again in the future," said Dwyer, who is now in 11th grade.

Dwyer created the Web site containing criticism of Maple Place School in April 2003, on his own time from his home computer. Comments posted on the site's "guest book" section angered school officials, who suspended Dwyer for a week, benched him from playing on the baseball team for a month, and barred him from going on his class trip, among other discipline. The district's lawsuit said anti-Semitic remarks were posted on the site, which Dwyer denied writing.

"The school district has never — to this day — explained to us what rule or policy our son violated," said Kevin Dwyer, Ryan's father.

Maybe a few more big payouts like this will cause zero-tolerance crazed administrators to think critically before slapping students with draconian punishments for infractions that are no infractions at all – especially when it involves the illicit limitation of rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

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Somehow I doubt that the supporters of academic freedom for the likes of Ward Churchill will say a word in protest of the imprisonment and flogging of Mohammad al-Harbi, who was taken to court by his colleagues for daring to speak contrary to the Saudi governmentÂ’s religious edicts.

Al-Madina newspaper said secondary-school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi, who will be flogged in public, was taken to court by his colleagues and students.

He was charged with promoting a "dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the Gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer," the newspaper said.

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, strictly upholds the austere Wahhabi school of Islam and bases its constitution on the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Public practice of any other religion is banned.

And this isnÂ’t the first time a teacher has been punished for such apostate comments.

Come on, folks, when are you going to speak out in favor of the academic freedom of teachers in other countries? How about religious freedom?

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Students from Sam Houston State University have written a book about high school mascots here in Texas. You know, some of them are quite unusual, with great stories behind them.

It's the single-name schools that attract the attention.

Like the Hutto Hippos, a name that goes back to 1915 when a hippo escaped from a circus train in Austin and finally was found in a creek near Hutto, about 25 miles to the northeast.

In the 1924 yearbook at Mason High School, the football team was called the cowpunchers, another term for cowboy.

As the years went by, the name got shortened to the Punchers, and it survives. The school plays in the Puncher Dome.

Local economies factor into many of the names. In the 1940s, the Rockcrushers of Knippa got their name when a rock-crushing plant moved there, and Rocksprings adopted the name the Angoras when it became "The Angora Goat Capital of the World."

Brazosport High School, along the Gulf Coast, has the Exporters. Robstown has its Cottonpickers, and Port Isabel, at the southern tip of the state on the Gulf of Mexico, has the Fighting Tarpons.

Some were obvious. In Hamlin? The Pied Pipers. Muleshoe? The Mules. And in Winters? The Blizzards.

Other one-of-a-kinds include the Porcupines of Springtown, who trace their mascot to a 1920s basketball player who suggested the name because people feared the animal's sharp quills. Local folks quoted in the book are more inclined to remember the awful smell of a real porcupine adopted by students in the 1960s.

Itasca's Wampus Cats owe their birth to a 1921 school pep rally where the term apparently was yelled out by a cheerleader. According to the book, it's either a Cherokee evil spirit, a legendary ferocious half-man, half-wildcat wandering Georgia or a striped cat from Tennessee.

The Mighty Red Ants of Progreso are named not for the pesky insect but for the nickname a beloved teacher called her students when the district had only one elementary school. When the high school was built, it was filled with her "little red ants."

In the book, football coach Elvis Hernandez is quoted as saying the school name prompts fans from opposing schools to greet his teams with signs of: "Got Raid?"

You have to remember -- historically, the local high school team was the focus of life in a community.

In some places, it still is.

During the Hurricane Rita evacuation, my wife and I stopped in Gainseville, Texas to fill her prescriptions. The hot topic of conversation between the pharmacy staff and the locals who were waiting to get their medication? That evening's homecoming game.

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I guess not, if it gets special resources for the few of a darker hue.

The Chicago school district plans to open an all-boys high school primarily for black teenagers.

The Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men must be approved by the Board of Education this month, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Mayor Richard Daley plans to open 100 schools in the city in the next five years. Plans for the next two years include a virtual elementary school, a high school operated by the University of Chicago and a high school stressing business entrepreneurship.

Urban Prep would be located inside Englewood High School. Backers say it is aimed at a group that has the lowest graduation rate of any in the city.

"We're going to take our students where they are and help them gain admission to college and succeed once they are there," said Tim King, the founder of Urban Prep. "Clearly there is a high need for figuring out how to serve these kids academically."

I’m all for getting students – of every race or ethnicity – prepared for success in life. Heck, that is what my career is about. But I am concerned any time we set up programs that include a race or ethnicity based admissions formula or criteria.

Posted by: Greg at 04:50 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Before I started teaching, I never considered the possibility that it could happen.

But it does.

It has even happened a few times at the school where I teach over the years. They hauled a 18-year-old football player out in handcuffs when they caught him on the stage with his 14-year-old girlfriend my first year there. During the height of Monica-gate, the girls basketball team walked into the gym for practice and found a couple doing the Full Lewinsky. And then there was last spring, when a somewhat shaken student returned from girls restroom and informed me that there were two girls engaged in "hot lesbian action" in the handicapped stall.

I assumed that such incidents were rare, and could be accounted for by the huge enrollment at our school (grades 9-12 have grown from 3300 to 3900 in the last decade). But it seems like it is getting more and more common -- and that some kids don't even find it shocking.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about students having sex in a high school auditorium was that other students didn't find it very shocking at all.

"I glanced over and, whatever, I just let him continue on with his business," said a 16-year-old linebacker on the Osbourn High School football team who, along with a friend, stumbled upon a couple engaging in oral sex. "I stayed for five to eight minutes, just talking. We weren't worried about it. When the janitor came in, everyone started running."

Manassas school officials weren't as laid back. The students -- eight in all -- were quickly identified and suspended, and the matter prompted the small school system to confront an issue many adults would rather not face: in this case, two girls and three boys engaging in oral sex or intercourse on school property while three other boys watched, according to sources familiar with what happened.

"In all the years that I've been in education, I've never run into this one before," said John Boronkay, the school system's acting superintendent. "It's a new one."

Actually, it's not so new. According to some teenagers, sex on school property is more frequent than adults might imagine. And some adults who work with teenagers said it's happening more often these days.

There's anecdotal evidence to support that:

Two students were discovered recently having sex in an Anne Arundel County high school gym. Four students at Col. Zadok Magruder High in Rockville were arrested in June after performing sex acts in the school parking lot. A boy and a girl at Springbrook High in Silver Spring were caught "touching inappropriately" in a school bathroom. Last year, three teenage boys at Mount Hebron High in Howard County were arrested after a student accused them of sexually assaulting her in a school restroom, but charges were dropped after the boys said the sex was consensual and the girl recanted.

"Students would have intercourse on the stairwells, locked classrooms, in the locker rooms," said Ihsan Musawwir, 18, a recent graduate of Dunbar Senior High School in the District. "It was embarrassing for me to walk in on it."

Jessica Miller, 19, who graduated in June from T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, said that for some students there, sex on campus is a popular fantasy -- and sometimes a reality -- particularly in the auditorium.

"It's so big, it's so dark," Miller said. "There's a lot more places to find privacy -- behind the stage and on the catwalk."

But what's the appeal? "Just being rebellious," she said. "Coming back to class and saying, 'Ooh, guess what I just did? I just had sex in the auditorium.' "

Deborah Roffman, a Baltimore-based sexuality educator, said she has been hearing more about similar occurrences in the past five years. "Schools are calling me, asking, 'What do we do? We've had this incident at our school.' "

The fact that teenagers have sex is well established: Roughly half of all 15- to 19-year-olds have had vaginal intercourse, and more than half have had oral sex, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But getting a handle on the reasons students are emboldened to risk having sex at school is as tricky as figuring out how many are doing it. Musawwir, the Dunbar graduate, who has helped lead teen forums on sex, said she thinks students have sex in school because they have nowhere else to go. "And it's the thrill of getting caught or not. And the media has a lot of things to do with it. They think that if they see it on TV, they can get away with it in real life."

What is shocking is that many schools are finding out that they don't even have such situations covered in their handbook or district policies.

Many schools don't have rules specifically banning sex on campus but punish students who do it through a clause prohibiting "immoral conduct" or behavior that offends the community's morals, said Naomi Gittins, a staff attorney at the National School Boards Association. Gittins added that more specific policies would make it easier for schools to defend themselves against legal challenges.

Gotta love that -- the rules are needed not to prevent exploitation, not to encourage proper behavior, not to encourage morality, but rather to use as a legal shield! Where are our priorities?

So, folks, what do you think? Do your really believe that it isn't happening at your schools? Do you really think it isn't your kids? And what would do you think should be done?

Posted by: Greg at 11:46 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The Ninth Circuit was willing to let a single non-custodial parent determine whether or not every child could say – or even hear -- the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. But they don’t believe that parents have the right to control the exposure of their own children to sexual material at school.

On Wednesday the court dismissed a lawsuit brought by California parents who were outraged over a sex survey given to public school students in the first, third and fifth grades.

Among other things, the survey administered by the Palmdale School District asked children if they ever thought about having sex or touching other people's "private parts" and whether they could "stop thinking about having sex."

The parents argued that they -- not the public schools -- have the sole right "to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex."

But o n Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit dismissed the case, saying, "There is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children...Parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students."

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for the panel, said "no such specific right can be found in the deep roots of the nation's history and tradition or implied in the concept of ordered liberty."

Funny, I always believed that the right to raise oneÂ’s child and to control their education was one of those things that fundamentally predates civilization as a whole, and which society may therefore not infringe upon.

I guess that the State really is their mother and their father – at least in the Ninth Circuit, and as long as the state doesn’t use permit the use of the “G-word” around them.

Posted by: Greg at 01:44 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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