Sad and shocking -- and not surprising, given the number of teen pregnancies in this country.

A middle school janitor doing end-of-school cleaning Thursday found what appeared to him to be a human fetus in a trash bag inside a locker, police said.

Police are unsure what was in the trash bag, and its contents were turned over to the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dallas police spokeswoman Sr. Cpl. Janice Crowther said.

"It is hard to determine what is in the bag,'' Crowther said. "If it is a fetus, it has been there quite a while.''

A janitor was cleaning out Ben Franklin Middle School on Thursday when he came across the trash bag inside a locker in the girls locker room.

It could be several weeks before the medical examiner makes a determination, Crowther said.

Did someone bring her abortion for show-and-tell? And will the school's solution be to stop allowing students to use lockers rather than encourage abstinence?

UPDATE: No fetus -- just rotten oranges.

Posted by: Greg at 01:39 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I'm so pleased to see a leader in the field of education saying what those of us in the classroom know and say among ourselves -- NCLB has resulted in lower standards.

Thanks, Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said yesterday that the federal No Child Left Behind law has created a culture that has education leaders nationwide "shooting way too low" and that it has spawned a generation of statewide tests that are too easy to pass.

In a meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters, Weast said the federal mandate, with its push for 100 percent proficiency on state tests, has driven states toward lower standards that don't prepare most students for college or careers.

"I think we've got to adjust up," he said. "Or at least give some flexibility for those who would like to adjust up."

Now you do get the obligatory state flunky intoning that the test is a floor, not a ceiling", but that is nothing but a pious lie. When the expectation is that 100% of the students pass a test, you lower the floor -- which puts the ceiling even further out of reach for everyone.

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In 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that public schools cannot determine campus placement based upon a student's race. Today, over five decades later, in a 5-4 decision, the same rule was applied by the United States Supreme Court -- but four "liberal" justices effectively sought to overrule Brown v. Board of Education in order to permit districts to assign students to a school other than the one closest to their home based upon the student's race.

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected school assignment plans that take account of students' race in two major public school districts. The decisions could imperil similar plans nationwide.

The rulings in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle leave public school systems with a limited arsenal to maintain racial diversity.

The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by the court's other three liberals.

Perhaps the single best part of the opinion authored by the Chief Justice is this little bit of common-sense wisdom that was lost on the minority but should be carved on granite in every town square in America.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Justice Thomas was eloquent, powerful, and a bit more scholarly with this observation, but not nearly as pithy.

"What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today," Thomas said. "The plans before us base school assignment decisions on students' race. Because 'our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,' such race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional."

It is important here to remember something about these two school desegregation/integration plans. These were not campus assignments pursuant to a court order to remedy past segregation -- in one case there was never a desegregation order and in the other the order had been lifted by the supervising court. But in each case the district decided that the race of a student should be the basis for the assignment of children to a campus other than the one that their place of residence would ordinarily dictate. A majority today rejected that concept -- although one Justice in the majority seems to be prepared to go wobbly on this bedrock principle of civil rights in education and join the minority in repudiating Brown v. Board of Education in some instances.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion in which he said race may be a component of school district plans designed to achieve diversity.

He agreed with Roberts that the plans in Louisville and Seattle went too far. He said, however, that to the extent that Roberts' opinion could be interpreted as foreclosing the use of race in any circumstance, ''I disagree with that reasoning.''

Particularly frightening is that the dissenters dared to claim that the majority's position upholding Brown's core principle -- that school assignments based on race violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment -- constituted an assault on Brown and that their repudiation of that principle constituted the ultimate fulfillment of it!

Justice Stephen Breyer, in a dissent joined by the other liberals on the court, said Roberts' opinion undermined the promise of integrated schools that the court laid out 53 years ago in its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

"To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown," Breyer said.

The problem is that Brown does not call for integration -- it calls an end to legally-mandated segregation. Indeed, "integration" of schools is not required by the Constitution and would, in most places, require an unconstitutional distribution of benefits and burdens based upon race of the sort banned under Brown to accomplish.

The other day I asked if the precedent in Tinker v. Des Moines was dead? Based upon the willingness of a substantial minority of the court to abandon the fundamental principles of Brown v. Board of Education and the lack of firm resolution to uphold that seminal decision on behalf of equality of all students based upon race on the part of a fifth, I am left fearing for the future of race-neutral treatment in public education, even as I celebrate the decision in today's cases.

UPDATE: The New York Times, of course, comes out firmly in favor of violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in an editorial that ought to be called "Civil Rights: They're A Black Thing".

I wonder -- would they have been equally supportive of a plan designed to make sure that predominantly white schools didn't become "too black" and denied transfers for that reason?

OPEN TRACKBACKING AT Perri Nelson's Website, DeMediacratic Nation, stikNstein... has no mercy, Pirate's Cove, Webloggin, Stuck On Stupid, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, High Desert Wanderer, and Pursuing Holiness, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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I'll be honest -- I've had colleagues who have married former students.. It has always made me uncomfortable, though not necessarily acutely so. After all, when Mike and Jeannie got married, he was 30 and she was 22 -- and they had not started dating until she came to back to the school as a student teacher. I'll admit to being a little more uncomfortable with Dan and Melissa -- we all wondered how many hours after graduation he waited to ask her out, since they were openly dating within weeks of her receiving her diploma and were married about 18 months later -- and have an age gap of around 20 years. I was pleased, though, when the school I used to teach at fired our counselor when he married the class valedictorian in Vegas two days after graduation (four weeks after his divorce became final) and announced that they would be having a baby sometime around Halloween.

This situation, though, positively makes my skin crawl.

A 40-year-old high school science teacher and cross country coach who once worked in Guilford County has resigned his position and married a 16-year-old student.

Brenton Wuchae coached Windy Hager at South Brunswick High School, where she recently completed her sophomore year as one of the school's top runners. He also lives less than two miles away from the Hagers' home on Oak Island.

Wuchae married Hager in Brunswick County on Monday, according to a marriage license.

Hager's parents, Dennis and Betty Hager, said they did all they could to keep the couple apart after noticing a deeper-than-usual friendship forming between them. The parents said they tried to intervene by talking to the coach, going to school officials, pleading with police and sheriff's office detectives, even other teachers and students at South Brunswick.

But the Hagers say they reluctantly signed a consent form allowing their daughter to marry her coach.

Clearly, this relationship blew right through any and all student-teacher relationship boundaries, and he had to go. I know that this would have been a firing offense in my district, which has a strict "no dating the students" policy in place -- even if the student is 18 and the employee does not have any sort of authority over the student. We had a 22-year-old teacher from an elementary school let go a couple of years ago for dating an 18-year-old girl he knew from church, because she was still a student two months from graduation at one of our high schools. I don't want to even think about the sh!t-storm we would have if one of our teachers actually married a current student.

H/T Interested Participant

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Oh, that's right -- it only applies if something Christian is brought into a public school setting. Non-Christian practices and indoctrination may be done in public schools with taxpayer dollars without any challenge at all.

With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

Now would the New York Times be writing an article like this if we were talking about a program that brought the meditative techniques of Trappist monks into the public schools as a way of helping students focus, concentrate, and learn? No, we wouldn't -- we would instead get a blistering editorial denouncing the use of public schools for proselytizing. Left-wing groups would be up in arms, issuing blistering press releases about impending theocracy. And the ACLU would have a lawsuit in the works, complete with a gay, transgendered, atheist, illegal immigrant girl in a wheelchair who claims to feel oppressed as the lead plaintiff.

But since this is Buddhism, those same separationist folks are more than willing to pronounce it secular and let the program continue. After all, the Left likes Buddhism -- you know, the Dalai Lama is sort of cool,Richard Gere is a Buddhist, and Paris Hilton even took some Buddhist books with her to jail. it is only those awful Christians we have to watch out for.

Posted by: Greg at 06:05 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I think the teachers are really setting themselves up for trouble, defying a court order to end the strike. But IÂ’m always shocked by the level of ignorance shown by some folks in responding to calls for better salaries and benefits for teachers.

An ongoing strike pitting Quincy teachers against town officials escalated yesterday, as parents complained their family summer plans are being thrown into turmoil.

Teachers vowed to ignore a court order forcing them back to work today. School officials canceled another day of school as talks with the teachersÂ’ union stalled again last night.

“This is splitting the city in two. People have a lot of opinions about this,” said parent Kelly Tinney, who said she backs the teachers even though she had to switch shifts at work to care for her 9-year-old daughter.

Other parents arenÂ’t as forgiving.

“They only work 180 days a year and they get 90 percent of their health insurance paid,” said Saori Caruso, whose daughter attends Bernazzani Elementary. “My husband works a lot more and he has to pay nearly all of his health insurance.”

I always find it interesting when I hear arguments like Caruso’s – parents who are willing to spend inordinate amounts of money to get their child the latest luxury item, but think that they should pay their child’s teachers on the cheap.

I also find this comment a bit silly as well.

Outside City Hall, parent Roberta Lee said of the teachers, “If they want to do this, why can’t they do it during the off season so the parents don’t have to find day care and the kids can finish the year? It’s not right.”

Let’s think here for a minute – strike during summer vacation would have what impact, exactly? No one would notice, because the kids would be out of school. You wouldn’t care or have to think about the issues because you wouldn’t be inconvenienced in any way. A strike during the school year, however, sort of makes you think about how much value you place on what these teachers do for you and your children, doesn’t it? Do you think that might just be the reason why the strike is occurring now and not in July?

Of course, I’m not a big fan of strikes by public employees or of unions in general. And personally, I’m pretty impressed by the pay and benefits offered by the schools up there in Massachusetts, compared to what we get down here in Texas. Since I’m off school for the summer, I’d be glad to come up and teach for you for a couple of weeks – and would even be open to staying on permanently. So if there is anyone from the Quincy school district personnel department reading this, feel free to send me an email with an offer of employment.

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Before transferring to be closer to home, I spent my first two years of college at a school with a strong honor code that forbade cheating. I thought that was great -- but every year we had students expelled for violating the honor code. I really wonder how much impact this new proposal from the TEA will have on the problem of TAKS cheating.

Students will be asked to sign honor pledges next year that they will not cheat on the state's high-stakes test, and school districts could suffer lower ratings if cheating is found, education officials said Monday.

Frankly, I don't know that having the kids sign honor pledges imposed from outside will have any impact on a kid bound and determined to cheat. But i do like this idea.

They'll also use several test versions in the same classroom, making it harder for a student to look over someone's shoulder and make cheating easier to spot if they do, because all seats will be assigned.

Having multiple versions in the same classroom only makes sense, in my book -- and my school has already implemented the assigned seats model and had encouraged it even before it was a mandate.

But for all the talk of "widespread cheating" on the test, the statistics do not really bear that out.

The education agency has been battling allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests for the past 2 1/2 years. In 2006, Utah-based Caveon Test Security was hired to conduct a study of test scores, and flagged about 700 Texas schools for irregularities.

State investigations cleared most of the schools of cheating allegations. But 16, including four Houston charter schools, remain on the list of campuses with testing irregularities.

In a state the size of Texas, 16 schools is not that significant. And as is pointed out by one school administrator, the initial group of 700 schools got flagged for doing the thing that the tests were supposed to encourage -- improve student performance.

However, Gonzalez said he hopes TEA has a better independent audit than the one done by Caveon. Those flagged schools were publicly named before local officials had a chance to review and contest the data even though the vast majority were cleared.

"They dinged you if your scores were too good even if it was from all the tutorials and steps we took to help kids do better," he said.

In other words, finding a program that works was initially deemed evidence of cheating by the company hired to do the reviews. If such a standard is applied this year, I can only imagine how my school's leap in math scores will be interpreted -- even though it can be accounted for by changes in scheduling, class size, methodology and resources allotted to the math department.

Of course, I personally believe the TAKS test to be a joke. I don't believe it shows what it claims to show, and doesn't measure what it claims to measure. maybe, just maybe, the impending change to end-of-course tests will fix that problem.

Posted by: Greg at 01:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The Hokie Horror this past spring, with the murder of so many Virginia Tech students and faculty members, may yet claim another victim -- the functionality of the building where most of the murders took place.

Norris Hall is known for its Gothic architecture, its central location on Virginia Tech's huge campus and, more than anything, its role as the primary site of the nation's deadliest individual shooting rampage.

The two-story building that witnessed so much carnage in April when a gunman killed 31 people there, including himself, will reopen in about two weeks and will be used for offices and laboratories, university officials announced yesterday.

Formerly used by several academic departments, Norris will house only two departments -- engineering science and mechanics, and civil and environmental engineering -- when it reopens June 18.

The decision comes nearly two months after student Seung Hui Cho of Fairfax County shot and killed 30 students and faculty members on Norris's second floor before shooting himself. Cho fatally shot two other students in a campus dormitory earlier that day.

Since the April 16 attack, Norris Hall has been empty, but debate has surfaced among university officials, parents, students and faculty members about what should be done with it. Some wanted to raze the building and replace with it a memorial. Others said it should be left alone.

Speaking as an outsider, I think that it is a good thing that Norris Hall is being returned to some use -- and think that it quickly needs to be returned to full use rather than limited functionality. The demands that it be torn down are nothing more than the cries of those who believe that emotion should overcome reason -- the wussification of the American spirit and the over-indulgence of grief.

Come here to Texas. Visit the University of Texas in Austin. There stands the bell tower, site of the infamous sniper attack in the 1960s. It stands unchanged, as does (for the most part) the plaza where the victims were killed and wounded. Thousands pass through that plaza daily, as they go about their lives. Thus has it been for four decades -- the greatest memorial to the dead. For you see, it is the prime example of how life goes on in the face of tragedy, and how the paroxysms of grief that follow death cannot be allowed to forever paralyze the mourners.

So should it be at Virginia Tech -- the ultimate honoring of those who have died by those who continue to live in their footsteps and in the pursuit of the same lofty academic goals. Bravo to those who have moved to reopen the building -- and may they bring the building back to full use soon.

Posted by: Greg at 03:00 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Here's one of those times when I would love to be a plaintiff's lawyer -- I imagine that one could really take this school district to the cleaners.

A high school that had warned against undignified behavior at its graduation ceremony denied diplomas to five students after enthusiastic friends or family members cheered for them during the commencement program.

On May 27, Galesburg High School students and their parents were asked to sign a contract promising to act in dignified way. Violators were warned they could be denied their diplomas and barred from an after-graduation party.

Many schools ask spectators to hold applause and cheers until the ceremonies end but few rigidly enforce the policy.

“It was like one of the worst days of my life,” said Caisha Gayles, one of the five students, who officially graduated, but does not have her diploma to frame and hang on her wall. “You walk across the stage and then you can’t get your diploma because of other people cheering for you. It was devastating.”

The school said the five students can still get their diplomas by completing eight hours of public service, answering phones, sorting books or doing other work for the district.

Uhhhh -- wrong. These kids have already earned their diplomas. They met all requirements established by the state and by the district. Indeed, you even announced as much at graduation that day when some district official announced that the graduates had met all those requirements and you called them across the stage. To impose an additional requirement after the fact -- especially based upon the behavior of other individuals rather than the students themselves -- is hardly reasonable. The actions of other school districts in removing the actual disruptive parties is much more reasonable and defenable.

And there is an additional question -- how far can a district go in denying diplomas? My district had to face that issue eight or nine years ago when a young man decided to moon the graduation crowd. Now he didn't drop trou -- he just raised his gown and shook his butt around at the crowd -- but the district tried to withhold his diploma, only to find itself open to some serious legal issues (especially since that action would have cost the young idiot an full-ride athletic scholarship). And that was for actions committed by the graduate himself, not some family member, friend, or (as one student suggested) enemy looking to cause trouble.

Posted by: Greg at 12:30 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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