Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca wants to teach criminals a lesson — literally. The top cop of America's most populous county is launching a new initiative aimed at offering education to every one of the 160,000 inmates who pass through his lockups each year. Liberal reformers have long advocated such a course, citing studies showing lower recidivism rates among prisoners who learn while locked up. But it's extraordinary talk coming from the man who runs America's biggest jail system. Baca's Education-Based Incarceration initiative officially launched last year but is still in the ... Read More
Budget Idea: Divert Money From Prisons to Schools
April 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Solving state and national budget woes is going to demand a painful set of decisions on where to carve out money — from public services, public safety, environmental protection? — no matter where legislators look. But an unlikely coalition of organizations, including the NAACP, ACLU and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform,* is rallying around a common target: Why, they ask, are we spending so much money on prisons? Over the last 40 years, America's inmate population has quadrupled, from 500,000 to 2.3 million, giving the U.S. 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent ... Read More
The Cash Benefits of a Catholic Education
April 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Catholic high schools in the United States have long boasted a 99 percent graduation rate compared to 73 percent for public schools, and they report sending twice as many students to four-year colleges. Now, an education study from Michigan State University system's Oakland University finds there may be a substantial cash benefit for those who obtain a Catholic high school degree. On average, it shows, students who graduated in 1957 from Catholic high schools earned 18 percent higher wages in their mid-30s and mid-50s than their peers in public high schools. It's true that Catholic ... Read More
Book Banners Finding Power in Numbers
February 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
On the website Parents Against Bad Books In Schools, some of the works deemed "sensitive, inappropriate and controversial" for K-12 students, even those who are college-bound or in advanced placement classes, include Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. "Bad is not for us to determine," says the disclaimer on the site. "Bad is what you determine is bad." One of the purposes of PABBIS.org, the disclaimer goes on to say, is to "provide information related to bad ... Read More
Charter Schools: What Would Dr. King Say?
January 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It is unfortunate that the charter school industry now finds itself on the wrong side of educational progress and civil rights history, even as spokesmen like Nelson Smith, writing at Miller-McCune.com last month, engage in a public relations campaign aimed to minimize awareness of the segregated conditions that exist in the majority of American charter schools today. Whether located in the poorest, brownest neighborhoods of the Twin Cities or in the leafiest, whitest suburbs of North Carolina, charter schools often engage in a form of intensely segregated schooling that either contains or ... Read More
Charter Schools and Equal Opportunity
December 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Remember Norman Rockwell's stark painting of the little African-American girl being escorted into a New Orleans schoolhouse by two deputy U.S. marshals? Today that little girl, Ruby Bridges, is working to open a public charter school in that same school building, which will house a civil rights museum as well. Wouldn't it be strange for a civil rights figure like Bridges to join a movement that was "accelerating re-segregation by race," as charter schools were characterized in a recent Miller-McCune.com article? Yet that's what some critics would have us believe, though more than a million ... Read More
Asian-American Parenting and Academic Success
December 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Why do so many Asian-American kids do so well in school? Researchers are zeroing in on one important reason: the unique style of Asian-American parenting. A visit to the University of California's most selective campuses shows how very well Asian-American kids do academically: While Asian Americans constituted 14 percent of the state population in 2008, this fall they made up about 40 percent of the freshman class at UCLA and 37 percent of the entering class at University of California, Berkeley. But it's not just in California, and it's not just in college. The 2000 Census found that ... Read More
Walking Backward Out the Schoolhouse Door
December 7, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The NAACP held a conference last week in North Carolina to draw attention to a trend easily unnoticed in what many Americans have come to think of as the "post-racial" age ushered in by the nation's first black president: Fifty years after the Civil Rights era, American public schools are resegregating. More black students today attend "extremely segregated" schools than did in 1988, at the height of desegregation, the NAACP notes. It symbolically hosted the education conference in Raleigh, N.C., where the local school district has been wrestling with the controversial end to a busing ... Read More
Detroit Reading Corps Battles Poor Test Scores
December 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"These scores confirm that we have a reading emergency." So last December said Robert Bobb, appointed by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm in March 2009 to deal with Detroit Public Schools' persistent financial problems and has more recently exerted authority over academic matters. Longtime observers of the school district and its 138,000 students spread out over more than 100 campuses are intimately aware of a persistent decline in student achievement, a trend now several decades long. This was underscored in late 2009 with a report released by the National Assessment of Educational ... Read More
Minority Teachers: Hard to Get and Hard to Keep
December 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"Our teachers should be excellent, and they should look like America,” said the Secretary of Education in 1998, during the administration of President Bill Clinton. It was an admirable goal, backed by federal money, yet it is still out of reach today despite a ballooning number of minority teachers in the workplace. Too many are going in one door and out the other, researchers say. “Teachers of color are literally at risk: They’re leaving, and they’re leaving in droves,” said Betty Achinstein, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the co-author of ... Read More
