Want to Improve Schools? Make Parent Involvement Meaningful
Truly involving parents and communities in our public schools, and the decisions that affect them, is essential to improving our school system.
While parent involvement is crucial to a child’s educational success, the reality is that such involvement is not always present for various reasons. However, the larger communities in which a student’s school and home are located also play an instrumental role in nurturing educational achievement, as expressed by the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Unfortunately over the past several years, the Department of Education has consistently failed to meaningfully empower and involve these important stakeholders in its decisions about schools. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the Education Department’s decisions and proposals regarding closing or phasing out schools,
Looking Again at Police Arrest Data
Over a 50-day period recently, beginning last summer, the police arrested or ticketed four New York City students a day, according to records released by the New York City Police Department last month. Over all, the department’s school safety division arrested 63 students and issued 182 summonses to middle school and high school students during that period, the report said.
The New York Police Department released the information to comply with a City Council request, at the urging of the New York City Liberties Union, but it has not commented on the data it released.
“It has really confirmed for us our worst fears, that the police are using criminal law tactics to enforce school rule violations,” Johanna Miller, assistant advocacy director at New York Civil Liberties Union, told Laura Keller, a reporter and student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, in a video that was produced by Lars Vercelli, another student.