School shootings have fueled a $2.7 billion school safety industry. What makes kids safer? - Washington Post

School shootings have fueled a $2.7 billion school safety industry. What makes kids safer? - Washington Post

Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards and secret snipers

Billions are being spent to protect children from school shootings.

Does any of it work?

he expo had finally begun, and now hundreds of school administrators streamed into a sprawling, chandeliered ballroom where entrepreneurs awaited, each eager to explain why their product, above all others, was the one worth buying.

Waiters in white button-downs poured glasses of chardonnay and served meatballs wrapped with bacon. In one corner, guests posed with colorful boas and silly hats at a photo booth as a band played Jimmy Buffett covers to the rhythm of a steel drum. For a moment, the festive summer scene, in a hotel 10 miles from Walt Disney World, masked what had brought them all there.

This was the thriving business of campus safety, an industry fueled by an overwhelmingly American form of violence: school shootings.

At one booth, two gray-haired men were selling a 300-pound ballistic whiteboard — adorned with adorable animal illustrations and pocked with five bullet holes — that cost more than $2,900.

“What we want to do is just to give the kids, the teachers, a chance,” one of them said.

“So they can buy a few minutes,” the other added.

Elsewhere at the July conference, vendors peddled tourniquets and pepper-ball guns, facial-recognition software and a security proposal that would turn former Special Operations officers into undercover teachers. Threaded into every pitch, just five months after a Parkland, Fla., massacre, was the implication that their product or service would make students safer — that, if purchased, it might save a life.

What few of the salespeople could offer, however, was proof.

Although school security has grown into a $2.7 billion market — an estimate that does not account for the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — little research has been done on which safety measures do and do not protect students from gun violence. Earlier this fall, The Washington Post sent surveys to every school in its database that had endured a shooting of some kind since the 2012 killings of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Conn., which prompted a surge of security spending by districts across the country. Continue reading: School shootings have fueled a $2.7 billion school safety industry. What makes kids safer? - Washington Post

Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters? | janresseger

Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters? | janresseger

Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters?

Last week’s election produced a couple of significant indicators that the public may be growing weary of charter schools.  At the same time the public seems increasingly aware that adequately funded public schools may be a better way to help the children our society has left behind.  This is despite an enormous political investment by wealthy investors in the future of the charter school movement.

Consider the race for California Superintendent of Public Instruction. Last month for The Intercept, Rachel M. Cohen explained what this highly contentious, non-partisan race between charter proponent Marshall Tuck and his opponent Tony Thurmond has really been all about: “The California charter school lobby is testing its influence in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, turning an election for a somewhat obscure statewide position into a notably expensive battle.  More than $50 million has flown into the contest between two Democrats for a nonpartisan office with little statutory power.  For perspective, this is more money raised than in any U.S. House race this cycle and most Senate races, not to mention every other race in California, save for the governor’s. The race, largely understood as a proxy war for the future of California charter schools, is the second attempt by the state’s charter school lobby to demonstrate its influence…. The candidates, Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond, both insist that the race is about far more than charters, which currently enroll 10 percent of the state’s 6.2 million public school students, though they admit they hold different visions for the publicly funded, privately managed schools. That’s something their funders also acutely recognize.”

On election night, Marshall Tuck, the former president of Green Dot Charters and an advocate for expanding California’s already huge charter sector, was ahead by 86,000 votes. But as mail-in and absentee ballot have been counted, Thurmond has progressively caught up. By Saturday night, EdSource reported, Marshall Tuck was still ahead by 38,251 out of 6,934,591 votes counted by that time. However, by yesterday morning, the California Secretary of State was reporting Tony Thurmond had pulled ahead with a 3,500 vote lead. By last evening, each candidate had cornered roughly 50 percent of the vote, with a tiny 1,808 vote margin for Continue reading: Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters? | janresseger