Latest News and Comment from Education

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Sexual Harassment: Not In Our School #MeTooK12 #MeToo #TimesUp

Video | Stop Sexual Assault in Schools:


Stop Sexual Assault in Schools

Stop Sexual Assault in Schools

Educating students, families, and schools about the right to an equal education free from sexual harassment


Click Here To Go To The #MeTooK12 Campaign On FaceBook


Click Here To Go To The #MeTooK12 Campaign On FaceBook

shnios-buxton




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WATCH IT NOW
PART 1    PART 2
SHARE IT NOWREAD ABOUT ITTAKE ACTION
shnios-buxton is an innovative video for K-12 parents, middle and high school students, schools, and community organizations. It’s about gender equality in education, students’ protections under Title IX, and much more. Video Contents  Media Reports
As high school students plan for their new gender equality group, we watch them interview nationally recognized education, legal, and LGBTQ experts and learn from counselors, advocates, parents, and students. The video offers simple steps and engaging activities to make schools safer with equal learning spaces for all students.
In Part 2, a teenage victim learns about her right to privacy and mandated reporting when she speaks with a victim’s advocate.
 was created by parents who know—first hand—how important this information is for K-12 families. Share the video and Action Guide widely. Use the Presentation Guide to invite others to start the conversation!
shnios-buxton is free of charge. Your tax-deductible donation helps to defray production costs of Part 1 and allows us to produce Part 2.  To make your donation, please use PayPal. Thank you!

Take Action
toolkit

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Resources referenced in the video

In order mentioned
The assault that led to the founding of SSAIS
The Sexy Lie TEDx Youth Talk with Professor Caroline Heldman
Read 26 more items ↓

Fact Sheets

Read 11 items ↓

Know Your Rights

Read 6 items ↓

Is Your School Title IX Compliant?

Problem with your school

Abuse by school staff

Films, online talks, and PSAs

Read 19 items ↓

Books and Studies

Read 8 items ↓

Talking to Students

Read 1 item ↓

SSAIS thanks Terri L Rossi for supporting this page.

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Promoting healthy masculinity in K-12 schools - Marc Grimmett #MeTooK12 #MeToo #TimesUp

Promoting healthy masculinity in K-12 schools - Marc Grimmett - YouTube:

Promoting healthy masculinity in K-12 schools - Marc Grimmett



#MeTooK12 Campaign | Stop Sexual Assault in Schools

In this excerpt from Sexual Harassment: Not in Our School! psychologist and professor Marc Grimmett talks about ways to make our schools free from sexual harassment and violence. Watch the full video at http://bit.ly/2q6dVqt and Part 2 at http://bit.ly/2pvZZs8 "Sexual Harassment: Not in Our School!" is an empowering video for middle and high school students, K-12 parents, schools, and community organizations. It’s about gender equality in education, students’ protections under Title IX, and much more.
Visit SSAIS.org/video to learn how to bring Sexual Harassment: Not in Our School! to your audience free of charge. Share it widely using the Presentation Guide to start the conversation!
#MeTooK12 Campaign | Stop Sexual Assault in Schools
This video was created by parents who know—first hand—how important this information is for K-12 families. Visit SSAIS.org/video to support this work and get involved!
 
Copyright 2016 SSAIS.org All Rights Reserved. For noncommercial distribution only.

Stop Sexual Assault in Schools

Educating students, families, and schools about the right to an equal education free from sexual harassment


Stop Sexual Assault in Schools



#MeTooK12 Campaign




#Me2K12

A campaign to promote awareness and inspire action
to counteract pervasive sexual harassment and sexual violence in K-12 schools.




Combating rampant K-12 sexual harassment and assault

by Esther Warkov, Executive Director, SSAIS
#MeTooK12 is a social media hashtag created by the national nonprofit Stop Sexual Assault in Schools (SSAIS.org). The campaign encourages ...
Read more

What adults can do about K-12 sexual harassment and assaultby Jeffrey Caffee, civil rights attorney

Action Plan

  • Spread the hashtag #MeTooK12
  • Tweet your experiences of K-12 sexual harassment or assault. 
  • Post your experiences on the new #MeTooK12 Facebook page.
  • Check out the video and action guide at SSAIS.org/video, and the SSAIS YouTube channel.
  • Involve students, parents, school staff, clubs, community, media, and lawmakers.
  • Learn about Title IX and implement the Action Guide at SSAIS.org/video.
  • Contact SSAIS to become more involved with this campaign.

Coming soon: Blog by Sabrina Stevens, Senior Digital and Mobilization Manager, National Women's Law Center.

Coming soon: Vlog by professor and activist Caroline Heldman.

Thursday, January 11, 2018

New Year’s Resolution For Public Education

New Year’s Resolution For Public Education:

New Year’s Resolution For Public Education

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Wayne Wlodarski, a labor relations consultant for OEA, is asking teachers and all other citizens to make a New Year’s resolution in support of public education.
He, with permission, turned a Network for Public Education (NPE) statement into the attached resolution:
I BELIEVE that public education is the pillar of our democracy. I believe in the common school envisioned by Horace Mann. A common school is a public institution, which nurtures and teaches all who live within its boundaries, regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, sexual orientation or learning ability. All may enroll – regardless of when they seek to enter the school or where they were educated before.
I BELIEVE that taxpayers bear the responsibility for funding those schools and that funding should be ample and equitable to address the needs of the served community. I also believe that taxpayers have the right to examine how schools use tax dollars to educate children.
I BELIEVE that such schools should be accountable to the community they serve, and that community residents have the right and responsibility to elect those who govern the school. Citizens also have the right to insist that schooling be done in a manner that best serves the needs of all children.
In so stating these beliefs, I will do whatever I can to support and promote public education in Ohio.
This resolution can be signed and sent to public official and the media as an expression of support for the public common school system.
Please circulate this resolution via all means available.New Year’s Resolution For Public Education:


Monday, January 8, 2018

Mapping the imaginary lines we use to segregate our schools - Vox

Mapping the imaginary lines we use to segregate our schools - Vox:

Mapping the imaginary lines we use to segregate our schools

Is your district drawing borders to reduce or perpetuate segregation?



Think about your elementary school.
If you attended an American public school, chances are you went to that school because your family lived in that school’s attendance zone. You probably didn’t think twice about it.
We tend to assume these are neutrally drawn, immutable borders. But if you take a step back and look at the demographics of who lives in each attendance zone, you’re faced with maps like this:
Once you look at the school attendance zones this way, it becomes clearer why these lines are drawn the way they are. Groups with political clout — mainly wealthier, whiter communities — have pushed policies that help white families live in heavily white areas and attend heavily white schools.
We see this in city after city, state after state.
And often the attendance zones are gerrymandered to put white students in classrooms that are even whiter than the communities they live in.
The result is that schools today are as segregated now as they were about 50 years ago, not long after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
But this exact strategy — gerrymandering school districts to include certain kinds of students Mapping the imaginary lines we use to segregate our schools - Vox:


Sunday, January 7, 2018

Wendy Lecker: The segrenomics of U.S. education - StamfordAdvocate

Wendy Lecker: The segrenomics of U.S. education - StamfordAdvocate:

Wendy Lecker: The segrenomics of U.S. education



For children in Baltimore classrooms, 2018 opened with buildings where temperatures never topped 40 degrees. An incensed teacher wondered why persevering in abominable conditions is something “we only ask of black and brown children.”
A new book by Cornell professor Noliwe Rooks, “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education,” traces the history of separate and unequal education in America.
White America’s reaction to the prospect of educating children of color has ranged from outright and often violent opposition to promoting weak substitutes for adequately funded, integrated schools — substitutes that fail to ensure educational equity. Throughout U.S. history, these maneuvers have presented opportunities for hoarding resources for the white and affluent and even profiting at the expense of children of color — a phenomenon Rooks calls “segrenomics.”
From the earliest days of tax-supported public education, states found ways to deny African-American communities equal educational opportunity. One method was to simply refuse to fund African-American schools.
In 1914, South Carolina spent on average $15 per pupil for white schools but fewer than $2 per pupil for black schools. Appalled at the conditions in which African-American children were forced to learn, that state’s superintendent of education remarked: “It is not a wonder that they do not learn more, but the real wonder is that they learn as much as they do.”
As Rooks chronicles, officials in the South outlawed integration, double-taxed African-Americans, refused to build African-American schools and engaged in violence. Public money, even if raised by African-Americans, almost exclusively benefited white students.
Some white philanthropists resolved to help African-Americans — on their terms. They required poor African-American communities to front money for schools that the philanthropists would match. Determined African-American communities all over the South expended herculean efforts to raise the required money.
The philanthropists had a constricted vision of education for African-Americans. To them, it was a means to provide effective and subservient laborers to ensure the South’s economic health. As one organization put it, the goal was “to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life where they are.”
Rooks illustrates how officials and “reformers” have virtually ignored successful models for education, such as: adequate funding, integration, and community-initiated reforms.
As she demonstrates, inequality, hoarding and profiting off the backs of poor children of color continue today. Schools have Wendy Lecker: The segrenomics of U.S. education - StamfordAdvocate:

Friday, January 5, 2018

Charter Schools Are Reshaping America’s Education System for the Worse | The Nation

Charter Schools Are Reshaping America’s Education System for the Worse | The Nation:

Charter Schools Are Reshaping America’s Education System for the Worse

High faculty turnover, high student attrition, and booming funding are making charters into the perfect weapon to destroy our public school system.



Charter schools have been hailed as the antidote to public-school dysfunction by everyone from tech entrepreneurs to Wall Street philanthropists. But a critical autopsy by the advocacy group Network for Public Education (NPE) reveals just how disruptive the charter industry has become—for both students and their communities.
Charter schools are technically considered public schools but are run by private companies or organizations, and can receive private financing—as such, they are generally able to circumvent standard public-school regulations, including unions. This funding system enables maximum deregulation, operating like private businesses and free of the constraints of public oversight, while also ensuring maximum public funding. 
According to Carol Burris of NPE, charter schools “want the funding and the privilege of public schools but they don’t want the rules that go along with them.” She cites charter initiatives’ having developed their own certification policies, as well as disciplinary codes and academic standards—a tendency toward “wanting the best of both worlds” among both non- and for-profit charter organizations.
In California, a nonprofit charter industrial model has flourished. The California Virtual Academy (CAVA) network runs hundreds of schools, delivering online-based programs through “cyber” outlets, often concentrated on students in low-income communities of color. CAVA’s political influence has expanded along with its brand.
 California’s 2016 primary elections saw fierce battles funded through charter-school industry groups, particularly the Parent Teacher Alliance, which spent several million dollars on races for local superintendents and legislators. Reflecting the ambitions of charter proponents to aggressively expand the sector statewide, the charter boosters pushed candidates who favored lifting district limits on opening new charters. Such policies have sparked controversy, since charter growth is associated with budget erosion for public schools and resistance to staff unionization in the host district. Another measure opposed by the charter sector would “make charter board meetings public, allow the public to inspect charter school records, and prohibit charter school officials from having a financial interest in contracts that they enter into in their official capacity.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District has seen dramatic effects from the expansion of charter schools as it wrestles with budget crises. The teachers’ union recently estimated that charter funding imposes costs on the district of about $590 million annually (the figure is disputed by charter Charter Schools Are Reshaping America’s Education System for the Worse | The Nation: