Education and Schools

It’s back to school time, and with the return to school comes anxiety on the part of students and parents about bullying. Bullying and harassment is especially a problem for girls, students who do not conform to gender norms, and LGBT students. While it is of course important to educate students and parents about effective techniques for avoiding and standing up to students who bully, most articles and lists about the best ways to avoid bullying are woefully one-sided. These lists address targets of bullying, rather than the students who bully, and can therefore tend towards victim-blaming. Instead of placing responsibility only on targets and bystanders of bullying, we need to charge students who bully with changing their attitudes. Here is a handy guide – for bullies – on how to avoid bullying:

• If you see someone you don’t like, simply leave them alone. Don’t make disparaging remarks or tease them.
• Don’t use slurs like “slut” and “whore” to describe classmates or peers, and don’t forward “sexts” or explicit emails.

Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee issued a searing indictment of for-profit colleges. The report, “For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success,” was the result of Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)’s two-year investigation into the growing for-profit higher education sector.

The report found that although for-profit colleges, in theory, have an important role to play in higher education and should be well-equipped to meet the needs of non-traditional students—such as older students and single parents—the reality is quite different.

For-profit education is a big money-making industry that puts profits ahead of student success. More widgets = more profit. Except for that the widgets in this case are students. So it’s no surprise that companies that the report examined spent $4.2 billion (with a capital “B”) on marketing and recruiting, equivalent to 22.7% of all revenue.

This incentive structure has led to aggressive, misleading, and deceptive recruiting practices that look a lot like a sales process. For example, training materials from some for-profits showed that recruiters were taught to locate and manipulate prospective students’ fears.

And it’s working! These schools sink incredible amounts of money on marketing and recruiting, and are reaping incredible profits. In 2009, publicly traded companies operating for-profit colleges had an average profit margin of nearly 20% (and paid their CEOs an average of $7.2 million). Read more »

That's me, right behind the President. Told you it was insane.

Screen cap from whitehouse.gov/live.

Yesterday, I got to meet President Obama. It was insane.

I attended a lobby day a few weeks ago to encourage Congress to find a solution to prevent the doubling of federal student loan interest rates, set to kick in July 1.

I showed up to the event, organized by Campus Progress, not knowing much about the debate except that the interest increase from 3.4% to 6.8% would mean $2,400 added on to my loan bill. Since then, I have kept working on this issue and tried to stay on top of it in the media. Then, three days ago, as the result of continued involvement with Campus Progress, I received a message in my inbox I never expected: I was invited to attend an event at the White House on student loans with President Obama.

I came to DC this summer to intern for NWLC and learn more about policies that impact women and families. Yesterday, while staring at the back of the Presidents head as he gave his speech about the importance of keeping student loan interest rates down, in a semi-existential moment, everything connected—and I realized that I was learning about a women’s issue at that very moment. Read more »

Growing up in a post Title IX era, I did not think about discrimination on the basis of my gender in school. I played sports when and where I wanted to and participated in many accelerated courses in high school. As a humanities major and now a law student, I’ve mostly been in courses where women were equally represented, if not the majority of students.

The same is not true for my sister, Jessica, who is a nuclear engineer. In her time at Berkeley she was often the only woman in her classes and continues to be one of few women in her field. I asked her to about her thoughts on what Title IX and equality in STEM education means to her. Here’s what she told me:

“I have always been interested in how things work. I realized at an early age that math and science were my strong suits, so in high school I opted for advanced courses in these disciplines rather than in the humanities. When I was applying to college choosing a major was easy: I was going to be an engineer. Not only did I embody the characteristics that make a good engineering student, it was fun. Up until this point I was aware that people considered boys to be more interested, or even better, in math and science, but this was not apparent during my educational experiences.

Once I enrolled in Berkeley the dichotomy was obvious.

What a great way to start the day! I sat down at my desk, opened my email, and was immediately greeted with good news. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced that young people who were brought to the United States before age 16 and who meet several key criteria will no longer be subject to deportation immediately. Instead, they will be considered for relief from removal proceedings for a period of two years, subject to renewal, and will be eligible to apply for work authorization. I applaud the Obama Administration for taking this huge step forward for our country’s immigration policy.

This is also a big step forward for education policy, because to be eligible for this relief the youth has to be in school, have graduated from high school, have obtained a GED, or be an honorably discharged veteran of the armed forces. Creating a clear path to work authorization (and taking away the stress of possible removal) for eligible, hard-working students will provide them with a powerful incentive to stay in high school and graduate. Read more »

This week, we had a small piece of good news about federal investments in child care and early education. On June 12, the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee approved a fiscal year 2013 appropriations bill that included increased funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), Head Start, and early intervention services and provided new funding for Race to the Top, with a portion set aside for the Early Learning Challenge.

The bill would increase Child Care and Development Block Grant discretionary funding by $160 million, to $2.438 billion. (Discretionary funding is set each year; there is also $2.917 billion in mandatory CCDBG funding.) The increase includes $90 million to support training, education, and other professional development opportunities for the early care and education workforce, which is key to improving the overall quality of early care and education, and $70 million to help more families pay for care and raise reimbursement rates for child care providers. By providing funding to expand the availability of child care assistance as well as to enhance the quality of the workforce, the Senate Subcommittee is signaling that it recognizes investments in both areas are essential in giving families access to higher-quality child care options. Read more »

Welcome to NWLC’s first weekly roundup for April. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, so I thought I’d kick things off by sharing a few ideas of how you can support victim of sexual assault and help raise awareness during the month. Also this week: our latest infographic, some lady athletes making history, and more.

All throughout April, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center will be providing resources and ways to get involved with Sexual Assault Awareness Month, or SAAM for short. The 2012 SAAM Day of Action passed us already (it was this past Tuesday, April 3), but you can see what other current campaigns are in the works here, including Tweet About It! Tuesdays every Tuesday in April at 2pm ET. SAAM activists from around the country will be using the hashtag #Tweetaboutit for these weekly chats, in addition to #SAAM and #SAAM2012.

You can also check out Take Back The Night’s calendar to see if there will be a TBTN event in your community in the coming weeks.

Yesterday we published a new infographic detailing what tax breaks for millionaires cost. The

 average tax cut per millionaire in 2012 – $143,000 – could help support a number of programs, like Head Start or Pell Grants. Want to learn more? Check out the graphic – it opens in full size if you click on it.

Read more »

My 5-hour trip to a New York theater this weekend was the longest I have ever traveled to watch a movie, but the 1.5-hour “Bully” film was an even longer emotional journey.

It’s hard to sit in a theater and eat popcorn as kids are being brutalized and taunted in front of your eyes. “This can’t be happening,” you think, before remembering your childhood - it does. This isn’t a John Hughes’ movie. Jokes about “geeks” aren’t funny. It’s real life and kids go home thinking their lives are not worth living.

Alex, 12, is stabbed with pencils, strangled, punched and pushed, but it’s what he says that makes you really cry. When asked how the abuse makes him feel, Alex replies, “I don’t feel anything anymore.”

The film shifts between the stories of five children, capturing the struggles of these different families and their powerful stories in context of a systemic crisis. With more than 13 million children falling victim to bullying each year, the problem transcends geographic, racial, ethnic and economic borders.

It forces us to look at greater issues, including violence, homophobia, and a pervasive “kids will be kids” attitude that perpetuates bullying culture in schools, rather than focusing our anger on the faceless child issuing beat-downs on the skinny kid in glasses who has trouble making friends. Read more »

Earlier this week, the federal district court for the District of Columbia dismissed a case brought by the American Sports Council against the U.S. Department of Education, in which ASC tried to stop the Department from applying to high schools Title IX’s three-part test for determining whether schools are providing males and females with equal opportunities to play sports. Of course, the law has always applied to high schools; this was merely the latest attempt to weaken Title IX’s application to sports.

You would think that everyone would be in favor of treating our sons and daughters equally, but ASC and similar groups have long argued that the law hurts males by requiring schools to cut their opportunities in order to provide girls and women with opportunities that they don’t really want, because they are inherently less interested in playing sports. Fortunately, the federal courts of appeals have unanimously rejected such arguments, which are premised on the very stereotypes that Title IX was enacted to combat. Read more »

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) released the 2009-2010 civil rights data collection which tracks a number of equity indicators from schools around the country, everything from discipline rates to rates of sexual harassment, from schools around the country. We at NWLC were thrilled to see that  the CRDC data has been cross tabulated by sex and race.

Cross tabu-what?

Let me digress. When data is collected, it can be disaggregated. That means that rather than just take a count of how many kids are suspended in a year, disaggregated data would count how many White kids and how many Native American kids are suspended in a year. Or you can disaggregate by sex and count how many girls and how many boys were subject to physical restraint in school. Cross tabulation takes that one step further and lets you look at one or more of these categories together.

Which is how we found out that 1 out of every 10 African American girls was subject to an out of school suspension last year. Boys made up about two-thirds of suspensions, but African American girls were more likely to be suspended than all other girls, White Boys, Hispanic boys, and Asian boys.

Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a lot of attention paid to the plight of African American men and boys in this country, and with good reason. Black men in the U.S. face shockingly high drop-out rates, unemployment rates and rates of incarceration. As Michelle Alexander has pointed out, there are currently more Black men in prison or on parole in this country than were enslaved before the Civil War began.

Unfortunately, the emphasis on the serious educational crisis for boys of color has resulted in little focus on the challenges facing girls of color. In fact, girls at risk — particularly girls of color — have alarmingly low graduation rates. Over 45% of Native American female students fail to graduate on time, if at all; the same is true for 38% of female African American and 39% of Latina students. Cross-tabulated data help us to ensure that problems faced by different subgroups of students are not masked, so educational interventions (or lack thereof) will be data driven, not based on stereotypes. Read more »