Teachers in Georgia Stand Up for Safe Working Conditions

John McCrary, principal of Lindley Middle School in Mableton, Georgia, liked to boast about the significant decline in discipline referrals in the 2006-07 school year. But many teachers at Lindley say there's a simple reason for the drop: incidents of student misbehavior were being ignored by the administration.

Lindley has had a long problem with student violence, including assaults against school staff. Most teachers will testify to the effectiveness of building positive relationships with the students that in part can help reduce the chances for confrontations in and out of the classroom.

But at Lindley, says Tana Page of the Georgia Association of Educators, "the students run the school. Teacher safety was not being taken seriously. In fact, they were even blamed most of the time."

Page says her office was receiving a call a day about the working conditions at Lindley. The problem was McCrary's over-emphasis on "bonding" with the students at the expense of discipline and safety--to the point where many teachers no longer felt the school provided a safe working environment. By the fall of 2007, enough was enough.

In November, Page filed an ethics complaint against Principal McCrary with the education division of the Professional Standards Commission, citing grievances related to working conditions, including student misbehavior being blamed on staff and gang activity in school being ignored.

In response, Principal McCrary issued a new discipline plan to address these concerns, promising to respond to every teacher concern or problem with any student. Teachers at Lindley, their voices now being heard, are waiting to see how and when this new plan actually unfolds.

--Tim Walker

Test-Prep Nitty Gritty

There are still some people out there who think that getting students to pass high-stakes tests is a way to maintain high expectations so they'll wind up learning more -- no pain, no gain, right?

But that's only true if the test is a reasonable reflection of what makes educational sense for the students. At a recent public forum in Somerville, Massachusetts about the Massachusetts state test, high school teacher Kate Bunker explained how she goes about trying to prepare students who speak very little English for the test. The Massachusetts test is used under No Child Left Behind to rate schools, but it's also a graduation test -- she's trying to help these kids get a high school diploma. Here's an excerpt from what she said. See if you think the time and effort they put into this will help them in any other situation than taking this test. (She'd be the first to say, No! But she doesn't have a choice.)

"First, I want to say that I'm just speaking for myself, not representing the Somerville Public Schools, just myself and how I've been preparing the foreign students to pass the [state test]. ...

"The long composition is about a piece of literature that they have read previously. That's 20 points. I try and encourage the kids, you know, out of a possible 20, maybe you can get 14. Maybe you can get a 10. So that they don't give up. Because a lot of kids will just give up, faced with the fact that they have to write a few paragraphs about a novel. It is really pretty tough.

"Some students come to my class not knowing the past tense, barely knowing English, and they had to take the exam in November.

[One strategy we taught] was changing the prompt into an introductory sentence. We went for weeks and weeks crossing out the part of the question that was a prompt, and then highlighting in yellow the words that they would reuse. I don't know -- does that sound crazy? -- and they got it.

"For example, 'From a piece of literature you have read, in or out of school, select…' We crossed that all out. '…a character with the ability to inspire or lead others.' And we crossed out all the rest. And then we would say, 'Forrest Gump, from the book Forrest Gump, was a character with the ability to inspire or lead others.' This is primitive! It may sound very shocking, but I got the kids who barely knew any English to be able to do that -- to recognize what was a prompt and what was content, and then rework it. So this is the level that I was dealing on."

--Alain Jehlen

And They'll Serve Detentions at Gitmo

From architecture to agriculture, almost every high school in the country has some kind of school-to-work program that aims to hook kids with relevant academics and real-life job training.

Well, how about this one?

In a sure sign of the times, Maryland's Joppatowne High School has become the first in the country to consider the economics of terrorism. Students in its "Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness" magnet program, which opened in August, will choose one of three tracks: Engineering and technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science."

According to the school's website, the homeland security industry is growing from a $40 billion business in 2004 to an estimated $180 billion industry by 2015. With the magnet program, students will have the opportunity to prepare for related jobs, and "provide services back to the community, the State and the Nation."

--Mary Ellen Flannery