School Safety & Security

The first of some 20 federal investigations into racial disparity in school district discipline practices closed today, yielding a long-term, prescriptive plan for change in the Oakland public schools, a district in which black students made up 32 percent of enrollments last school year but accounted for 63 percent of all suspensions.

 Repeated studies have shown that when recess is delayed, children pay less and less attention. They are more focusedon days when they have recess. A major study in Pediatrics found that children with more than 15 minutes of recess a day were far better behaved in class than children who had shorter recess breaks or none at all.

This shortfall in mathematical preparation for college-bound students has existed for a long time, but it is being exacerbated by the increased use of technology. College-level math classes almost never use graphing calculators, while high-school classes invariably do. College professors want their students to understand abstract concepts; technology advocates claim their products help teach students such abstractions, but in practice they simply don’t.

Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson can move forward with plans to close 15 D.C. schools, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, rejecting activists’ claims that the closures violate the civil rights of city children. 

Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.

South Dakota became the first state in the nation to enact a law explicitly authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job, under a measure signed into law on Friday by Gov. Dennis Daugaard

School districts in L.A., New York, Chicago, Dallas, Miami and Orlando, Fla., plan to announce Thursday efforts to use their collective clout — 2.5 million daily meals served and $530 million annually spent — to make wholesome food a national standard. The districts are also aiming for more eco-friendly practices — replacing polystyrene and plasticwith biodegradable trays and flatware, for instance.

These issues are at the heart of the 2013 edition of Education Week’s Quality Counts report: Code of Conduct: Safety, Discipline, and School Climate. A collaboration between the Education Week newsroom and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, Quality Counts 2013 investigates the impact of a school’s social and disciplinary environment on students’ ability to learn and on the teachers and administrators tasked with guiding them.

The report’s journalism takes an in-depth look at a range of school-climate factors—including strong and positive peer interactions, a sense of safety and security, and school disciplinary policies and practices—that help to lay the groundwork for student achievement.

This is an EdMedia Commons summary and story portal concerning the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Accounts and takeaways by Education Week, ABC News, CBS News, USA Today, among others, are featured.

The share of kindergartners whose parents opted out of state immunization requirements more than doubled in the decade that ended in 2008, peaking at 7.6 percent in the 2008-9 school year, according to the state’s Health Department, raising alarm among public health experts. But last year, the Legislature adopted a law that makes it harder for parents to avoid getting their children vaccinated, by requiring them to get a doctor’s signature if they wish to do so. Since then, the opt-out rate has fallen fast, by a quarter, setting an example for other states with easy policies.

The attendance push has been particularly strong in California, New York, Texas and other states where schools funding is based on how many children are in their seats each day, rather than enrollment. Several California districts have made a back-to-school ritual of reminding parents that schools lose money whenever kids are out.

Some have asked families with children who missed school for avoidable reasons such as family trips to reimburse schools the $30-$50 a day the absence cost in lost funding, or at least consider having a child with the sniffles or a stomach ache show up for the first part of the day so he or she can be counted before going home sick.

“A new analysis of Census data by the real-estate services company Trulia Inc. shows that the quality of schools remains a crucial factor in where parents choose to buy homes. Of course, schools have always been closely tied to real-estate sales, but Trulia’s findings indicate that despite the collapse of the housing market, education is sometimes even more important than factors such as price, commute time and nearby amenities.”

Research brief from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network offers recommendations for how schools can make their climate more supportive for LGBT students. It states that “By including LGBT-related content in their curriculum, educators can send a message that they are a source of support for LGBT students.

After Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge, anti-bullying advocates and others were quick to attribute his death to cyberbullying from his roommate Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on Clementi with a guest in their room. This exhaustively reported article shows that—in this case and others—the blame perhaps is not so easy to place.

This report examines what sorts of policies states use to address bullying. It found that “from 1999 to 2010, more than 120 bills were enacted by state legislatures nationally that have either introduced or amended education or criminal justice statutes to address bullying and related behaviors in schools.

The Philadelphia Inquirer education team won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of violence in the city’s schools. Their interactive site offers school-by-school databases for incidents of violence in addition to stories that includes an analysis of how even kindergarteners can be the perpetrators and victims of severe campus violence. The articles also are available as printable PDFs. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

This report is a comprehensive and wide-ranging compendium of statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Its “Key Findings” section is a go-to source for quick summaries of the numbers of different types of crimes reported during the school year.

In the summer of 2010, several U.S. Cabinet departments held a summit to discuss ways they could collaborate to help the federal government to stem what was seen as a rising tide of bullying in the nation’s schools. Education Secretary Duncan spoke with the group, stating “bullying is doubly dangerous because if left unattended it can rapidly escalate into even more serious violence and abuse. Just as you have gateway drugs, bullying is gateway behavior.

This report offers detailed statistics on the types of harassment and abuse that LGBT students reported experiencing in school. “Schools nationwide are hostile environments for a distressing number of LGBT students — almost all of whom commonly hear homophobic remarks and face verbal and physical harassment and even physical assault because of their sexual orientation or gender expression,” notes the report as a key finding.

This report considers the educational consequences of the considerable racial segregation that remains in schools today and the potential of controlled choice to address them. It begins with an extensive review of research regarding the effects of school integration. Previous research provides relatively strong evidence that desegregation helps minority students reach higher academic achievement and better long-term outcomes such as college attendance and employment.