School Blames Sick 2nd Grader for Funding Shortages

Or, Principal Sends Obscene Memo to Parents
Or, The Memo I Can't Show You

The Children Are Watching 

Well, maybe not obscene in the way you may be thinking, but definitely not up to “the moral standards of the community.” How else to describe a note to parents accusing them of costing the school money by keeping a sick child at home?

The color-coded form bears the name of the school and the ominous opening line: “To the parents of __[our second-grader]_____________.” Then, “We are sending this letter to inform you that your child has missed ______ days of school so far for the 2018-2019 school year.” Presumably something the parents of a 7-year-old would be aware of.

Then the real message: “Our average daily attendance drives our school budget….Every day your child is in school, we earn about $20 for our school budget.” Then a sentence claiming that as of mid-January of this school year, the school has “lost” tens of thousands of dollars due to student absences. “If a child is absent (excused or unexcused) we lose funding.”

That the child also loses a day of instruction seems added as an after-thought. The form is signed by the principal.

When I first saw this memo, sent to me by the child’s parent, its pre-printed format looked to be an official document of the school district, something I’d post here so you should it see for yourselves and not think I was making this up! But in checking with teachers at other schools, which I do when a school policy seems too absurd to be real, I learned that to their knowledge, the district requires no such message to parents. One elementary math teacher said it best, “We certainly don’t want sick children to come to school.” Neither does the CDC. Neither does the American Pediatric Association. Nor public health officials at all levels. Only keeping hands washed ranks above staying away from others is promoted as sound disease prevention.

What’s missing here? First, any concern or compassion and offer to help the child learn what she might have missed while she was out sick.

Even more obviously omitted is any message that parents and teachers – and this principal – need to join together to fight for full, adequate, equitable funding for the schools. The idea that school attendance “drives our budget” is ridiculous. There was a time when school funding, especially the state’s share, was based on a school’s enrollment; enrollments were set by the number of
students enrolled as of a certain arbitrarily chosen day, usually in October. Not a perfect formula, but one that stayed stable over the school year. A shift to dollars-per-daily attendance mocks the vagaries of childhood illnesses, flu season itself, and parents’ good-faith compliance with pediatric and public health directives, to say nothing of the factors like poverty, lack of transportation, or language barriers that directly impact children's ability to come to school.  Blaming the children instead of the legislature, the governor and lieutenant governor, the drastic cuts by a previous governor (you, Rick Perry) which have never been fully restored, and more recently the millions drained from the public’s schools by the charter chains – absurd, undemocratic, and anti-child. I can only imagine how a less informed parent, or a parent new to American schools,  would feel on getting this notice: “your child is costing us money! Is she really, really, really sick enough to stay home?” Would your child face punishment? Your family maybe be billed for the $20?

When will educators and parents place the blame where it belongs? When will we all join in common cause to demand the funding our schools need for all our children to learn and for all our children and families to thrive? For all our teachers to do their best work? And for administrators to say no to harsh, degrading policies that undermine their good judgment?

We're seeing this courage around the country: Families and students joined to support LA teachers who walked out in strike on their behalf. Teachers in very red states, with no union protection, walked out to demand living wages for themselves and instructionally-sound funding for their schools. Texas teachers have for too long taken scarcity for granted. And now their principals, afraid of the “accountability” calculus that punishes them for children’s absences, shift the blame to the youngest, the sickest, the least powerful: the children. We’ve seen this in the harmful effects of the testing system, with the children who don’t test well blamed for low school ratings and even school closings. Struggling learners triaged out as liabilities to their school ratings. Now the sick kids get the blame for the state’s failure to fund our schools?  The state's refusal to fund them abundantly, in proportion to the state’s incredible wealth? The state whose economy is said to be the world’s 10th largest?

You see now why I call the bright yellow memo obscene: if it does reflect our communities’ shared moral standards, we are in deep trouble. And so are the children.

Here are links to bills currently before the Texas legislature this very session TEXAS FREEDOM NETWORK and to the House and Senate legislative committees charged with funding, sustaining, and protecting our public schools. And if you’re a principal or school board member or PTO president, why not hold an information session for parents to learn how our schools are funded, and under-funded, and which state officials have the power to make changes. Do it now, while the legislature is in session!

They need to hear from you: the children are watching.

Your Kids, Their Data, No Privacy

Who, exactly, is watching?

A woman is pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of your child’s school, taking pictures of the children and the school. She seems especially interested in the front and side entrances. A kid runs in to tell his teacher. An alert parent in the carpool lane calls 911.  

Your daughter sees a shadow outside her bedroom window and hears a rustling in the flower bed.  You rush outside too late to see the culprit but find a large shoe print in the newly raked soil and call 911.

The coach catches the shy sophomore boy everyone believed to be kind and polite sharing nude photos on his phone with the guys in the locker room.  He takes the phone and calls the principal – who then has to call the girl’s parents to let them know their daughter’s body is no longer her own private self.

When children’s privacy is violated in ways that are overt, visible, knowable, the violation is unquestioned. It is unacceptable. In most cases it is illegal.  Even when a perpetrator is caught, prosecuted and punished, the unease remains.  The fear doesn’t go away.   The child may not feel safe, may not be able to trust.  And the parent – or teacher – lives with the vulnerability of not being able to protect that child.

So why is it different when the violation is hidden, opaque, electronic, commercial, and complicated?

Kim Slingerland, a mother of three in Alberta, Canada, discovered an intrusion into her children’s privacy by an unlikely source:  a game app marketed for children in the “family” section of Google Play.  The app, which has kids racing cartoon cars driven by animals, looks innocuous, and is even labeled as age-appropriate for young children.

In a report titled “How Game Apps CollectData on Children,” New York Times reporters say that the game is designed to do more than make racing against animal drivers fun.  They write “Until last month, the app also shared users’ data, sometimes including the precise location of devices, with more than half-dozen advertising and online tracking companies.”   The attorney general of New Mexico filed a lawsuit claiming the maker of Fun Kid Racing had “violated a federal children’s privacy law through dozens of Android apple that shared children’s data.”  The suit charges the maker of this and other apps designed for children of “flouting a law intended to prevent the personal data of children under 13 from falling into the hands of predators, hackers and manipulative marketers.” And the suit charges Google with misleading parents and other consumers by listing these un-private apps in the “family” section of its products.

The Times analysts did additional research, confirming academic studies and other investigations that show that without parental consent (or even knowledge), many apps aimed at children are collecting such personal details as names, physical locations, email addresses and tracking other connections such as ads the users click on. 

The article, which extends to a full-page story in the Business section, follows attempts to regulate apps designed for children, and restrict their capacity to collect data on children, through laws and regulatory policies.   The writers document pushback by Google and others, both denying and defending their practices and urging “self-regulation” by the industry.  Graphics accompanying the article show how the data moves from the “user” (a child!) to being collected to then being marketed to third parties.

The article concludes with statements by regulators and industry leaders about whether new laws can protect children’s privacy (their “data” is their lives!), suggesting without good, consistent enforcement these companies will never be compliant.

So about that 911 call:  if we don’t know that the person lurking outside the window is really an electronic signal hiding already inside the child’s room, how can we call to report the violation?

Some speculate that the current generation of parents who grew up on computers and cell phones and social media don’t even expect for their personal information to be confidential. They think privacy is passé – it’s over.  But I’m not so sure.  If these same parents call 911 about that woman with the camera taking pictures of kids who aren’t hers, these parents clearly do care about privacy. They do care about protecting their children.  The intruders are just not visible from the carpool lane. They’re not leaving footprints in the flowerbed.

I’ve written before about the ways instructional software and digital testing programs increasingly dominating our classrooms are gathering data on the students – not just from their digital homework and tests but from any other social media they have open on their devices.    Researchers are making these intrusions – and the very inadequate laws meant to regulate them – known, but policymakers, often reliant on the big campaign contributions of the tech companies, have been slow to act. And most have little knowledge of how any of this works.

So it may be up to parents to step up, speak up. I suggest sending this article to all the parents you know who may be concerned in general about the amount of “screen time” they allow their young children but think these cute kiddie apps are harmless. The apps and the hidden systems behind them are not safe and there is no way to know just how much of your children's information has been sold to these third parties or what they may already be doing with it.

Let’s stop them from watching.

Reverence For Life, An Immigrant Mom, and the Nun on the Bus

The Children are Watching

What can be more sacred than a nursing baby, safe in its mother’s protective arms?  That moment of nurture and love and connection calls to mind Albert Schweitzer’s writings on The Teaching of Reverence for Life.

Does anyone read Schweitzer any more? Is his affirmation for all life – including the lives of people who seem very different from ours – taught in our schools?  

I don’t know. But I do know that Schweitzer’s reverence for life — and our calling to live it — has a powerful voice in the person of Sister Simone Campbell, the attorney-nun who came to fame as one of the “Nuns on the Bus,” speaking out for the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed right here in our country.  Why do we need the voice of Sister Simone?  Because today’s news story tells me that the reverence for life — our humility before the very essence of human existence —is in jeopardy.

Read this news from CNN. You'll stop breathing. You may feel tears.  You may wish you could get on a plane to McAllen and go find that baby.  (And you wish you could just shake that immigration officer – but that would be fueling the cycle of inhumanity—we can’t let them make us cruel.)

" McAllen, Texas (CNN)The undocumented immigrant from Honduras sobbed as she told an attorney Tuesday how federal authorities took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center, where she was awaiting prosecution for entering the country illegally.

When the woman resisted, she was handcuffed, Natalia Cornelio, the attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, recalled from her interview with the woman, who had been detained under the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy to refer anyone caught crossing the border illegally for federal prosecution. "

Surely none of us is so cruel to as rip a nursing baby from her mother.  But if we do nothing, we are complicit. Complicit in an action we could not have imagined, or might have imagined  as being the actions of a “third-world” despot. Surely not in a democracy. Surely not in a country with laws.

Right now the laws are being inverted, perverted, controverted to impose cruelty, not justice.    But there is a lawyer who can teach us how to reclaim our humanity:  Sister Simone Campbell, one of the Nuns on the Bus!

Sister Simone is one of my heroes: she keeps speaking out about poverty when no one (most notably not even one of the presidential candidates in 2008 or 2016) is mentioning this growing crisis. She doesn't tolerate silence when there is injustice.  She speaks candidly about the human costs of war, about fairness and equity.  

And she is eloquent on the matter of the peoples whose perilous lives are bringing them to the US even when they know their dreams of a safe place for their children are now threatened by the policies of an administration hostile to them as people.  (I won’t repeat the words the president and attorney general use to describe these, their fellow human beings – you’ve already heard them and I don’t want a word search to attach them to my name). 

Here is a video of how Sister Simone describes the situation:

What is at stake?

What Sister Simone sees at stake is the values and ethics of a nation complicit with the poor and inhumane treatment of immigrants, specifically immigrants crossing the Mexican border. Here is an article citing her condemnation of the use of the Bible to justify separation of families at the border.

What should we do?

She calls on us to treat migrants in a way that is “humane, just, and fraternal” by improving our detention and deportation practices. “It is a mandate of our faith and our nation. Laws that separate families are unjust and immoral and are no laws at all," she says in regard to the cruel immigration laws enforced by the Trump administration. Here is a Link to the Federal Policies Sister Simone and NETWORK supports as well as some Policy Solutions they have put forward (scroll down to see their ideas for solutions). 

I could not be more grateful for the life, the work, the mission, the example of Sister Simone.  She would  ask us to turn that gratitude into action, that admiration into advocacy.   Her example is powerful to the extent we follow it.

To share your ideas about Sister Simone, babies taken from their moms, and actions you are taking to end the immigration cruelty, please click on the “comments” pencil.

Teacher Appreciation, A Gift of Love: The Children Are Watching

Let a teacher know how grateful you are for the many ways she cares for your child, stays up late and works weekends to create lessons that will engage your child's curiosity, expand his mind, stimulate her drive for learning. Let your child's teacher know how much you appreciate all the ways he helps the children make friends, discern the effects of their actions on others, master complicated ideas that transform them into bold know-it-alls, eager to tackle the next tough assignment. (Sometimes that
assignment comes from the tough questions the kids ask, like how colors got their names or why it's ok for countries to make war when kids are told not to bully )

It's time to give that teacher some love! Specifically, I Am Loved, the incomparably beautiful new book of poems by Nikki Giovanni! Ashley Bryan's luminous illustrations add both force and tenderness to these poems of love - love for a child, love for "our dance beneath the sun," love for elders who have passed, whom we sing as a

sad blue song ....

a Song of Blackbird

To Say

You will be missed.

The theme of this collection of poems is clear, the message strong:

I reflect the strengths

Of my people

And for that alone

I am loved

Nikki Giovanni is connected to my life as a teacher: she was a young poet when I was a young high school English teacher in Nashville, my first time in the South. As my colleagues and I sought out Black authors to add to what counted as "American" literature in the curriculum, I discovered Nikki Giovanni. We couldn't have imagined teaching poetry without her.

Give I Am Loved to a teacher. Donate it to your school library. Send a copy to your school board - why not? Remind them what our schools are for: the kids, the teachers who inspire them, and the dreams we have for the kinds of caring people we want them to become. After all, the children are watching.

To add your comments, please click on the "comments" pencil.

Announcement: Save Texas Schools Rally

This is an announcement from Save Texas Schools.  Please add your voice at the Capitol!

It's rally time at the Capitol-Saturday, March 25, 10 am-Noon 

Public education in Texas continues to struggle with the challenges of underfunding and over-testing. Texas children deserve better. Join thousands of fellow Texans standing up at the Capitol to say THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW!

We have an amazing set of speakers (including parents, teachers and students) and student performers. We'll also have a large group of legislators attending as our audience. Buses are in the works from DFW, Houston, San Antonio,El Paso, and the Valley. Keep spreading the word!

Texas children cannot be left standing, waiting for long-delayed funding reforms. We need fair funding, testing reform and community-based supports for struggling schools today!

Click here for information about parking, speakers, etc. Get those amazing signs ready, spread the word on social media and be there on Saturday morning, ready to be make some noise for public ed!

Save Texas Schools Twitter: @savetxschools

Education, Race and Poverty: It’s Time to Organize!

Our local NPR station (KUHF) joined with its Dallas counterpart (KERA) for a state-wide conversation on the persistent connections between race, poverty and the education of the state’s children. You can listen to the program here.

The invitation to participate prompted me to reflect on my thirty years of studying Texas public schools and the ways year after year, legislative session after legislative session, the story has been one of extraordinary teachers and children inside the schools up against pressures from outside that blame, undermine and disinvest.  I used a part of my time during the KUHF interview to recount a history of what Jean Anyon called “pauperizing,” that is, making poor – taking resources away from our schools. In Texas this has happened through a long history of inadequate and unequal funding (acknowledged in more than one court ruling but rarely remedied by legislative investment), as well as billions in direct cuts under Rick Perry (gasp, now US Secretary of Energy) when he was governor.  

Recent and current top officials (Bush, Perry, Abbott, Patrick) have made families poorer as well, rejecting Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act though the state ranks very high in the number of uninsured children and families, and not even considering such legislation as fair and living wage laws, increased regulation of asthma-inducing industrial pollution, or other policies to mitigate inequalities.

And now the threat to poor families, and to the public’s schools, is the outsourcing of poor, Latino and African American children to charter chains and voucher schools (giving families “freedom scholarships,” with tax breaks to rich “donors” to private schools), an artificial “market” of schooling in no way accountable to or aligned with strong communities and democracy governance.  It can’t be a coincidence that strategic subtractions from the capacities of our public schools come at a time when our student population is most ethnically, culturally, linguistically diverse – that is, less “white.”

Professor Richard Milner of the University of Pittsburg contributed to the radio discussion his research on the ways our failure to address persistent poverty and to address educational inequalities fills the school-to-prison pipeline, abridging the futures of the most vulnerable youth.  In his concluding remarks he urged listeners to organize on behalf of our schools and our children.

I didn’t get to follow up on the air, so I’ll share with you my closing remarks:

Yes, organize!   Get together with your neighbors and with parents and teachers at a school near you.  And join in the efforts of these groups already working on behalf of your children, your community and our schools:

In Texas: 
Community Voices for Public Schools:  See their website for info on Save Our Schools Day, March 25 , to lobby the legislature to defeat vouchers and fund our schools

Pastors for Texas Children , working to keep tax dollars in the public's schools, not in voucher schools; and Texas Freedom Network, vigilant advocacy for public schools, for separation of church and state, for educational equity

Nationally:  
Network for Public Education, now 300,000 members strong!  

Only by organizing, by making common cause, can we counter the increasing forces of pauperization and subtraction dominating education policy in Austin and in Washington.


Please comment on my post here

ACTION NEEDED AGAINST VOUCHER LEGISLATION

For my readers in Texas, Raise Your Hand Texas reminds us that Vouchers Hurt!  Call and write your state senators NOW to let them know you're not fooled by "tax credit scholarship voucher," "Education Savings Accounts," or any other trick label that takes dollars out of our children's classrooms and turns them over to profiteers and private interests.   Tell them: we know theft when we see it.  And we're watching.  Vouchers hurt the public's schools. A vote for vouchers will hurt you in the next election!

UPDATE:  

The Senate Education Committee on voucher legislation has been RESCHEDULEDfor Tuesday, March 21.

Please comment on my post here

Imagine a Secretary of Education for America’s Schools

Source:  http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/static/photo/1x/Imagine-Dream-Teaching-Inspire-Classroom-1182585.jpg

When the President of the United States appoints a Secretary of Education who openly, vocally, and financially works to destroy the public’s schools, we can sigh and hope to outlive her time in office, giving what support we can to the teachers we know and the schools that serve our communities.  Or we can declare the experiment in democratic education over (as some have already done), and shed tears for what this generation of children will miss and what our country will lack when their schools are closed and they, and their friends, are outsourced to private “education management companies” called “charter schools.”

Or, we can heed Maxine Greene’s admonition to foster in each other a social imagination – the imagination to envision a more just society, a creative public spirit, and a collective sense of urgency to make democracy work for everyone.  For Greene, an esteemed professor at Teachers College and a tireless advocate for educating through the creative arts, a social imagination was not idle musing or wishing what might have been.  An informed social imagination leads to action for justice.

Source:  https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7286/27345059694_5b19ae9dfb_b.jpg

I invited readers to imagine along with me what it would mean if we had a Secretary of Education for America’s children:  a cabinet member who understands the gravity of being the voice of the children –all our children – at the highest levels of government, and who acts accordingly.   Now we need to imagine what a Secretary of Education would do in her first months in office if she understood, cared about, and used her power to advocate for the public’s schools.

Again, cue up John Lennon’s “Imagine” or maybe “What a WonderfulWorld.”  And let’s imagine together…..

Imagine a Secretary of Education who understands that an investment in America’s infrastructure absolutely must include making sure that every public school, in every neighborhood, is built as an engaging learning environment and an asset to its community. That secretary would call in the Secretary of Labor to remind him that building good schools, and renovating older ones, is a great for job creation – for the workers immediately employed and for economies that that powerful learning will generate in the schools they build.  Our imagined Secretary would enlist the Secretary of Health and Human Services and colleagues NIH and the CDC and EPA for their expertise in assuring the building materials are built with children’s health in mind, safety from toxic chemicals, with clean air and water a given.  She’d of course call on the expertise of the Department of Energy and the professional organizations of school architects for specs on energy efficiency and renewable systems throughout, to model for the children a reverence for nature’s resources as well as to reduce expenses.

Imagine a Secretary of Education who tells the Congress and the President and infrastructure designers to get ready to build, but not until she has consulted with teachers and parents about what they want their school buildings to be.  Lively learning centers, yes.    Abundantly equipped, yes – even in the poorest neighborhoods, the most remote rural counties.    And inviting to all – a place where teachers want to teach, children are excited to spend their days, parents and neighbors know they are welcome to visit and volunteer.   Well acquainted with the amenities in private schools, the Secretary will already know that teachers need offices and conference rooms for study and lesson prep and collaborating across disciplines; teachers won’t have to ask for those basics. But teachers will want to weigh in on things this particular Secretary of Education may not think of – a community clinic with mental health services as well as basic family medicine, spaces for parents to meet, a community liaison who knows well the families’ languages, needs, assets and network of referral services throughout the community.

Imagine a Secretary of Education who understands that learning involves all the senses.   She might take a literal walk in the park to confer with the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, the Secretary of the Interior as well as the leaders of Nature Conservancy and various urban park systems to ask how they could work together to make sure every American child has places to play outside. She would have read Last Child in the Woods on the plane in from Michigan and arrived fired up to get America’s kids outdoors, exploring, discovering, skinning their knees and – the radical part – getting to play!

I’m beginning to like this imagined Secretary of Education.  Though I doubt she’ll materialize on her own. It will take a village – a very large and energized village and its teachers – to “raise” her.  In a future post, we’ll imagine what she might learn from America’s teachers – if she did decide to become the Secretary of Education for all of America’s children and all of the public’s schools.

Add your imaginings to mind in the Comments section here:

We need to make calls TODAY, THIS WEEK: Support Ethnic Studies in Texas NOW!

From Angela Valenzuela:

Support Ethnic Studies in Texas NOW!

Time to put pressure on the legislature to get our Ethnic Studies bills heard this legislative session.  Please call your representatives in the House for a hearing for BOTH  HB1817 and HB366.  Also call your representative on the Senate side for a hearing of SB695.

Contact information appears below for the House and Senate Education Committee representatives, respectively.

If any of you live in the districts of any of the members listed below, do know that you are one of their constituents and call them since a call from you as one of their constituents means a whole lot more than if they receive a call from someone that is not a constituent. If you do not know who represents you, click here to find out. 

If none of the house or senate members represent you, then reach out to the chairs themselves or better yet, tell families, friends, and members of organizations that live in their districts to begin making calls.

One last, very important point.  The Texas State Board of Education may also implement this without being forced by the legislature to do so.  Yes, they are empowered to simply do the right thing.  So if they see that the legislature is getting pressured, they can move on their end without a law making them do this.

 To enlarge, click here.

 To enlarge, click here.