Tuesday, October 12^th

Mother's Fight For Jailed Son Exposes Special Education Gaps

About 89,000 juveniles were held in public and private correctional facilities in 2008, according to the most recent one-day count conducted by the U.S Justice Department (pdf) And we know that, compared to the student population at large, incarcerated youth tend to be well below grade level academically, and with learning disabilities that may or may not have been diagnosed, much less addressed in a prison setting.

This article from the Los Angeles Times about a mother who fought for special education services for her imprisoned son, shines a spotlight on an under-covered issue. Read More

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Maryland High School Graduation Rate Climbs

Baltimore cuts its dropout rate in half over three years.

More Maryland high school students are graduating and fewer are dropping out than two years ago, defying critics of the state's graduation testing requirement who feared the tougher standards would drive kids to leave school or fail.

The dropout rate, which fell in 16 Maryland school districts this year, took a particularly steep dive in Baltimore City, where nearly 1,500 fewer students left high school last year than in 2007, according to data released by the state Wednesday. At 4 percent, the city's dropout rate is now half what it was three years ago, a swift decline that won praise from education experts. Read More

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Newark's Facebook Friendship Faces Legal Snag

Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker publicly accepted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million dollar “friend” request on the Oprah Winfrey Show. But the friendship in the form of Zuckerberg’s brand new education reform effort, the Partnership for Education in Newark, comes with strings attached - the kind of strings that might make the $100 million in stock options offered to reform the city’s public schools against the law.

Due to abysmal academic performance and mismanagement, Newark’s schools have been under state control since 1995. No legal issues there - except that a condition of the $100 million gift is that the state has to cede some control of the school district to Mayor Booker. Giving decision-making power to a mayor violates New Jersey law.

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Researcher Studies Roles of Females in Gangs

While most research concentrates on male gang members, Jody Miller, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers-Newark, chose to look at the gang activity of females - a topic less studied.

"When you think of those environments, you think of young men, gangs, guns. Most of the policy attention and intervention attempts are focused on men," Miller said. "That overlooks half of the population."

For her research, Miller chose to focus on newly emerging gangs in Columbus, Ohio, and St. Louis that provided a proliferating comparative, she said.

Columbus thrived economically over the last decade but did not have a strong industrial base to begin with, Miller said. St. Louis had industry in the beginning but has recently suffered a lot of racial segregation and poverty. Read More

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D.A.R.E. Program Looks to Reorganize Its Priorities

D.A.R.E. isn$t just about drug prevention anymore.

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education program is reinventing itself after years of being dropped by schools and police departments struggling with stretched financial budgets.

To prove its relevance, D.A.R.E. has added lessons about online safety, bullying, choosing good role models and other current topics. It also is teaming up for certain subjects with experts from the community-not just police-to save cities and schools money.

"Minnesota is a very progressive state," said Kathi Ackerman, executive director of Minnesota D.A.R.E. "In a recession-you need to think outside the box and utilize whatever you have." Read More

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Gates Foundation Launches $20M Grant for Online Ed

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Monday announced a $20 million grant program to improve college graduation rates via technology, which will probably be oriented around online education and learning programs.

Next year, the focus will be expanded to K-12 programs, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft and the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in a conference call.

The initiative, first disclosed last week, will be known as the Next-Generation Learning Challenges, a $20 million "funding round" that will be handed out in grants ranging from $250,000 to $750,000. The request period will run until Nov. 19; the winners will be announced by March 31, the foundation said. Read More

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Obama Administration Targets 'Disparate Impact' of Discipline

Federal officials are getting the word out that addressing racial disparities in school discipline is a high priority, and they plan to use “disparate-impact analysis” in enforcing school discipline cases-a legal course of action that some civil rights lawyers contend was neglected under the administration of President George W. Bush.

“Regrettably, students of color are receiving different and harsher disciplinary punishments than whites for the same or similar infractions, and they are disproportionately impacted by zero-tolerance policies-a fact that only serves to exacerbate already deeply entrenched disparities in many communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, recently said at a conference on school discipline and civil rights, according to a transcript of his speech. The invitation-only conference was hosted by the U.S. departments of Education and Justice on Sept. 27 and 28. Read More

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