AJC.com > Blogs > Get Schooled > Archives > 2007 > January
January 2007
Hey, Guv: Don’t Take Away Kids’ Foreign Language Study
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I met my new boss on Friday. He is a well educated and traveled individual. He works out of his office in Brazil, and speaks Portuguese. He arrived at my plant in southwest Atlanta with one of his colleagues from Argentina, whose principal language is Spanish. Both speak English fluently.
I am far from bilingual. Despite three years of Spanish in high school and various refresher courses since then, I still lack a certain comfort with foreign language. Not so for my 8-year-old son. He’s been taking French at his public school since kindergarten. Now in second grade, he has a natural comfort with the language that I can only envy.
I took some foreign language in elementary school, and I still find myself recalling Greek phrases and words from those days in fifth grade — despite the growing distraction posed by girls. But I can hardly blame my lack of proficiency on Dina Valdez.
Recent news that Gov. Sonny Perdue wants to cancel funding for elementary foreign language classes is cause for serious concern. Research has shown that students of foreign language, who reach fluency, will have a higher earning power, on average, than those who do not. In fact, the benefits of second language study reach across all aspects of the curriculum, including reading, writing and mathematics.
But perhaps the best evidence comes from my son. He is taken with the language and culture he is studying. He finds French words in his daily conversations and seems excited to discover the interconnectedness of languages in general. It is his sense of wonder and zeal for learning that is partly fueled by this second language study.
Young children may not be able to master all subjects, but they understand very well the power of language. Should we deprive them of this opportunity?
Today’s guest blogger, a regular reader of Get Schooled, is a plant manager for a major consumer goods firm. His son attends Brandon Elementary in Buckhead. If you’d like to be a guest blogger, send a sample entry on any education topic to bgutierrez@ajc.com.
No More HOPE For K-12 Schools?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This morning, Gov. Sonny Perdue is expected to unveil the latest version of his “HOPE Chest” amendment, which will limit the use of Georgia Lottery revenues to college scholarships and free pre-kindergarten classes.
The governor introduced his proposal last year, but the bill failed to get the required two-thirds vote constitutional amendments need to be placed on a ballot. I was surprised to learn during the previous session that some education groups, including the Georgia PTA, opposed the plan because they feared it would prohibit the future use of lottery money for technology and teacher-training programs in K-12 public schools.
After the lottery was started in the early 90s, schools were able to use some of the proceeds to purchase classroom computers and satellite dishes for educational programming. But that funding dried up in 2003 when Perdue stepped into the governor’s mansion and declared there was too much pork in the program. In fact, up until that time, about $1.8 billion of lottery monies had been spent on various and sundry items, including headquarters for Georgia Public Broadcasting.
Now most school systems pay for classroom technology with increases in local sales taxes, which voters must approve, or grants they seek on their own.
UPDATE: According to my colleague Kevin Duffy’s story Wednesday, Republicans are confident they’ll get the latest amendment through the Legislature this year. The governor says Lottery money needs to be preserved for future generations, but some education groups still are against the plan. Sally FitzGerald of the Georgia PTA told Kevin: “If we want kids ready for the 21st century, we’ve got to give them more than pencils.”
Should Public Education Advocates Abandon Ship?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Maureen Downey had another interesting piece in Sunday’s Opinion section about what she sees as public education advocates’ resistance to change.
Sure, these lobbyists — including those representing the Georgia School Superintendents Association, the Georgia School Boards Association and the Georgia PTA — have vested interests. They’re unabashedly pro-public school and they’ll fight anything they think will hurt the ability of teachers and administrators to do their jobs.
Sometimes, their comments may be over the top. But other times they’re trying to bring real-world perspective to policies that are clearly moving ahead. After all, you don’t have to be a soothsayer to predict which Republican-led measures in a Republican-controlled statehouse will pass.
So, should the education lobby just get out of the way and allow lawmakers to do whatever they want without considering the implications, or does Georgia still need someone to stand up for the public schools?
What Happened At School Today? Nothing, I Just Got Pepper-Sprayed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
More than two-dozen Mount Zion High School students were treated for exposure to pepper spray after a school resource officer used the incapacitating chemical on an unruly classmate during lunch yesterday.
According to our account of the incident, the officer pulled out the spray after a student grabbed him as he was trying to break up a fight among a gaggle of girls. Shortly thereafter, 29 kids had to be treated for burning eyes and itchy throats.
Last semester, another Clayton County resource officer Tasered a kid at Jonesboro Middle School in order to stop a fight at that campus.
Now, I can’t really claim to know whether it’s better being sprayed or shocked, but is it too much to expect school-based officers to break up fistfights without resorting to weapons?
Cox: Math Is The Problem And Solution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How’s this for a conversation starter? State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox says a history of “math tracking” has been “a death sentence” for Georgia’s students.
Cox, who calls herself a “data geek,” launched into an energetic Power Point presentation at the education reporting conference I attended last week, showing why she thinks the way math has been taught in Georgia has been holding students back.
“What I’m going to show you isn’t pretty, but it’s the truth,” she said, before demonstrating how math skills for all students worsen after fifth grade, and that disparities between student groups (white, black, and Latino) grow over time. “This is what is so incredibly unacceptable.”
A former social studies teacher, Cox blamed years of “low expectations” for some students and a poor math curriculum that allowed pupils to get away with taking dumbed-down classes for the state’s low scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the SAT.
“We’re not doing something right and what that has to do with are a lot of low expectations,” she said.
The new math curriculum, which is being phased in now, will address some of that by requiring sixth-graders to begin learning algebra and finish middle school with some geometry skills. The other part of the equation, Cox said, will be new high school graduation requirements, which a state committee is currently developing.
Those new diploma standards are expected to require all kids to take a minimum of algebra II before they graduate. Right now, the superintendent said, only about 20 percent of Georgia’s graduates do.
If that plan sounds ambitious, consider Cox’s concluding remark: “This is probably the single most important thing I believe we are doing for the future of Georgia.”
State of Education: ‘No Child’ Goes On
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It didn’t take President Bush long to bring up education in his “State of the Union” address last night, and it took even less time for him to move on to other topics.
But in the brief moment he spent on the nation’s public schools — just after the economy and right before healthcare — Bush had a few strong words about the upcoming reauthorization of his No Child Left Behind Act. Namely, that he won’t stand for any “watering down” of standards or “backsliding” on reforms he ushered in five years ago.
The president wants more help for struggling students, more emphasis on math and science, more flexibility for local officials to turn around failing schools and more options for families to leave low-performing campuses. Of course, these changes first have to get through a Democratically controlled Congress where key lawmakers already are demanding more money to implement the law’s requirements and balking at private school tuition vouchers.
So, to use an old cliche: Was Bush’s tough talk on education this year really just more bark than bite?
The ‘V’ Word
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lately, I’ve been talking to folks in education policy about a legislative movement to bring government-funded, private school tuition vouchers to Georgia. Writing my latest piece, it occurred to me that the law on government support for private and parochial schools is as muddy as immigration policy.
Some avid public school supporters oppose vouchers because they don’t want limited tax dollars diverted to private campuses, which don’t adhere to the same accountability measures as public schools, or because they don’t think the government should fund religious instruction.
But state officials routinely fund free pre-kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds who attend church-run classes as well as HOPE and other tuition grants for college students who enroll in private — including religious — institutions. Much of that money comes from the Lottery, but some comes from taxes. Some K-12 students who attend private schools also participate in federally funded education programs (there’s that taxpayer money, again), sometimes on their own campuses.
So, why do vouchers spark such fierce debate when other publicly funded, privately run education programs are acceptable?
UPDATE: I had reported in my story that no hearing had been scheduled yet for the special-needs scholarship bill. I was wrong. The Senate Education and Youth Committee will hold a hearing Thursday.
The ESOL Dilemma
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My colleague Laura Diamond had an interesting story in Sunday’s newspaper about the growth in the number of non-English speaking pupils in Gwinnett County. These kids make up just a fraction of the 1.6 million pupils in Georgia’s public schools. But in Gwinnett, particularly in the primary grades, their numbers are substantial.
As Laura found, children whose native tongue is not English represent nearly one in three Gwinnett kindergarteners. That means roughly one of every three 5-year-olds enrolling in the state’s largest school system needs to learn English.
Two years ago, I reported that Gwinnett had quietly become a minority-majority district with African-Americans, Asians, Latinos and other minority groups together making up more than 50 percent of the student body. It was a historic shift, and a trend that shows no sign of reversing.
It’s also costly. This year alone, Gwinnett expects to spend $33 million on ESOL instruction.
Now I know some of you will say the U.S.A. should just ship all these kids back to the countries they came from (even if they were born right here in Georgia), but what’s a school superintendent, principal or teacher to do?
Education’s ‘Top Ten’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education released its annual “Top Ten Issues To Watch” report yesterday at the group’s first-ever conference for education journalists.
I don’t have to tell you that education policy can be a complex and sometimes confusing subject. So I attend as many of these seminars as I can to make sure I’m up on the latest trends and studies. There were so many interesting discussions yesterday, I could blog about it for weeks.
Among the issues the partnership thinks (and in some cases, hopes) will be hot on the radar of state policymakers this year: teacher quality, high school reform, school choice (charter schools, vouchers and tuition tax credits), achievement gaps, the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, public school funding, college affordability and Pre-K.
Stephen Dolinger, the organization’s president, writes in the report’s introduction about the need to act on these issues now so that future generations may reap the benefits. I thought I’d leave you this morning with a question he raises: “In 2007, how will we answer when we are asked, how did we invest in our children’s future?”
Charters, Charters Everywhere?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle has been talking up his plan to create “systems of charter schools” for several weeks now. Today, he’s rolling out the details of just how he’ll accomplish that.
Georgia has a pretty small number of these non-traditional public schools — just 58. But, as my colleague Kevin Duffy reports, Cagle’s proposal could change that fairly quickly.
Charter schools began in the early 1990s as a way to foster more innovation and reform in public education. The idea was to create schools where parents could play an active role in the operation of the campus and where teachers and administrators were freed from bureaucratic restraints.
Ultimately, Georgia policymakers hoped charter schools would lead to better students and higher test scores. So far, their dreams seem to have been realized, despite a few highly publicized closures.
According to the most recent comparison I could find, in the 2003-04 school year, 84 percent of charter schools met federal requirements under No Child Left Behind compared to 78 percent of regular public schools. The previous school year, charter schools also outperformed traditional public schools on the “adequate yearly progress” measure.
So, if they perform better, why not take Cagle’s idea even further, create a statewide charter system, and convert all public schools to charters?
UPDATE: Check out the details of Cagle’s proposal, which could sink millions of dollars into developing new charter schools.
The Education Budget: Big Bucks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Regular readers of this blog know a free, public education ain’t cheap. K-12 education alone accounts for nearly 39 percent of the proposed $20.2 billion state budget for fiscal 2008.
Add $329 million for Pre-K to the mix and the sum tops $8.1 billion to educate Georgia’s more than 1.6 million public school children.
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox will return to the Legislature this afternoon to talk about her portion of the education budget. Last year, if memory serves, Cox spent much of her time with lawmakers discussing the academic gains students have been making and why the state’s SAT scores aren’t that bad.
This year, I’m interested to hear whether Cox mentions Gov. Sonny Perdue’s continuing “austerity reductions,” which next school year will amount to a loss of about $140 million. Schools are supposed to earn that money under the Quality Basic Education formula, which determines how much campuses earn per student to pay for teachers and other classroom essentials.
Since Perdue has been in office, he’s slashed QBE funding every year, saying the state had to cut back during an economic downturn. During his recent re-election campaign, Democrats hounded the governor about the accumulated $1 billion in formula cuts.
We all know how that strategy turned out. Perdue won his second term handily. So does anyone want to venture a guess as to whether Democrats will bring up this niggling little detail about austerity reductions at today’s hearing?
UPDATE: One of the lawmakers at the hearing this afternoon (I’m afraid I couldn’t catch the name as I was listening over the Internet) did ask about the QBE cuts in the coming fiscal year. “When are we going to catch up with this?” she asked Cox. “We do some,” Cox replied, noting that about $30 million had been redirected from other programs to reduce the austerity reduction slightly. “There is some.”
Professors As National Security Agents?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Part of the job of education lobbyists at the state capitol is fending off legislation their institutions find onerous, to put it nicely.
Last week, an interesting piece of potential public policy was filed that would force college professors to report any international students who miss too many lectures to federal homeland security agents. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Burke Day (R-Tybee Island), told my colleague Brian Feagans: “The idea is to use the university systems themselves as the keeper of passports… .”
The goal of Day’s bill is to force public and private institutions — including junior colleges, technical colleges and flight schools — to keep closer tabs on foreigners attending Georgia schools on student visas. State and federal funding could be withheld from institutions that fail to comply.
It’s still unclear how the Board of Regents, which already is cracking down on students who are illegal immigrants, and other institutions of higher learning will respond to the bill. But the idea raises a host of questions, not the least of which is: Even in an age of terrorism, should educators be used as an arm of the law?
Tutoring Scandal: Just The Tip Of The Iceberg?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last week, State Board of Education members barred a local tutoring company from working with public schools after education officials found Get Smart Inc. had cheated the Clayton County school system out of more than $18,000 for tutorials that never took place.
Kids were being paid to forge parents’ signatures on applications and attendance sheets, which were then being used to bill the school system. State and local investigators said tutors even created fake test scores and student evaluations to perpetuate the fraud.
Under No Child Left Behind, poorly rated public schools must pay for private tutoring for students, an acknowledgement that struggling pupils need help while their campuses try to improve. A handful of other tutoring services have been kicked off the official state-approved list of providers since the program began, mainly for not following proper procedures.
Over the years, millions of tax dollars have flowed to private academic tutors, including such recognizable companies as Sylvan Learning, through the law’s “Supplemental Educational Services” provision. State officials said this latest problem in the tutoring program was the most serious they’ve found. But after I learned that company officials trying to get on the state list of approved providers aren’t given criminal background checks, I had to wonder: How many problems have not yet been discovered?
Emory’s Advantage
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ll never forget the day my mom called me at college to tell me she’d been laid off from her job at Westinghouse thanks to the defense budget cutbacks in the late 1980s. It was just weeks into the first semester of my freshman year. Neither she nor I knew how we were going to pay for the next four years. I was convinced I would have to drop out.
Fortunately, my grandmother — a modest and frugal woman who reuses every plastic bag and container she comes across — stepped in and paid for nearly my entire degree out of her retirement savings. I left college with a diploma in hand and practically debt free.
Of course, many aren’t lucky enough to have a Grandma Rosie or other family member who can handle that cost, especially with the exorbitant price of college these days. The officials at Emory University, where tuition runs upwards of $32,000 annually, seem to have woken up to this.
They’ve developed a plan — the “Emory Advantage” — so fewer families, particularly those in the middle class, will be asked to carry the burden. From the looks of the program, described in Andrea Jones’ story, once word gets out, Emory could be flooded with applications.
College: ‘It Could Be You’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I keep seeing that new TV commercial from the folks at the Georgia Lottery Corp. announcing they’ve hit the 1,000,000th HOPE recipient. Usually, the lottery deals in dollars, but this time the million refers to a college student.
According to the commercial, as of this year, a million students have headed off to institutions of higher learning with a HOPE scholarship courtesy of the lottery’s scratch-off cards, Quik Pik tickets and numerous cash-prize games.
When I started perusing Gov. Sonny Perdue’s new budget last night, my attention quickly turned to lottery revenues, more than $500 million of which will go toward scholarships next year.
Since the first HOPE scholarship was awarded in 1993, $3 billion has been spent on HOPE scholars. That’s a lot of dough, especially when you consider that many often lose the grant because of poor grades. So my question today is one of economics: Has HOPE been worth the cost or could those funds have been put to better use?
The Governor’s Education Challenge
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gov. Sonny Perdue gave his annual “Eggs & Issues” address to the Georgia Chamber of Commerce yesterday.
Last year, Perdue used the speech to unveil an attention-grabbing education agenda, which included reducing class sizes and putting “graduation coaches” in every high school.
This year, the governor took a less dramatic tack. Instead of laying out his own education plans, Perdue issued a “call to action,” asking business leaders to provide “real world” experiences for students, such as job shadowing and internships, to help boost the state’s graduation rate.
“Anything to give students a sense of the exciting promises ahead of them,” he said.
Of course, many high school students already are working in the “real world.” Say, for example, as a cashier or cook at the local Chick-fil-A. So what I’d honestly like to know is: Do internships really add to a high school student’s education or are they just a waste of academic time?
UPDATE: The governor touted education as his top priority in his “State of the State” address today. “I’m here to tell you again that my priorities have not changed,” he said, according to a text of the speech. “Education is the single most important factor in the future prosperity of our state.”
Perdue’s new budget, also unveiled today, includes a 3 percent pay raise for teachers as well as a continuation of the $100 gift card for teacher supplies. The governor is using $21 million to expand the graduation coach program to middle schools.
‘Best’ Schools: How Do You Tell?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While doing my grocery shopping this weekend, I spied the latest Atlanta Magazine, whose cover advertised the area’s “best” high schools.
I cringe whenever editors propose a story on the “best” or “top” or “most excellent” schools. Usually, those ratings are based on test scores, and any education reporter worth her salt knows test scores don’t tell everything about a school.
I remember visiting a Gainesville elementary a couple years ago that President Bush had talked up in a speech. One of the first things that greeted me when I walked down the main hall was a bulletin board with multi-colored charts of student test scores, sliced and diced by grade, subject and teacher.
Saying this campus was test-score obsessed would have been an understatement. But that was the point.
The principal told me he did everything he could to ensure students performed well on standardized exams. That included outlawing anything that wasn’t strictly academic, such as school assemblies and class parties, and cutting into social studies so more time could be spent on reading, arithmetic and test prep.
His plan worked. His campus was considered a model by no less than the president. But I guess I’ll always wonder: Given the choice, would Bush have sent his own kids there?
Giving Voice To Voiceless Teachers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the toughest parts of reporting on education is getting teachers to go on the record about problems in their schools.
When I first started on the education beat, I couldn’t understand why so many refused to speak out on issues important to them. Of course, that was before I understood school system politics.
Then I learned the importance of teachers’ groups, which give cover for individuals who don’t want to go out on the proverbial limb, and give voice to problems that parents and taxpayers should know about. Now Gwinnett County has just such a group.
According to my colleague Laura Diamond’s article this weekend, the newly formed Teachers’ Alliance of Gwinnett hopes to enlist members from every school in the county. It will be interesting to see how many teachers in the state’s largest school system sign up. Then maybe we’ll know just how much the organization was needed.
The Other Kind of Discipline
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In Japan, students are placed in schools and career tracks based on their test performance.
I had a student several years ago who was from Japan. When his family found out they would be returning, he began a furious preparation for the tests to which he would be subjected as soon as he arrived. He did very well and ended up in a professional track as he hoped.
In the last several months, I have had an opportunity to see two high school bands from Japan perform. (And, subsequently bought a DVD of Japanese bands to show my students.) Those kids played with the technique and precision of many of our best university programs. Granted, these kids were from some of the top high schools in Japan; however, I think their abilities and talents are a direct result of the disciplined approach to Japanese lives, a discipline we are lacking in America.
I wonder how testing kids for schools would go over in our country? (I already know that answer).
For the last decade or so, vocational classes have been taken out of our middle and high schools, but I think they are beginning to come back. There is a real push to prepare all high school students for college, but not all students are college material. Perhaps, a variation of the Japanese approach to education — placing kids in vocational tracks that match their aptitudes — would be a good idea.
Today’s guest blogger — the first at Get Schooled — is a high school band director in Newton County, 30 miles east of Atlanta. He’s taught at the middle and high school levels for about 10 years. A relative newbie to Get Schooled, regulars might recognize him as the Band Director Who Wants Kids To Bedazzle. To be a guest blogger here, send a sample entry on an education topic of your choosing to bgutierrez@ajc.com.
College: Ready or Not
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Education Week’s “Quality Counts” report covers a lot of ground this year. Although there’s no in-depth reporting on the issues, it does provide a helpful survey of some of the latest buzzwords, including “early childhood education” and “college readiness.”
The latter topic is covered by an editorial from David S. Spence, president of Atlanta’s own Southern Regional Education Board, whom I interviewed for my article yesterday.
According to Quality Counts, Georgia is among the majority of states that have yet to define what it means for students to be ready for college. Surprisingly, Spence says it can take as few as two years to align public K-12 and university systems (curriculums and testing) so the standards are in place.
Considering that, in 2002, only 32 percent of Georgia’s ninth-graders were expected to finish high school and go to college, will even two years be soon enough?
UPDATE: To clarify: that last statistic is based on the number of high school freshman finishing high school within four years. While it’s cited in the Quality Counts report, the information came from “Measuring Up,” a report on the state of higher education released in September.
I was struck by this particularly scathing excerpt from the Measuring Up site:
“Georgia’s underperformance in educating its young population could limit the state’s access to a competitive workforce and weaken its economy over time. Compared with leading states, relatively few 9th graders in Georgia graduate from high school in four years. Since the early 1990s, Georgia has seen a double-digit drop in the percentage of 9th graders graduating from high school, and this rate is now among the lowest in the country. Of those who do graduate, few go on to college.”
Old Dominion, Here We Come?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A new report from Education Week released today gives mixed marks to Georgia’s education system. The state ranks high in certain areas such as education policy, but near the bottom in others, including K-12 student achievement.
Staffers at the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center also developed a new, provocatively titled “Chance for Success” index this year that enabled them to link certain benchmarks from childhood to adulthood.
The Peach State ranked 38th among the 50 states and District of Columbia on that index with Virginia ranking 1st and New Mexico dead last. As if that wasn’t enough food for thought, editors of the 94-page report included this analysis in their executive summary:
“When state populations are viewed from this perspective, it’s clear that it matters where children live. At almost every stage, for example, a child born in Virginia is significantly more likely to experience success than the average child born in the United States … .”
OK, so who’s moving to Virginia?
UPDATE: For those interested in hearing a response from the state’s top educator, here’s the statement State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox released after the report:
“The Quality Counts report confirms that education in Georgia is moving in the right direction. It also shows that there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure that every student is receiving a top-notch education and is at least getting a high school diploma. That hard work is happening at every level of education, most significantly in the classrooms of Georgia’s schools.
“Improving Georgia’s graduation rate is the number one priority for the State Board of Education and the Georgia Department of Education. We are approaching this challenge in a common sense way — providing a strong foundation for learning through our new curriculum, the Georgia Performance Standards; setting high expectations for all of our students and giving teachers the training and resources they need to be successful. If we stay focused and determined, we will continue to see steady, long-lasting improvements in student achievement.”
So You Think You Can Do It Better?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My family and friends can testify that I’m no cook. I can’t even make a proper scrambled egg. But I won’t hesitate to turn up my nose at an omelet that doesn’t taste just right. Being a critic comes easy when you’re impatiently waiting at the table.
Americans love to criticize. We critique our restaurants, our books and, yes, our schools. We pick, pick, pick even when, usually when, we know nothing about creating a gourmet meal, award-winning novel or educated citizen.
Since I began writing this blog, I’ve received my share of we-can-do-it-better taunts. So now’s your chance: Write your own blog entry on any education topic you choose. Then e-mail me a copy at bgutierrez@ajc.com. If it’s good enough, I’ll post your item as a guest blogger.
Go ahead, show me just how smart you really are.
UPDATE: Check out Get Schooled’s first guest blogger, Band Director. He did a great job of sparking debate about an interesting topic.
A Get Schooled Resolution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When I took over this blog 24 entries and 1,632 comments ago, I resolved to sit back and watch how readers interacted online.
Sure, I had the power to ban posters, delete postings and cut off comments when I deemed it necessary. But I chose to let you, the reader, police yourself. After all, this is a forum for public discourse and public discourse ain’t always pretty.
Unfortunately, many posters are more interested in name-calling, bullying and displaying downright meanness than carrying on an open, intelligent conversation; ironic behavior when you consider how many parents and teachers here lament the discipline problems in schools.
So in deference to that time-honored, start-with-a-clean-slate tradition, I’m offering a simple resolution this year for Get Schooled readers: Always think before you post. Trust me, other readers will be far more impressed by how you articulate and defend your arguments if you leave out the schoolyard foolishness.
UPDATE: If you have not already done so, please familiarize yourself with the AJC’s rules for commenting. It will give you some guidelines for what is acceptable to post and what is not.
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