Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Best of ed blogs rounded up
This week’s Carnival of Education is being hosted over at NYC Educator, a really good education blog that I read most days and have quoted here in the past.
This looks to be one of the bigger education carnivals (a carnival is a weekly collection of the best blog posts on a given topic) to date and includes lots of good stuff from around the edusphere, including this post on Mrs. Frizzle’s frazzled life.
I’ve enjoyed following Mrs. Friz’s ups and downs as she wraps of the school year in the Bronx and tries to prepare to teach next year in Turkey as part of an educator exchange program. (I don’t speak Turkish but a friend who does says it is hard to translate in your head because the verb is always the last word of every sentence.) After today’s events, I hope there’s still and airport for her to land at in Istanbul this fall!
NYC Ed was kind enough to include two of my posts, one on parents as the new school bullies and one about saving old schools.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Sex offender law goes too far?
Let me start off by saying that, as the father of three young children, I am very much in favor of tougher laws for sex offenses against children.
Even so, what Wisconsin did yesterday gave me pause.
The state legislature there passed a low requiring all child sex offenders to wear global tracking devices for the rest of their lives. The devices send police a signal if the convict goes near a school, park or other child-heavy places and tampering with the device will be a felony. The offenders can appeal to be released from the device only after 20 years!
Wow. Two things made me wonder here. First, the majority of sex offenses do not begin at playgrounds, etc. Most involve adults and children that are known to them. I’m not sure if the device is something big and visible to others or more easy to conceal. But the point is, just keeping offenders away from parks may not prevent them from offending again.
But more concerning is just the concept of being tracked for life by the government after a convict has paid his or her debt to society and been released from jail or court supervision. I just don’t know. If it prevents other children from being victimized, that’s good. But I worry a bit about what comes next after this program. If lawmakers can track sex offenders, how soon before they want to track others, maybe even non-criminals, some day? It seems a little un-American.
So I can’t make up my mind whether I favor this tough new approach, or if it’s just too dangerous a precedent. Let us know what you think.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Young Children
