NEWSBYEMERALD BECKER

When Kristin Larsen began teaching, she wanted to stay up to speed with education news by reading education news articles in the New York Times. But she found it very difficult to actually locate the education section online. She instead found herself typing “education” into the page’s search engine. "Is education not news?" she wondered.

Located under the same section as the classifieds, corrections, and crosswords, Kristin felt increasingly frustrated that education was not being afforded the platform it deserved. “The New York Times has placed education in a very bizarre non-news like pace on their website,” Kristin said in an interview with Change.org.

Now a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, Kristin has become increasingly curious about the New York Times’ choice of locale for education. She sent an email to their customer service department asking for an explanation of its placement and received a generic response. So she decided to take matters into her own hands by creating a Change.org petition to formally request that education be elevated in the New York Times to the same status as business, technology, style, and travel.

When budgets are slim in Maryland, what's the first thing on the chopping block? Preschool for low-income children.

Late last month, county commissioners in Frederick, Maryland decided the best way to deal with a budget gap was to stop funding a Head Start program geared toward needy families. Now, community members are fighting to bring it back, fully funded - and asking for an apology for sexist comments made by county officials.

Head Start serves children ages 3 and 4 in families that fall below the federal poverty line ($22,050 in salary for a family of 4). This particular Head Start program serves almost 300 students annually and has existed for four decades. It also provides crucial medical and nutritional services. Aside from the children losing valuable education, the 80+ staff members also risk losing their jobs.

On January 18^th, Republican State Representative Kelli Stargel of Florida filed a bill that would require Florida teachers to evaluate parents on how involved they are in their student’s education.

Parents would be graded on four criteria: Student attendance, interactions with teachers, their children’s completion of homework and preparation for tests, and their children’s physical preparation for school. Parents would be rated as either “satisfactory,” “needs improvement,” or “unsatisfactory” directly on student’s report cards.

While teachers are certainly not going to be thrilled when they learn this bill requires them to track parent progress, thus increasing their workload, the chief absurdity is that it bears an underlying assumption that student under-achievement is the parent’s fault. Parents are definitely going to love that!

And since parent-teacher relationships can be on the hostile side, a bill encouraging teachers to formally criticize parents is probably not going to solve that problem.

If Mark Twain were alive today, he would likely tell Dr. Alan Gribben to back off his books.

Gribben, a Twain scholar working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish the latest edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is planning to release these editions with some notable changes: Twain’s use of the N-word will be changed to “slave,” the use of “injun” will be changed to “Indian,” and “half-breed” will be changed to “half-blood.”

In a recent NPR interview, Gribben argued that the repeated use of such offensive terms makes readers uncomfortable and, he says, deters potential readers from engaging with Twain’s books.

Gribben notes that the offensive language has caused Twain’s literature to be banned from most public education reading lists.

Now while Gribben certainly deserves credit for asking the right questions whereby precipitating a conversation that should have happened a long time ago, he has unfortunately come up with the wrong answer. He's overlooking (or perhaps dismissing) an important follow-up question: Why would readers be uncomfortable by such language?

Need any more proof that Fox News is actually making its viewers dumber? Look no further than the latest study out of the University of Maryland.

Fox’s fake news program has actually managed to convince 49 percent of viewers that income taxes have gone up since Obama became president. 56 percent of viewers believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout. And 63 percent of Fox News viewers continue to believe Obama  may not have been born in the United States.

All of these things are false. What else is false? The idea that climate change isn't real. But that's exactly the idea Fox News reporters are required to spread, Media Matters revealed late last month with a shocking leaked memo.

Change.org's Environment blog has the rundown on the environmentalist response here. In the education community, professors are speaking out against Fox News and calling them on their falsehoods.

You know that whole "religious freedom" thing where religious discrimination is illegal in the United States? Apparently, the University of Kentucky didn't get the memo. In 2009, Dr. C. Martin Gaskell was interviewed as a leading candidate for running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. He was passed over for the job, partly because his potential future colleagues did some Internet research and found that Gaskell was, gasp!, an evangelical Christian. At the end of his job interview, Gaskell claims in a lawsuit against the University, his interviewer asked him about his religious beliefs and was told they were a matter of concern. Dr. Gaskell was not offered the position and is now suing the University of Kentucky for religious discrimination.

Let's get this straight. Gaskell is not a creationist, he says, and accepts standard evolutionary science. Although he is on record tying scientific evidence to his religious beliefs, i.e. fitting Genesis in with scientific findings, he's also a career scientist who got to the interview stage of a prestigious research university's hiring process. But he faced opposition like this email between department staff in which one staff member said, “Clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with, but potentially evangelical.” Another staff member allegedly advised that hiring Dr. Gaskell would be a “huge public relations mistake.” The case is now set to go to trial in February.

Two 17-year-olds in Oklahoma are currently being denied the ability to earn a high school diploma because of their sexuality, they told a local news station recently. The principal of the school has blatantly denied their enrollment citing their sexuality as his reason, they say, and this isn’t the first time this principal has done this.

So let’s get this straight: Teenagers, on their own accord, recognize the value of a high school diploma to achieve their goals (one wishes to be a firefighter so she can save lives). They express clear desire and determination to graduate from high school only to be denied the opportunity by the educators themselves.

Is this really happening? Let’s take a moment to remember that these are teenagers who are admonishing they are not prepared to handle the world on their own. They are begging for an education, for guidance.

What teenager would spend their Friday and Saturday nights under parental supervision? Well, they have to, if they want to hang out at many U.S. malls. Over the past 15 years, it has become increasingly popular for malls to institute “youth escort policies.”

These policies generally require that on Friday and Saturday evenings, people 17 and younger must be with an adult 21 or over. Anyone not following these rules risks getting kicked out of the mall.

The latest of these "youth escort policies" will be implemented at the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, New York, due to the perception that large groups of youth "drive away customers." What's wrong with banning some people but not others? Besides the obvious civil rights violation, this practice drives a wedge between young and old.

A noisemaker called the “Mosquito” was recently installed in Washington, DC’s Chinatown neighborhood which emits an obnoxious high-pitched sound targeting the hearing range of 13-25 year-olds. The Mosquito was installed in response to local shopkeepers’ complaints that fights, theft, and drug dealings related to the loitering were deterring shoppers. Shortly after its implementation, the National Youth Rights Association filed a complaint against the city citing youth discrimination, and the Mosquito has since been removed.

The true stupidity in this strategy isn’t just that youth who aren't loitering would potentially be affected, or that cruel and unusual side effects of the Mosquito include headaches and nausea. It's that the Mosquito doesn’t actually address the issue of loitering.

Youth frequently loiter because they simply have nothing better to do. When the school day ends, underprivileged communities especially tend to lack organized out-of-school time activities, leaving young people to their own devices. Even if stricter anti-loitering laws were passed, it wouldn’t change the fact that the loitering is occurring because these kids haven’t been provided with alternative ways to spend their time. Logically speaking, pushing people out of one neighborhood will only move them to the next neighborhood—but why would we ever use logic to address social issues?