NEWSBYROSE GARRETT

Ah, school. A place to enrich the mind, strengthen the body, and … get used as rape bait by your teachers?

School should be a safe space for all, and victims of sexual assault are certainly no exception. But a rash of stories detailing how girls are not only assaulted by schoolmates, but taken advantage of by their schools, present a troubling truth: some schools are not only failing to keep students safe, they are putting them in harm’s way.

Take the case of a 14-year-old girl who had been repeatedly sexually harassed at her Alabama middle school. A teacher reportedly persuaded the girl to meet her assailant in a bathroom, assuring her that they would "catch him." However, nobody followed her into the bathroom. The teacher simply returned to her classroom and waited … while the girl was raped again.

The incident echoes an almost identical case at a high school in Pennsylvania, where a girl reported being forced to have sex with a male classmate after school. The principal decided to use the girl and others in a “sting operation” to catch the culprit and expose underage sexual behavior on campus. The result? Police following the students lost track of them and figured they went home … and two girls were raped in a school stairwell.

In another case, a 15-year-old girl was even forced to cheer for her rapist. After reporting that she had been raped, the high school cheerleader was first encouraged by school administrators to “keep a low profile” around school. Then she was made to cheer for her rapist by name at a basketball game. When she refused, she was kicked off the squad.

For most kids, middle school is defined not only by backpacks and books, but by a swirling vortex of social interaction that introduces kids to the fundamentals of adult social relationships. Not so in Chicago’s high-crime neighborhoods, where fear of violence causes kids to keep “associates” at arm’s length. According to a recent article in Miller-McCune, 13- and 14-year-olds in Chicago’s most violent areas simply do not trust anyone enough to let down their guard. The first casualty of this approach? Friendship.

“They had an extremely strategic and really disturbing way of thinking about friendship,” said Mario Small, a University of Chicago sociologist who directed student interviews at two of the city’s predominantly African-American, high-poverty elementary schools. These students were found to have what researchers called a “bunker mentality” towards friendship and social interaction. They vetted acquaintances for trustworthiness, sometimes observing them for years before putting any faith in them. Some even devised tests of classmates’ loyalty by telling them false rumors to see if the gossip spread, or staging fights to see who would have their backs. “It sounded like a warlike situation,” said Small.

Although crime is down in Chicago following a national trend, first-hand experiences or second-hand knowledge of violent crime contribute to an unpredictable climate where anything can happen at any time. From stabbings across the street to sexual assaults in the park, fear and a defensive wariness can keep kids from trusting anyone, even their closest classmates.

Waiting for Superman, the new movie by the team behind the climate-change doc An Inconvenient Truth, is making waves among teachers, parents, and the media for turning a critical eye to the our nation’s education system. The doc has already gotten flack for vilifying teachers unions and touting charter schools as a panacea for education. But anyone who’s seen the movie can tell you that the message is loud, clear, and compelling: whether schools are really in crisis or simply leaving too many kids behind to tolerate any longer, there are some pretty big problems with the way things are going. And something needs to change, now.

Just what’s broken, and how can we fix it? Here are the top three issues the documentary hits on:

1. Tenure and Teachers Unions: Ugly Stepsisters?

Teacher tenure is a policy which gives teachers a permanent contract, effectively ensuring them a guarantee of employment … for life. Teachers that have tenure cannot be fired unless for “just cause”, such as severe misconduct or incompetence. Critics say that teacher tenure makes it virtually impossible to fire bad teachers. Once teachers earn tenure, which, according to a charter school leader quoted in the movie, is as easy as breathing for a few years, getting rid of them can involve years of review and bureaucratic hurdles, and can cost tens of thousands of dollars per teacher.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been top of the news lately, largely due to buzz around the forthcoming Facebook movie "The Social Network", which promises to paint him as a less than savory character. Today, Zuck made his own headlines by pledging a $100 million donation to the Newark, New Jersey school system. It's believed to be his biggest contribution to date, and it's a doozy: with a total annual operating budget of $800 million, the money will give a major financial boost to the troubled school district.

Although Forbes magazine estimated Zuckerberg's fortune last year at $2 billion, the donation marks the 26-year-old CEO's first major philanthropic contribution. Why Newark? Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, according to a recent New Yorker profile, and has not been actively involved in education reform in the past. However, the New York Times reports that he met Cory Booker, the popular Newark mayor, at a conference in July, prompting a series of conversations around Booker's plans for the city that culminated in Zuckerberg's contribution. The money represents an initial gift towards a foundation for education to be financed by Zuckerberg.

The money will help to ease the financial troubles that have plagued Newark's school system, which was declared a failure and taken over by the state in 1995. With New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's blessing, Booker will be ceded more control than ever before in fixing the struggling school system, which is hoped to be the next challenge tackled by the city's reform-minded mayor.

Zuckerberg, Mayor Booker, and Governor Christie are expected to announce the news on Friday on the "Oprah Winfrey Show".

Photo credit: deneyterrio

From teachers and school administrators to politicians and pundits, the message is clear: the education system is in dire straits, and something earth-shattering needs to be done about it. It’s no secret that teachers are being laid off in droves, college is more expensive and selective than ever, and student achievement is, as a whole, nowhere near where we’d like it to be. But is the education “crisis” actually real?

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, thinks not. In the forthcoming Sept. 27 issue of  The New Yorker, Lemann argues in that instead of recognizing what works, we are falling prey to a facile narrative which embraces heroes and villains while diverting our attention from real problems and solutions.

Lemann suggests that the system is no worse than it’s ever been in the past: enrollment is growing, college graduates continue to do better economically and student achievement is holding steady. But a narrative of systemic failure nevertheless holds the public in thrall. “In the current school-reform story,” Lemann writes, “there is a reliable villain, in the form of the teachers’ unions, and a familiar set of heroes, including Geoffrey Canada, of Harlem Children’s Zone; Wendy Kopp, of Teach for America, the Knowledge Is Power Program; and Michele Rhee, the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. And there is a clear answer to the problem—charter schools.”

$400 for a 45-minute assessment. $200 an hour for test prep. Make-or-break admissions interviews and fierce competition among top-scoring students. Think we’re talking Ivy League applications? Try kindergarten admissions.

In the cut-throat world of elite New York private schools, it can be as hard to get into kindergarten as it is to be accepted to a top-ranked college. Standardized IQ tests such as the so-called ERBs are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the assessments preschool children undergo for a shot at such schools as Horace Mann, Dalton, and Collegiate. Competition is fierce to tip the scale, even if that means shelling out hundreds of dollars for coaches to help preschoolers ace something as basic as the playdate.

That's right: kids have to do well on a playdate to get into schools. More weight is being put on the “observed play time” portion of the admissions interview than ever before. According to an recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “During the playgroups, children are tested on dozens of areas including fine motor skills and the ability to follow directions, as well as quirky measures like how they hold a pencil, if they make eye contact with adults, or whether or not they can pour their own juice.”

It sounds like an oxymoron, or at the least, a very bad idea. But ‘for-profit’ colleges, run by private corporations and often charging far more than their public counterparts, are spreading faster than you can say “massive debt” or "the next bubble to burst."

Enrollment in for-profit colleges has grown from about 365,000 students to almost 1.8 million over the last several years, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GOA). But a new report by the GOA reveals that fraudulent and invasive recruitment practices may be at work behind the scenes of the sector’s rapid growth.

Undercover investigators posing as prospective students found that out of the 15 for-profit colleges they approached, all 15 made “deceptive or otherwise questionable statements” on details such as their accreditation, total cost of tuition, and applicants’ earning potential after graduation. Four colleges actively encouraged fraudulent practices such as removing a $250,000 inheritance from student loan applications, saying that it’s not the government’s business.

We live in an era of personalization, where individuals are able to design and assemble the services and environments that best serve their needs, from the apps on our smart phones to the features in our cars and the news and entertainment streaming on our computers and televisions.

With all this at our fingertips, it’s astounding to think that education may be the only system that’s remained virtually unchanged for centuries. Children, by and large, sit at desks facing a teacher who lectures and demonstrates on a chalkboard. Instruction is designed to target the most students in the classroom at once: as such, it generally follows a one-size-fits-all design.

Students who struggle in this format are designated as learning-disabled, assigned tutors, or simply left to slowly fall behind. Standardized tests exacerbate the problem, and the result is a host of children made to feel as if they can never succeed in school.

What if, instead of casting a wide net over the classroom and hoping to reach as many children as possible, we tailored our teaching towards student's individual learning style?

It’s no secret that America’s students are slipping in core areas such as math and science, especially when compared to other countries such as Singapore and Finland.  But what may be even more alarming is that students are losing more than just a top spot in international rankings: according to new research, their capacity for creativity has been in steady decline.

Newsweek reports that creativity scores, determined through a surprisingly accurate test developed by E. Paul Torrance in the late 1950s, rose at a similar rate as IQ scores until 1990. Then, they began to drop.

What happened in 1990? The Reds won the World Series, Die Hard 2 was released, and a hole in the ozone layer was discovered.  But the drop in creativity scores is most likely linked to changes in educational methodology that ushered in the era of standards and accountability, squeezing out other modes of learning that include collaborative problem-solving, intellectual exploration and artistic opportunity.

Sir Ken Robinson, an expert in creativity and education, gave a now famous presentation at the 2006 TED conference in which he suggested that the way our education system is designed may be killing children's creativity.

Getting to school on time can be a chore. But for thousands of students in Chicago, it's a death-defying task. The New York Times reports that 258 public school students were shot in the city last year on their way to or from school, and 32 of those were killed.

And that was before this week's Second Amendment Supreme Court ruling that threatens Chicago's stringent handgun ban.

But a ground-breaking project that matches at-risk students with advocates is bringing change to the air in the Windy City. The largest intervention program ever attempted to stem the tide of violence against, and between, urban students, the initiative paired each of 250 high-risk students with a professional advocate.  Available 24/7, these advocates are tasked with keeping their students safe, in school, and on track to graduation, whether that means driving them home from school, sitting by them in the hospital, or finding places to live for those that are homeless.