The Chronicle of Higher Education provides some details on the university's reasoning:

The point is to keep students healthy, says James L. DeBoy, chair of Lincoln's department of health, physical education, and recreation. All Lincoln students have long been required to pass a two-credit course called "Dimensions of Wellness," which covers array of subjects, such as alcohol, drugs, nutrition, and sexual health.

While revising the department's curriculum in 2006, however, Mr. DeBoy and his colleagues concluded that the university should do more to help students become more physically fit. The result was a course designed for students who are overweight. It includes walking, Pilates exercises, and fitness games.

Needless to say, there's been an uproar on the campus of the historically black university and throughout the blogosphere. The student newspaper, The Lincolnian, reported students' reactions.  From sophomore Lousie Kaddie:

"It's not up to Lincoln to tell me how much my BMI should be. I came here to get a degree and that's what the administration should be concerned with."

In the comments on the Lincolnian article, members of the community ask a number of questions, including:

• Why is the university focusing solely on BMI and physical education, when its cafeteria could be offering better-quality, fresher, organic food to its students?
• Does the university really want to lose bright, motivated students and prospective students who happen to have a BMI of 30 or higher?
• Why only target those who are declared obese based on the BMI, which is already a controversial way of measuring health?
• Why make high-BMI students pay for an extra credit hour, when students with a lower BMI do not have to do so?
• Why is the college not offering the same intervention to students with eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia?
• Is the college opening itself up to discrimination suits?

One commenter, Catta, noted a sad irony:

Finally, even cursory research into the history of the BMI shows its distasteful links to Victorian-era social darwinism. I am sure people know the tenets of this odious theory, and that they can then understand why I find it ironic that a university with a predominantly African American student body would endorse and use BMI to assess its students' worth.

One commenter on the Chronicle piece who appears to be a Lincoln student sees the requirement as drawing on stereotypes of African-American women:

[T]his is purely targeting blacks because of the stereotyped heavy, large-bottomed women. You want people to be fit--give them free health club memberships with FREE personal trainers. And look at the swill you are serving in the dorms--a carb-addict's dream.

Another Chronicle commenter thinks class is also a consideration:

Lincoln University doesn't want a lot of graduates who look lower class. Upper class people tend to be thinner.

Yet another commenter sees the policy as completely reasonable:

Lincoln's policy promotes good health and is not onerous. It is also fair, so long as freshmen know about it before matriculating. Obesity is associated with many health risks, and people habitually underestimate their caloric intake while overestimating their level of exercise. A mandatory course targets those at greatest risk. A BMI of 30 is also pretty high, except for the unusually well-muscled. A physical exam could distinguish the healthy from the unhealthy. In the worst case, failing the standard compels taking only a 1-credit hour course, not expulsion. In this respect, the course is akin to an incidental area requirement.

Yes, Lincoln could choose to tie alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drug use to graduation. But it chooses to do something about obesity. There is nothing inherently hypocritical in this choice, or in choosing to administer one policy instead of a gamut.

Jezebel published a brief item on the requirement, which also elicited a range of comments, including one from cand86, who asked, "[H]aven't we already proven that BMI is BULLSHIT?"  Others took the conversation in an interesting direction about how P.E. during K-12 could dissuade people from exercising later in life.

kavitabk linked to a recent critique of BMI by State University of New York Professor Emeritus Theo Pavlidis and added,

BMI is based on a "normal curve" that is derived from the range of weights found in French and Scottish (male, of course) soldiers (who were CONSCRIPTED--i.e. not exactly well-fed) in the 1830s. So it's a good measure for an entire world's population in 2009...how?

Bryce, a former coach commenting on an article at Inside Higher Ed about the Lincoln University requirement, had this to say:

The real question for me is whether Universities should be in the business of promoting the physical health of students. As an Exercise Science grad and former coach, my belief is yes. Most institutions make claims to the tune of "we prepare students to function effectively in society" and it seems like physical health ought to be part of that preparation. So, if that logic holds then it also follows that institutions should have criteria to determine whether students have achieved these outcomes. I don't know that I agree with the criteria that Lincoln has selected, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to hold students to some sort of standard with regard to health and wellness. After all, we do the same thing for the sciences, mathematics, and literature. Would we let a student graduate who had not fulfilled their math requirement? If they failed their placement exam as a freshman and never demonstrated mastery of basic mathematical concepts, would we still graduate them?

It's interesting how those of us in education want to enforce high standards in the "core" areas, but have no problem justifying low performance when it comes to physical health.

Harriet Brown at Feed Me! calls the incident an "epic fail."  She continues,

Some people object to the fitness course on libertarian grounds. Not me. I think good health and fitness is part of what we should be teaching children and practicing ourselves. But threatening or punishing larger people because of their size is not a useful strategy. As a researcher from the National Institutes of Health said recently, the number-one cause of obesity in this country is dieting. Programs like this buy in to the fat-is-unhealthy mindset. They also buy in to the thin-is-healthy mindset. By conflating weight with disease they do everyone a grave disservice.

Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass is one of those who adopt a libertarian critique, calling the requirement evidence of a "nanny campus":

I'm a huge fitness nut. I exercise every day, and believe it's vital to everything from mood to sleep patterns to energy level to mental acuity to managing chronic pain to just being healthy. But I don't think colleges and universities should be in the business of creating phys ed requirements--particularly when that involves singling people out as Lincoln has done. Shouldn't it be enough to do some basic education about healthy lifestyle choices as part of the res life program, to back that up with healthy menu options in on-campus cafeterias, to support student-led clubs centered on sports and fitness--and then to get on with the business of education?

Personally, I'm uncomfortable with colleges acting in loco parentis.  Encouraging physical fitness is one thing; requiring it is another thing altogether, especially since--as is made clear by commenters across the blogs I cited above--there are mental health issues tied up with physical education, obesity, weight, and fitness.  That said, I would like to see more colleges taking seriously the call for healthier, organic food in their dining halls--and evangelizing to students about the benefits to their bodies, their minds, the environment, and the local economy of eating fresh, local food when it's available.

What are your thoughts?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toybox and is the founder of Eager Mondays, a consultancy providing unconventional professional development.

Needless to say, this is a huge leap.  (By comparison, when I was an undergraduate a little more than a decade ago, tuition at my (non-UC) school increased by 2-4% a year.)  Coming on top of all the cuts being made to education and to supporting units at the UC, the increase is brutal.

The university community isn't taking this news sitting down--unless you count sit-ins.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reports,

Fourteen protesters were arrested at UCLA when they disrupted the meeting and refused to leave. Protesters then stopped the meeting several times, shouting "Whose university? Our university!" and chanting "We Shall Overcome." Hundreds of students and staff members also gathered at Berkeley and UCLA to begin a three-day protest of the tuition increases and faculty and staff furloughs.

University leaders have argued that the fee increases are necessary to compensate for severe cuts in state support. Mark G. Yudof, the system's president, said three out of four students would be shielded from the effects of the tuition increase by additional financial aid.

What Yudof is really saying—despite assurances elsewhere that the university system will raise grants to subsidize students who demonstrate financial need—is that students who can't afford to pay tuition up front will now have the privilege of taking out even more loans.  College has become so expensive that paying back such loans--particularly if a student goes on to grad school--can become a decades-long commitment.  (Me, I'm paying off my UC graduate education on a 20-year plan.  It's like the mortgage I can't afford because I work at the University of California and live in a UC town.)

Jenna Benty explains the impacts the budget cuts already have had on financial aid.  She focuses in particular on a program that was recently cut from UC Irvine, Student Academic Advancement Services, "which helped support low-income, first generation or disabled students." Benty continues: 

Ironically, the program SAAS was recently eliminated due to budget cuts, considering these are the students that are largely affected by the budget cuts and tuition increases. When talking to past SAAS students and now ex-coworkers, Deborah was shocked to find “the students were rationing their food in order to fight the termination and tuition increase just so they could have the opportunity to study abroad.”

Low-income students have now taken the budget problems from both ends, not only will they have to pay a higher tuition; important programs that assisted them in financial aid are being cut. Former SAAS student Leandra Ordorica states “SAAS has helped me find resources to be able to pay for UCI. Every time I applied for a scholarship, there was always someone there to write me a letter of recommendation.” These small amenities make the largest impact on the low-income students where finances are constantly a concern. Not only did the SAAS program assist in finding low-income students scholarships, “each counselor sat down personally with a student to see what their specific needs and goals were. After assessing each individuals students ambitions, they would personally find a type of aid that fit their specific needs,” according to Deborah Lee.

The office of the student Regent (an undergraduate who serves on the UC board) liveblogged today's Regents panel vote.  From the first post on the event:

9:35AM – [UC systemwide president] Mark Yudof is trying give his board report, but the crowd keeps interruppting and booing him.  the chant is “take a stand.” yudof: “regents have to act.  in the end of the day, it’s your job to blaance the budget.  the budget on the table is the only budget out there that will balance the budget.”  Yudof ends his speech early – asks the people that are distrubing the meeting to leave or be removed form the room.  police have just entered the room and are waiting for the protesters to remove themselves.  students please be safe!

These tuition increases are coming at a time when the UC campuses are actually reducing the number of courses they're offering, and when the quality of education at the university is at serious risk of deterioration.  UC is firing lecturers (contingent laborers, unlike tenured faculty) in droves, and the professoriate is loath to pick up the classes the lecturers had been scheduled to teach.  Worse, although UC may now authentically say that undergraduates have more contact hours with honest-to-goodness professors, many of these professors have not taught large classes (and large-enrollment courses of hundreds of students are increasingly replacing smaller ones, tripling or more the size of some classes) for a very long time.  Teaching very large classes is an art that few have mastered; after all, how does one employ best practices in undergraduate learning (e.g. interaction with and among students, activities, ongoing assessment) in a class of more than 500 students?

Democracy Now recently convened a discussion with a number of UC stakeholders to help people better understand the crisis.  I think Professor Ananya Roy of UC Berkeley's department of Department of City and Regional Planning put it best:

I think there is a very real crisis in California, where continuing budget cuts have devastated the infrastructure of public education, and we have a governor who continues to call for deeper and deeper budget cuts, even though there is nothing left to cut. So we’re clearly fighting for the ideal of public education. We’re fighting for the opportunity of Californians and Americans to get a decent education. But we’re also fighting for the future of our particular university, the UC system, and we’re fighting to be represented by leaders who believe in and can defend the mission of public education.

That bit about leaders may be a reference to UC President Mark Yudof's interview in The New York Times, which is widely regarded by UC denizens as both a disaster and symptomatic of the UC administration's profound misunderstanding of the history and values of public higher education in California.  In that interview, Yudof said he feels like the "manager of a cemetery," admitted he gets about a $10,000/month housing stipend from the UC (his total compensation package is $828,000/year), and admits he doesn't know how he got into education: "It's all an accident," he explained.

In response to that interview, two Berkeley professors wrote a letter to the NYT that included these paragraphs:

These missions of access, excellence and vision have been the essence of California’s Master Plan for Education since 1960. Yudof also says that he fell into education as a profession by “accident.” In contrast, each of us came to Berkeley deliberately, because we believe in the importance of the public research university as an institution — one that provides an outstanding education that is accessible and affordable. We are proud that for decades, our students have gone on to become the next generation of educators, researchers, business developers and public servants.

Yudof’s joking remarks about finance speak to the lack of vision and leadership in his administration. As faculty, we fear that it is not only our present but our collective future that is being destroyed. We need executives who will do more than preside over the collapse of the finest public university system in the world.

In the Democracy Now discussion, moderator Amy Goodman asked Laura Nader, a professor of sociocultural anthropology at UC Berkeley, to explain what she meant by a call for transparency in the UC budget--and suggests it's time for the university to reconsider its priorities:

LAURA NADER: We need transparency about such things as intercollegiate sports, which is a problem all over the country. And Brian Barsky and Alice Agogino, these are people in computer studies and engineering, they can add the figures, and the figures don’t make sense.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

LAURA NADER: The figures, it’s supposed to be—intercollegiate is supposed to bring in money to the university.

AMY GOODMAN: Sports.

LAURA NADER: In fact, they’re in debt, intercollegiate sports. So we’re subsidizing, the student fees are subsidizing intercollegiate sports. And we’re closing libraries. So we had—the libraries are supposed to be closed on Saturdays. There were some students that sat in, professors that spoke. And a wonderful donor, anonymous, gave money to keep the libraries open on Saturday, but the university didn’t fall into line and open the libraries on Saturday. So these are issues of transparency and accountability, fiscal accountability, that are very important today.

Because I earned three graduate degrees from the UC over a period of seven years, taught undergraduates and graduate students at the UC, and have served as a staff member there for more than three years, I've been around the UC block once or twice.  But I've never seen anything like this, nor felt such an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, frustration, and anger at any of the five other universities where I've worked or been a student.  One word comes to mind again and again: clusterfuck.  It's the perfect compound word for the situation.

Really, there's no one person or agency to blame for getting us into this mess, but there are definitely people and offices and agencies who could be working more thoughtfully and transparently to get us out of it.  Because a 32 percent tuition increase in a single year?  That's criminal.

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toybox, and is the founder of Eager Mondays, a consultancy providing unconventional professional development.

In her initial proposal to the commission, submitted on August 6, Heriot wrote,

Recently, accusations have been made that some selective private, coed, liberal arts schools are discriminating in admissions in to order to maintain what they regard as an appropriate gender balance. Specifically, the accusation is that women applicants are being discriminated against in order to prevent the schools from becoming “too female.” Indeed, some commentators have called this an “open secret” and suggested the same may be occurring at state schools too (where it would be illegal).

Women dominate higher education generally. Approximately 58% of bachelor's degrees and 60% of master's degrees go to women. The dominance of women is particularly felt in community colleges and institutions that are non-selective or only somewhat selective. The reasons for this are complex and controversial, but no doubt part of the reason is that males who have recently graduated from high school are more likely than their female counterparts to prefer the opportunities available to them in the military or in the building trades. Incarceration rates are also higher for men than for women in this (or any) age group.

Privately at least, some college administrators argue that they must discriminate against women or the gender balance at their institutions will become so off-kilter that many of the women they want won't be willing to attend. Colleges will then be unable to attract the female students they want most -or so they fear. Interestingly, this may be a bit of a collective action problem. Once a few lower-ranked liberal arts schools starting giving preferential treatment to men, others feel they must follow suit, since the failure to do so will cause any hold-out school to have a gender ratio that is seriously off-kilter.

The proposal outlines six questions the commission should investigate.  The questions ask whether colleges are giving men preferential treatment in admissions, whether an imbalance of men and women on campus might dissuade women from attending a college, how colleges might attract better-qualified male applicants without giving them preferential treatment, and whether some Department of Education policies might be dissuading schools from putting in place programs that might be more attractive to men.  That last question may seem odd in the context of a decrease in male admissions—why wouldn't schools add more male sports in that case?—but some interpretations of Title IX require schools to spend equal amounts on men's and women's sports, which might prove too costly for some colleges.

The commission has released the names of some, but not all, the colleges it will be investigating, but the commission only has subpoena power within 100 miles of where it holds the hearing, in this case Washington, DC.  The Chronicle reports that

They include colleges in several categories: historically black institutions; private, moderately selective institutions, including both religious and nonreligious ones; private, highly selective institutions; and public ones. Georgetown University, Gettysburg College, the Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Richmond were named at the meeting.

The colleges are chosen to be representative; only the University of Richmond is under suspicion of favoring male applicants.

I'm not going to pretend to have thought through all the ramifications of this case, but I do have some initial, very tentative, thoughts.  Some might argue that because some colleges practice affirmative action based on race or ethnicity to increase the proportion of underrepresented students on campus, these colleges should also be able to practice preferential admissions on behalf of male students when they represent less than 50 percent of the student body.  Practicing affirmative action on behalf of white men, however, is different from practicing it on behalf of people of color because white men have not traditionally faced the same kinds of social and cultural discrimination as have people of color--meaning white boys are more likely than children of color to have had sufficient resources available to them to allow for their success.  (Does this mean all white boys are privileged?  Absolutely not.  But statistically speaking, schools with a majority of children of color are less likely to receive sufficient funding and resources.)

What is Heriot's motivation? She has a history of taking issue with affirmative action policies. A couple years back, olvlzl at Echidne of the Snakes reported on a panel discussion that included Heriot.  She summed up Heriot thusly:

Heriot is a recent appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights based, in my humble opinion, on her being your garden variety, right wing, race baiter and echo of various conservative bromides. The Commissioner didn’t say much that you can’t get the gist of from reading her quite odious group blog. No, you really don’t even have to do that. Imagine what a Bush appointee to the Civil Rights Commission would have to say on the subject of affirmative action and you’ll have the complete picture.

Name-calling aside, Heriot has written a number of blog posts contesting affirmative action based on race and other matters of fairness in university life, including posts on how "holistic" admissions policies are a backdoor way to admit more applicants of color, her uneasiness with some of the ins and outs of test accommodations for students with disabilities, and her opposition to a revival of the Equal Rights Amendment, which includes this discussion from almost two years ago:

Back in 1996, when Proposition 209 passed, there weren’t a lot of affirmative action programs that overtly discriminated against women. I remember only one–a nursing program at a California state university that in the name of diversity gave preference to men interested in nursing. Proposition 209 outlawed it. Today, more than a decade later, 56% of all undergraduates are women. That makes them not just a majority, but a significant majority, particularly at the community college level. Some admissions offices at moderately selective schools are starting to give preferential treatment to men.

Harmless? I am not inclined to think so. But I will blog on that later. All I can say now is that I hope this development makes the leaders of organizations like NOW and the Feminist Majority worry about whether they did the right thing in supporting the University of Michigan in Grutter v. Bollinger and in opposing Proposition 209 and Proposal 2. Next time they get get a chance to think about the issue, they should remember that the group they are seeking to benefit makes up the majority.  And the majority can be abused too.

Regardless of Heriot's politics and motivations, the issue is an interesting one, as many colleges and universities have been arguing for years--and I agree with them--that a diverse student body on a college campus strengthens students' experiences inside and outside the classroom, in part because students may be exposed to a broader spectrum of arguments and beliefs, which can--I've seen it in my classroom--bolster critical thinking skills.  But does a push for diversity necessitarily mean campuses should support an equal balance of men and women?

The proposal raises some good questions, and I'm looking forward to seeing the answers, even though for now their future effect on campus life--through recommendations by the commission, as well as the policies that may develop from those recommendations--remains murky.

What are your thoughts?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and is the founder of Eager Mondays, a consultancy providing unconventional professional development.

According to the nationwide study, titled "Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today," disheartened teachers are frustrated with testing, a lack of support from school administrators, and behavioral problems among students:

The view that teaching is “so demanding, it’s a wonder that more people don’t burn out” is remarkably pervasive, particularly among the Disheartened—they are twice as likely as other teachers to strongly agree with this view. Members of that group, which accounts for 40 percent of K-12 teachers in the United States, tend to have been teaching longer and are older than the Idealists, and more than half teach in low-income schools. They are more likely to voice high levels of frustration about the school administration, disorder in the classroom, and the undue focus on testing. Only 14 percent rate their principals as “excellent”” at supporting them as teachers, and 61 percent cite lack of support from administrators as a major drawback to teaching. Nearly three-quarters cite “discipline and behavior issues” in the classroom, and 7 in 10 say that testing are major drawbacks as well.

Contented teachers also tend to be veterans—94 percent of them have been teaching for more than a decade—but they tend to see their schools as "orderly, safe, and respectful" and feel they have both the time and opportunity to craft solid lesson plans.  Many of them teach in schools attended by students from middle-class and affluent families. 

Idealists were those teachers most likely to agree with the statement "good teachers can lead all students to learn, even those from poor families or who have uninvolved parents."  More than half of idealists are 32 years old or younger, and more than half teach elementary-age students.  Of the idealists, 36 percent say they will continue to pursue a career in education, but not necessarily in the classroom.  An interesting note about idealists, from the study's web site:

Although the researchers caution that the teachers’ idealism does not necessarily guarantee that they are more effective teachers than their colleagues, half of Idealists believe their students’ test scores have increased significantly as a result of their teaching, a higher percentage than other teachers in the survey.

While disheartened and idealist teachers may on the surface appear to have different sensibilities about teaching, the survey results demonstrate they are actually very much in agreement on some key issues, including class sizes (they're too large) and the need to improve professional development for teachers.

The researchers conclude that disheartened teachers pose a particular challenge:

Some may be ill-fitted to the job and ready to move on, but how should the field encourage and support their transition? Others may be good teachers trapped in dysfunctional schools and, in the right environment, might change their views and become Idealists. While these teachers may be helping their students despite their bleak outlook, the researchers point out that it would be hard to believe that these Disheartened teachers are as effective as they could be given their own reports about their situation.

I remember reading a study years ago--its title and author elude me now--about the professional life cycle of K-12 teachers.  There were, if I remember correctly, five stages, with the fourth a relatively long period of bitterness and frustration and the fifth a brief period of healthy disengagement from the profession as the teacher readies for retirement.  It's not surprising, then, that those teachers in the study that have the most experience in the classroom would also be those that are disheartened.

Remember, too, that one of the rewards of teaching in public schools is frequently a solid retirement plan or pension. After investing 15 or 20 years in teaching, few teachers can afford to jump ship for another career, as the opportunities elsewhere for pensions are not as strong as if the teacher works another 15 years in the classroom.  These disheartened teachers may be locked into their positions for the rest of their professional lives.

That said, we should be encouraging and motivating our veteran teachers, not frustrating them.  Those teachers who have demonstrated their effectiveness in the classroom should be given more autonomy, not less.  It has to be profoundly frustrating to have developed, over two decades or more, a good deal of real-world, hands-on expertise, only to be met with demands for a standardization of curriculum and a regime of high-stakes testing.  Many of today's veteran teachers entered the profession at a time when creativity in, and innovation of, the curriculum was a thing to be celebrated, rather than something suspicious.  I feel for those K-12 teachers who expected to be able to innovate and grow throughout their careers, only to be met by No Child Left Behind and similar mandates on a state or local level.

Here's what bloggers have to say:

Tom Hoffman at Tuttle SVC takes issue with questions the study explicitly raises about its policy implications, suggesting that better questions might be "What turns an 'Idealist' into a 'Disheartened' teacher?" and "What turns a 'Disheartened' teacher back into an 'Idealist?'"

Jamie Davies O'Leary at Flypaper compares the Public Agenda study with a study from earlier this year on Ohioans' attitudes on variety of education issues.  Davies O'Leary wonders why the studies' results are so different on some key questions:

Admittedly, the sample populations are different and the questions are worded in slightly different ways. But what gives for these very different survey results? Do Ohioans have different views regarding teacher efficacy with poor students compared to the rest of the nation? Do teachers have more optimism than the general public? Is there a generational difference (the Public Agenda survey oversampled young teachers) when it comes to aligning with the idea that teachers can make a difference, rather than the traditional viewpoint that socioeconomics is destiny?

Elena Silva argues that there are ways to keep teachers from becoming disheartened. "There are better designs for teaching," she writes, "designs that can improve teacher satisfaction and effectiveness at the same time."

Maureen Downey isn't sympathizing with disheartened teachers:

My only response to this study comes out a conversation I had over the weekend with three people in construction-related fields. Each had lost their jobs and been looking for six months or more without even an interview. They were unsympathetic to employed folks complaining about conditions on their jobs. Their response to the rest of us was, “Be glad you have a job.” I would bet that “disheartened” now describes a good portion of the U.S. workforce.

What about you?  Are you in sympathy with disheartened teachers?  What are your ideas for improving their satisfaction--assuming job satisfaction among these teachers might lead to greater motivation and even stronger classroom performance?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and is the founder of Eager Mondays, a consultancy providing unconventional professional development.

Over the years, I've heard academics, parents, students, and the authorities provide a very wide range of reasons why students target one another or why adults target students. Dunblane was chalked up in part to pedophila by a former Scout leader; the West Nickel Mines (Amish) School shooting to molestation and pedophila; the Derrian Albert beating to a deadly neighborhood rivalry; the the Columbine high school massacre to (among other things) bullying, cliques, antidepressant use by teens, and video games; and the Heath High School (Paducah, Kentucky) attack on the shooter's mental illness. These are the most sensational and publicized incidents of school violence over the years; for a fuller list, check out this very disturbing Wikipedia page.  Of course, there are thousands more cases, ranging from fistfights to stabbings to rape and God knows what else, that occur under the radar of the national, and frequently also the local, media. I'd also posit that some of the blame can be placed on a Darwinian competition for scarce resources in impoverished school districts, parental and student poverty, suburban ennui in more affluent schools, and a persistent American history of cross-cultural distrust and misunderstanding.

Bloggers and journalists have written about the most recent incidents, particularly the Albert beating, dissecting possible causes of the violence and proposing ways to move beyond it.

Naomi Zikmund-Fisher, who blogs at Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback, is a school principal and a crisis consultant for schools and community organizations. Reflecting on the Varinecz stabbing and shooting, she writes,

A good Critical Incident Stress Management Team knows what to expect from an officer involved shooting. They know what to expect when an officer is injured. They know the patterns when a child dies, and those from violence in a school. They even know that sometimes two types of incidents combine into one event.

All that having been said, I don't think there is a team in the country that feels truly prepared for what happened at Carolina Forest High School today. There is no page in the textbook for the injury of an officer at a school in an incident resulting in an officer involved shooting of a child. As a school CISM Team Leader myself, I look at this incident and have to take a few moments just to swear under my breath before I can even consider where I would start.

This is just one more reminder that emergency preparedness isn't just about practicing for every awful event you can imagine. It's also about developing a tool kit of skills and the creativity and flexibility to use them in new ways, when those things that you can't possibly imagine in a million years happen on your watch.

At The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jonathan Zimmerman provides an historical perspective, emphasizing that strife isn't new to the schoolhouse--but guns are. Zimmerman's brief exposé goes all the way back to an 1841 story by Walt Whitman.

Jonathan Simon at Prawfsblog suggests schools need to do more to "govern crime" instead of "governing through crime." He cites Susan Saulny's New York Times piece examining how Chicago school officials are now determining which students are most likely to be victims of school violence. In short: Chicago students are more likely to be victims of violence if they are black, male, are academically off-track, and lack a stable home environment. Student victims of violence in Chicago schools miss an average of 42% of school days.

Mary at Freedom Eden wonders how recent violence will affect students' learning in a Milwaukee high school.

Barbara Twine-Thomas, who writes at Febone 1960, reflects on how youth violence has become "an American way of life." Her post chronicles several recent, and profoundly disturbing, incidents of violence by and against young people, including ones where a toddler and a teen were doused with flammable liquids and set on fire. Twine-Thomas calls on all of us to get involved in addressing the epidemic of youth violence.

Lisa H. at Chicago Moms blog reports on the unsettling (lack of) reaction of her fellow Starbucks customers to two 12-year-old boys' boasting that they were such victims of injustice (one had been given a white instead of a black iPhone) that they could kill everyone in the café.

In a Truth-Out op-ed, Henry A. Giroux suggests that

a set of larger forces in American society [...] are increasingly defining kids through a youth crime complex that touches almost every aspect of their lives - extending from the streets they walk on to the schools and community centers in which they spend most of their time.

He continues:

School violence cannot be disconnected from the larger violence that filters through American society, nor can it be addressed by demonizing or beating kids or, increasingly, militarizing their schools. Nor can it be addressed by simply pumping money into cash-strapped schools simply to promote standardized testing. The underlying economic, social and political causes of violence are largely tied to a society in which young people, especially poor, minority youth, simply do not matter any longer and are considered disposable. Removed from the discourse of social investment, if not the social contract itself, they are destined to be unemployed, having been warehoused in schools often lacking the most basic resources, and subject to a culture of violence from which they can rarely escape and almost never transform on their own.

Definitely click through to Giroux's op-ed, a real battle-cry for social, and not just school, reform.

Over at the Republican Reporter, Bob Schulz suggests the solution to school violence is school choice. However, in light of Giroux's more in-depth editorial, such a solution seems facile.

I imagine many of you have stories of school violence from your own days in junior high or high school. More notable for me were the days where violence was expected but nothing out of the ordinary occured. For example, I myself was at Long Beach Poly High School (Snoop Dogg's alma mater) during the Los Angeles riots. The school eventually closed for a day or two due to the riots, but on the first day, police officers who usually patrolled the campus on foot were instead driving their police car, windows rolled up, around the campus sidewalks. As far as I know, the only person hurt by campus violence during the riots was a diminutive vice principal who decided to throw herself into an altercation between two very large Pacific Islander young men.

That said, I was in charge of the obituary page in my senior year high school yearbook. My memory is that we lost fewer students than usual that year--maybe four or five that I could uncover, and not all due to violence--but in a high school of nearly 4,000 students with a high turnover rate, it's alarmingly difficult to keep track of such statistics.

What are your thoughts and experiences? What solutions do you propose?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and is the founder of Eager Mondays, a consultancy providing unconventional professional development.

Bloggers from all points in the political spectrum are weighing in on the standards--or, more commonly, on the idea of national standards, especially when they come from the federal government (though, as The Washington Post points out, the federal government really is more of a bystander) or if the federal government will be offering money as an incentive to states that adopt these standards. So far 48 states--Alaska and Texas being the exceptions--have signed on to the initiative.

At the New York Times Room for Debate blog, experts were invited to submit brief comments on the standards. Their backgrounds are diverse--they range from a representative of the libertarian Cato Institute to a charter school founder to a professor of urban schooling--and their comments aren't really surprising. You've heard them before: from Neal McCluskey's tired lament that teachers are fully to blame for all the ills in public schools and that parents will always make the right decisions for their children to Ernest Morrell's similarly cliché (but alas, true) observation that our schools aren't going to improve if we can't provide enough books, better-trained and highly educated teachers, and reasonable class sizes, the comments are predictable.

What's interesting to me is the way people--and here I refer to the NYT's invited respondents as well as bloggers elsewhere--are making the same claims about competing agendas. For example, at the NYT, Robert Siegler claims that variations in state standards "hinder learning, especially among children whose parents move often" and make it difficult to evaluate the learning taking place in different states. Yet McCluskey argues that it's the presence of uniform standards, rather than their absence, that slows learning.

There's probably truth in both statements, and honestly, I haven't done enough research to know which end of this standards continuum is drawing on better evidence regarding student achievement. I will say this: the standards themselves are fairly tame and--aside from a provision asking high school English teachers to teach students how to read texts from other disciplines as well as the traditional literary works--will likely not prove controversial in this draft. (Expect the dust to kick up once grade-specific standards are released.)

I do resent folks who are using this opportunity (as does McCluskey) to argue that we should unleash the forces of the free market on the education system, letting parent-consumers decide what's best and closing those schools that don't receive sufficient parental support. God forbid people who went to school for 5 to 10 (or more) years to study learning theory and practice, who have made it their life's calling and profession, have some say in what students learn. (But hey, I'm biased: I went to school through grade 24, so clearly you can count me among the anti-parent elitists.)

I'm hearing the free-market argument not only in K-12 education but also in discussions of what should be funded (or, rather, cut) in cash-strapped universities. By one measure, if undergraduate engineering majors go on to earn higher salaries than, say, English majors, then engineering is a more valuable major and should be better funded than English, even if equal numbers of students on campus are interested in each major. Similarly, some are arguing that if corporations are giving more money to science professors and researchers than they are to humanities and arts faculty, then the state university should invest its resources similarly because the markets have spoken. Of course, I hear this argument most often from the mouths of science faculty (and, interestingly, mostly white male science faculty).

So what happens if we let "the market" choose what K-16 students will learn? Taken to one (I'm afraid believable) extreme, we see a narrowing of the curriculum, with high school English teachers transformed into drones teaching students to interpret technical texts and universities cutting (as we're already seeing them do) foreign languages, literature, history, arts, and the humanities more generally. As state universities emphasize the lucrative fields of science, technology, engineering, and medicine, the last bastions of a real liberal arts education (by which I mean an education incorporating both breadth and depth across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences) will be those few elite four-year colleges that can afford, by dint of their endowments or their ability to attract top students, to continue to offer what may come to be seen as an outdated (or maybe "classic") education. But these institutions tend to be pricey, so such education may even further become a privilege of the elite--by which I mean either wealthy families or families that are savvy and well-connected enough to know which schools offer the best financial aid in addition to opportunities to expand students' horizons.

And now for a round-up of what folks are saying in the blogosphere:

Think Tank West addresses some myths--and, it ends up, not-myths--about the interplay of No Child Left Behind, federal and state control and funding of education, and national standards.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers makes a tentative case for national standards.

Writing a few months back at The American Prospect, Dana Goldstein recounted a roundtable debate among Weingarten, New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and D.C. schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee. Goldstein sums up the conversation:

So there you have it: Three of the most influential education leaders in the country, all supporters of national standards, but all raising their eyebrows at the current state and testing-industry-led effort to get there.

Melanie Smollin asks, among other questions,

How will teachers know how to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment with these new standards in ways effective enough to enable all students to have a shot at reaching them?

Chester Finn, writing at the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog, laments the Byzantine mess states have made of standards:

Yes, those who abhor the thought of national education standards and tests for the United States will find all sorts of reasons to oppose them. I don’t know if the forthcoming product, once fully massaged, will be to my liking. But I do know that our present motley array of state-specific standards and assessments is obsolete and dysfunctional—as well as mediocre or worse in many states. (There are a few happy exceptions.)

For some good discussion on an earlier leaked draft of the national standards, see the comments section of Robert Pondiscio's post Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival at The Core Knowledge Blog.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What do you think about the standardization of curricula, either within state borders or across them?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and is the founder of Eager Mondays, a consultancy providing unconventional professional development.