History > 2012 > USA > Education (II)

Keith Negley

September 19, 2012

Chicago’s Next School Crisis: Pension Fund Is Running Dry

NYT

19 September 2012

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/
business/teachers-pension-a-big-issue-for-chicago.html

 

N.R.A. Call to Guard Schools

Is Criticized as Too Simplistic

December 22, 2012
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

The National Rifle Association’s blunt call on Friday to train and place armed guards in every school in the nation as a way to “protect our children right now” has brought a divergence of opinion from school officials, teachers, parents and police officials.

But even those who said they might support some increased police presence on campuses as part of a broader safety strategy pointed out that the group’s proposal was far too simplistic.

“It’s not that they’re simply there if something terrible happens,” said Martin Miller, a math teacher at Hyde Park High School in Chicago, which has three armed police officers assigned to the building. The officers, he explained, are working to diffuse potential conflict within the schools as much as to protect students from outside intruders. One also doubles as a wrestling coach, Mr. Miller said, and the officers spend time with students serving as de facto counselors or social workers.

“In a lot of ways, I feel like our school is safer than a lot of other schools,” Mr. Miller said, adding that the school also had metal detectors at every entrance. “But as a whole, just having a police officer or an armed guard or someone with a gun is not going to stop the violence. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

While about a third of public schools nationwide have armed guards on campus, those who do not say they worry that allowing police officers with guns in schools would be far more destructive to the day-to-day culture of schools than any benefit they might bring in protecting against the worst-case scenario.

“To have an armed guard at every school completely sends the wrong message in so many ways about what schools are about,” said David Fleishman, superintendent of the Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts. He added that in extensive discussions with principals, local police, parents and elected officials over the past week after the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, “not a soul” had requested that the schools hire armed security officers.

When the Cleveland school district overhauled its safety program a few years ago, it decided not to arm the 145 security officers stationed in school buildings. David Osher, director of the human and social development program at the American Institutes for Research, who advised the Cleveland district on safety, said that an armed guard does not necessarily make a school safer.

“In theory what the N.R.A. is saying is we want to put someone in so that if somebody breaks in, we’ll shoot him down and everything will be fine and the only person that will be shot is the person breaking in,” he said. “In reality, the problem is you might shoot someone who isn’t in fact breaking in or you might shoot somebody else — a student or a visitor or a teacher or other adult who is doing something else that is inappropriate that is perceived by that person as being threatening.”

And many opponents of the rifle association’s proposal pointed out that a security guard at Columbine High School did not prevent the tragedy there, and that even trained New York City police officers shot and injured nine bystanders in August in their pursuit of a gunman outside the Empire State Building.

As a practical matter, placing trained professional security officers in all of the country’s schools would be costly, and it is not clear that there are enough people who could even do the job.

There are currently about 99,000 public elementary and secondary schools in the United States, along with about 33,000 private schools. According to the Department of Justice, there were 452,000 full-time law enforcement officers across the country in 2009, the latest year for which data is available.

Craig Steckler, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, called the rifle association’s proposal unrealistic and probably unwise. Putting at least one officer in each of the nation’s schools could mean hiring as many as 100,000 people, he said, expanding the ranks of state and local officers by one-quarter. Qualified applicants, he said, are already scarce.

“My city has 32 elementary schools, 5 middle schools, 6 high schools, and that doesn’t include private schools,” said Mr. Steckler, the police chief in Fremont, Calif., a city of 214,000 people. “My patrol force is 89 officers on all shifts. Where are we going to get 40-some additional officers?”

“I just don’t believe that putting more guns on the campus is a solution,” he added, saying that chiefs would rather see more resources devoted to mental health care and the control of assault weapons.

Another tier of the rifle assocation’s plan would make use of local volunteers serving in their own communities.

The group proposed that it could train volunteers, like retired police officers or military personnel, to serve as school guards. Others said that even school staff could be trained.

“I have been saying for years that schools should have personnel, whether it is a janitor or a principal, who are armed,” said John DeLoca, a father of a teenager and two other grown children who owns the Seneca Sporting Range in Ridgewood, Queens, and is a licensed gun dealer and an N.R.A. certified firearms instructor. “We have fire extinguishers all over the place and hopefully we never have to use them. In the same way, we need trained armed personnel at schools.”

Joseph Dedam, 16, a junior at Elizabethtown-Lewis Central School in Elizabethtown, N.Y., said the proposal “is proactive. Right now, the best a school can do is have the teachers lock the classroom door and have the kids try to hide in a corner. But this is a situation where you can’t fight fire with water. You need to fight fire with fire.” He added, “you would not want a school official who is scared of a gun or not fully trained to have one.”

But a number of parents objected to the notion of a school staff member or a volunteer carrying a gun anywhere near their children.

“If we’re going to do this — which I don’t know that we necessarily should — they should be paid professionals,” said Dave Lamb, a research physicist in St. Paul, who has two daughters in elementary school.

Other parents regarded the proposal as simply missing the point. Picking up her children from a Washington, D.C., elementary school on Friday, Courtney Carlson, a business consultant, said she felt “so totally outraged when I stepped into the school thinking that was the solution to a totally messed up problem.”

“I think crazy people who get access to high capacity-rifles want to cause mayhem,” added Ms. Carlson, a mother of three whose two eldest attend school. “Someone who has a gun that can shoot 200 rounds in under 10 minutes — you don’t stop that person unless you don’t let the person have that kind of gun.”

Richard Perez-Pena and Serge F. Kovaleski

contributed reporting.

N.R.A. Call to Guard Schools Is Criticized as Too Simplistic, NYT, 22.12.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/us/mixed-reaction-to-call-for-armed-guards-in-schools.html

N.R.A. Envisions

‘a Good Guy With a Gun’

in Every School

December 21, 2012
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
and MOTOKO RICH

WASHINGTON — After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country. It pointed the finger at violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement — not guns — as culprits in the recent rash of mass shootings.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, “N.R.A. Killing Our Kids.”

The N.R.A.’s plan for countering school shootings, coming a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was met with widespread derision from school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some critics calling it “delusional” and “paranoid.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, said arming schools would not make them safer.

Even conservative politicians who had voiced support this week for arming more school officers did not rush to embrace the N.R.A.’s plan.

Their reluctance was an indication of just how toxic the gun debate has become after the Connecticut shootings, as gun control advocates push for tougher restrictions.

Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools — about one-third of all public schools — already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data, for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days.

Even so, the N. R. A’s focus on armed guards as its prime solution to school shootings — and the group’s offer to help develop and carry out such a program nationwide — rankled a number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“Anyone who thought the N.R.A. was going to come out today and make a common-sense statement about meaningful reform and safety was kidding themselves,” said Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, who has called for new restrictions on assault rifles.

Mr. LaPierre struck a defiant tone on Friday, making clear that his group was not eager to reach a conciliation. With the N.R.A. not making any statements after last week’s shootings, both supporters and opponents of greater gun control had been looking to its announcement Friday as a sign of how the nation’s most influential gun lobby group would respond and whether it would pledge to work with President Obama and Congress in developing new gun control measures.

Mr. LaPierre offered no support for any of the proposals made in the last week, like banning assault rifles or limiting high-capacity ammunition, and N.R.A. leaders declined to answer questions. As reporters shouted out to Mr. LaPierre and David Keene, the group’s president, asking whether they planned to work with Mr. Obama, the men walked off stage without answering.

Mr. LaPierre seemed to anticipate the negative reaction in an address that was often angry and combative.

“Now I can imagine the headlines — the shocking headlines you’ll print tomorrow,” he told more than 150 journalists at a downtown hotel several blocks from the White House.

“More guns, you’ll claim, are the N.R.A.’s answer to everything,” he said. “Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?”

Mr. LaPierre said his organization would finance and develop a program called the National Model School Shield Program, to work with schools to arm and train school guards, including retired police officers and volunteers. The gun rights group named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas and administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency, to lead a task force to develop the program.

Mr. LaPierre also said that before Congress moved to pass any new gun restrictions, it should “act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation” by the time students return from winter break in January.

The idea of arming school security officers is not altogether new. Districts in cities including Albuquerque, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and St. Louis have armed officers in schools, either through relationships with local police departments or by training and recruiting their own staff members.

A federal program dating back to the Clinton administration also uses armed police officers in school districts to bolster security, and Mr. LaPierre himself talked about beefing up the number of armed officers on campuses after the deadly shootings in 2007 at Virginia Tech.

But what the N.R.A. proposed would expand the use of armed officers nationwide and make greater use of not just police officers, but armed volunteers — including retired police officers and reservists — to patrol school grounds. The organization offered no estimates of the cost.

Mr. LaPierre said that if armed security officers had been used at the Newtown school, “26 innocent lives might have been spared that day.”

The N.R.A. news conference was an unusual Washington event both in tone and substance, as Mr. LaPierre avoided the hedged, carefully calibrated language that political figures usually prefer, and instead let loose with a torrid attack on the N.R.A.’s accusers.

He blasted what he called “the political class here in Washington” for pursuing new gun control measures while failing, in his view, to adequately prosecute violations of existing gun laws, finance law enforcement programs or develop a national registry of mentally ill people who might prove to be “the next Adam Lanza,” the gunman in Newtown.

Mr. LaPierre also complained that the news media had unfairly “demonized gun owners.” And he called the makers of violent video games “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people,” as he showed a video of an online cartoon game called “Kindergarten Killer.”

While some superintendents and parents interviewed after the N.R.A.’s briefing said they might support an increased police presence on school campuses as part of a broader safety strategy, many educators, politicians, and crime experts described it as foolhardy and potentially dangerous. Law enforcement officials said putting armed officers in the nation’s 99,000 schools was unrealistic because of the enormous cost and manpower needed.

At a news conference Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is leading an effort to reinstitute a ban on assault rifles, read from a police report on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, which detailed an armed officer’s unsuccessful attempts to disarm one of the gunmen. “There were two armed law enforcement officers at that campus, and you see what happened — 15 dead,” Ms. Feinstein said.

Ernest Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, called the N.R.A.’s plan “unbelievable and cynical.”

He said placing armed guards within schools would “expose our children to far greater risk from gun violence than the very small risk they now face.”Officials in some districts that use armed security officers stressed that it was only part of a broader strategy aimed at reducing the risk of violence.

But Ben Kiser, superintendent of schools in Gloucester County, Va., where the district already has four police officers assigned to patrol schools, said it was just as important to provide mental health services to help struggling children and families.

“What I’m afraid of,” said Mr. Kiser, who is also president of the Virginia Association of School Superintendents, “is that we’re often quick to find that one perceived panacea and that’s where we spend our focus.”

In Newtown, Conn., the N.R.A.’s call for arming school guards generated considerable debate among parents and residents on Friday — much of it negative. Suzy DeYoung, a parenting coach who has one child in the local school system, said she thought many parents in town and around the country would object to bringing more guns onto school campuses.

“I think people are smarter than that,” she said.

Reporting was contributed

by John H. Cushman Jr. and Jeremy W. Peters

in Washington,

and Serge F. Kovaleski and Richard Pérez-Peña

in New York.

    N.R.A. Envisions ‘a Good Guy With a Gun’ in Every School, NYT, 21.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/nra-calls-for-armed-guards-at-schools.html

Varied Paths Toward Healing

for Sites of Terrorized Schools

December 21, 2012
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

At Columbine High School, a glass atrium glistens in the sunlight.

Inside Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall, pastel walls enclose a peace center.

At Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, a flower garden welcomes students.

These spaces were once other things: the second-floor library where two killers completed a rampage that left 12 fellow high school students and a teacher dead; the classrooms where 30 college students and faculty members were gunned down by another student; and the gymnasium where 16 5- and 6-year-old children and their teacher were fatally shot by an intruder.

School officials in Newtown, Conn., said this week that they had not yet begun to discuss the future of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 first graders and 6 staff members were killed inside. But in the indelible tragedies that came before, school officials and parents were often so haunted by the violence that they sought to dismantle whole sections of buildings, ripping out blood-soaked floors and every last chunk of cinder block from the rooms where the killings took place. And when the spaces were put back together, if they were not razed completely, they often had new layouts and amenities that rendered them nearly unrecognizable — which is more or less the point.

These new spaces were typically culminations of long and painful healing processes for devastated families and communities. School officials and parents say their wounds are still there, though their scars grow a little thicker with each passing year, as the survivors graduate and new students too young to remember what happened take their places.

“A school should not be a memorial,” said Cindy Stevenson, superintendent in Jefferson County, Colo., where school officials and parents rejected the idea of closing Columbine High School after the shooting. “We don’t ever want to forget those children, but you also need to say a school is a living, growing, vibrant place.”

For now, Sandy Hook Elementary remains a crime scene, a bullet-ravaged shell that has become a worldwide symbol of anguish. The school’s more than 400 students will resume classes in January in a former school nearby that is being painstakingly remade to resemble the one they left behind, down to the exact color of the classroom walls. Even their old desks and chairs are being moved over from Sandy Hook.

“All of our efforts have been focused on healing our children and families and restarting school,” William Hart, a Newtown school board member, wrote in an e-mail, saying, “we have been unable to put any energy into planning for the future of that building.”

He added, “I suspect it may be some time before we can do so.”

Many psychologists say that schools torn apart by violence are confronted by a need to provide some continuity to traumatized students and staff members, and the need to take steps toward moving beyond the tragedy, so it does not come to define them. “It’s a balance,” said Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of the book “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.” “I don’t think there’s any one right way to do this.”

Alan E. Kazdin, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University, said that research seemed to support efforts by schools to change their buildings after a tragedy, since returning to the same environment can set off terror and anxiety. “It will not help you get over it,” Dr. Kazdin said. “Anything that was associated with it, you want to get rid of.”

So Amish leaders decided to demolish a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., just over a week after 10 schoolgirls were lined up against a blackboard and shot in 2006. Five of them died.

Herman Bontrager, a local businessman who helped the families of the victims, said parents believed that it would be too traumatic for their children to go back, and others were concerned that the building could become a shrine that drew unwanted attention to their quiet community.

The students moved to a temporary site nearby while a new building was erected by the men in their community. It was christened the New Hope Amish School, and four of the five survivors of the shooting returned to classes there. “It was definitely a good decision,” Mr. Bontrager said. “They haven’t put the event behind them. They’ve just found a way to live with it.”

Similarly, Dunblane Primary School tore out its gymnasium, the scene of the 1996 attack, and converted it into a flower garden; a whole new gym was built in another spot.

Northern Illinois University debated razing a popular hall that was closed for almost four years after five students were fatally shot in an auditorium in 2008, but later remade the space into an anthropology museum and a classroom equipped with touch-screen computers. “That space has been replaced by a new state-of-the-art learning environment that is completely different,” Paul Palian, a university spokesman, said. “So it’s a way to honor their spirit and commitment to learning.”

In other places, however, tight school schedules and lean budgets have led to more modest changes. Chardon High School in Ohio reopened less than a week after a student opened fire in the cafeteria in February, killing three classmates. The school cleaned up the cafeteria, replaced tables and repainted the wall trim in the school’s colors, red and black.

Andy Fetchik, the Chardon principal, said he had expected students to be reluctant to set foot in the cafeteria. But that was the first place they went. They cried, hugged and wrote tributes on a table placed over a spot where their classmates had fallen.

“They needed to reclaim their space,” Mr. Fetchik said. “If it completely changes, it’s no longer their space; it’s a new space, and it doesn’t give them a chance to grieve.”

Columbine High School was temporarily closed after the April 1999 shootings and its 1,500 students were sent to a nearby school for the remaining weeks before the summer break. Dr. Stevenson, the superintendent, said the community had made it clear that it wanted to keep the school open but that the library had to be removed.

“You couldn’t have asked the children and teachers who had lived through that tragic day to go back to that space,” said Dr. Stevenson, who still remembers “the horror scene.”

The high school’s $2.6 million renovation — the bulk of which was financed through donations — included replacing the library with an atrium featuring a canopy of evergreens and aspens painted on the ceiling. A new library was built on another part of the campus.

Jerzy Nowak, a retired Virginia Tech professor of horticulture whose wife was killed in the 2007 shootings there, said a building that had been the site of carnage could not simply reopen as if nothing had happened.

Dr. Nowak helped lead the effort to create a Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention in 2008 and served as its founding director. He said he spent much of its first year meeting with relatives and friends of those killed, many of whom went to the center as part of their healing process.

“It had to be transformed because otherwise it would remain a symbol of evil,” he said. “Nobody’s reminded that it was a place of tragedy. They don’t feel that. All they feel is the spirit of the transformation, the spirit of the future.”

    Varied Paths Toward Healing for Sites of Terrorized Schools, NYT, 21.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/nyregion/after-rampages-officials-often-give-schools-different-life.html

Real or Not,

World’s End Is Trouble for Schools

December 20, 2012
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

Predictions of doomsday have come and gone repeatedly without coming true. But the latest prophecy, tethered to the Mayan calendar and forecasting that the world will self-destruct on Friday, has prompted many rumors of violence, with a particular focus on school shootings or bomb threats.

With students and parents already jittery after the shootings in Newtown, Conn., last week, rampant posts on Facebook and Twitter have fed the hysteria, and police departments across the country have been inundated with calls. Overwhelmed with the task of responding to threats and unconfirmed reports, districts in Bend, Ore., Stafford County, Va., Wake County, N.C., and Oak Creek, Wis., have sent out letters to parents trying to tamp down the panic.

In three counties in Michigan, Genesee, Lapeer and Sanilac, administrators were spending so much time dealing with reports of planned violence that the superintendents decided to send 80,000 students on their winter holiday break two days early.

“We hate canceling school more than anything,” said Matt Wandrie, the superintendent of the Lapeer Community Schools, north of Detroit. “We’re not doing this because we think there’s an imminent threat to our students. We’re doing this because we’ve been doing nothing but policing.”

Mr. Wandrie said that students and parents were passing on rumors they had picked up online — “It was like ‘my niece’s neighbor’s daughter says there’s going to be gun violence at school on Friday,’ ” he said — and added that students were overheard in the hallways saying things like “Let’s go out with a bang on Friday.”

“If you’ve got students who are disenfranchised or unstable or members of a community who really believe this end of the world stuff,” he said, “whether I think it’s credible or not, as a fairly logical person and human being, I’m not going to take that risk.”

Similar rumors prompted about 50 parents to call the police department in Oak Creek, the town in Wisconsin where a gunman shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in August.

Chief John Edwards said his department investigated every call but found that they seemed to be repeating a version of the same rumor that had gone viral online. He said that there was “no credible evidence” of a real threat.

On Wednesday morning, Chief Edwards visited Oak Creek High School to talk to faculty and students over the public address system, advising them that police officers stationed on campus would practice a “zero tolerance” policy for anyone making a threat. “So if anyone makes comments about violence, you will be arrested,” he said. “There will be no warnings.”

Randy Bridges, the superintendent of the Stafford County Public Schools in Virginia, posted a letter to parents on the district’s Web site telling parents that the rumors of violence accompanying the end of the world were “reportedly unfounded and national in scope.”

“I ask that each of you help stop the rumors spreading throughout our community by refusing to share these rumors with others,” Mr. Bridges wrote. He offered links to a source on “How to Talk to Kids about the World Ending in 2012 Rumors” and NASA’s Web site, which promises that Friday “won’t be the end of the world as we know.”

Officials said that previous prognostications of the end of the world, including a prediction of what was called the rapture in May 2011, have not generated the same kind of frenzy in schools.

“I’ve been an officer 19 years, and never have I seen the climate in our area the way it is right now,” said Sgt. Scott Theede of the Grand Blanc Township Police Department in Michigan. “I believe students and parents and everybody are a little bit more on edge as a direct result of what happened last week.”

Contributing to the worry in Grand Blanc was an incident on Wednesday, when a 15-year-old high school student sent a text message to his mother that he had heard shots at school and was hiding in a closet. After the mother called 911, the police responded and found that the boy was playing what he called “a joke.”

The police are considering pressing criminal charges against the boy. But Chief Steven Solomon said that what most surprised him after the police had investigated the call on Wednesday was that students seemed more occupied with their cellphones than with their lessons. “Twitter was lit up,” he said, “and there were so many texts flowing freely among parents, friends and family members during the school day.”

    Real or Not, World’s End Is Trouble for Schools, NYT, 20.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/education/doomsday-prophecy-prompts-rumors-of-violence-in-schools.html

Two Educators

Went the Extra Mile for Students

December 14, 2012
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK
and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

One dressed up in goofy costumes to make her students smile.

Another was a psychologist — preparing to retire — who had seen generations of students through their parents’ divorces and difficult days.

Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, and Mary Sherlach, a school psychologist, were among the six adults killed at the school in the mass shooting on Friday, educators gunned down alongside the children they cared for as if they were their own.

Authorities did not release an official list of the victims’ names, but the other four were believed to be school staff members.

The unimaginable loss of 20 children consumed much of the nation on Friday. But in Newtown, Conn., a tight-knit community of about 25,000 bonded by its schools, a profound, personal ache was felt also for the school staff members who were killed.

Ms. Sherlach, 56, was remembered for her many years of helping students cope with problems that they were unprepared to handle.

And Ms. Hochsprung, 47, was mourned as a creative and dedicated educator who had quickly won over children and adults alike.

“I’m not surprised she gave her life in this fashion, trying to protect her students,” said Gerald Stomski, the first selectman of Woodbury, Conn., who knew Ms. Hochsprung.

Grief-stricken Sandy Hook parents spoke of the elementary school as an extension of their own homes, a haven of support for children and their families.

That environment was fostered by Ms. Hochsprung, who began her job there in 2010 and had used the time since then to tamp down any nervousness children felt approaching the proverbial “principal’s office.” Before taking the job at Sandy Hook, she had worked at other schools in Connecticut.

“She was not the kind of principal I remembered as a kid,” said Diane Licata, the mother of a first grader and a second grader at the school. “She really reached out to the students and made them feel comfortable with her. She definitely took that extra step.”

Ms. Hochsprung organized festive days she called Wacky Wednesdays, when students were encouraged to wear goofy clothes that did not match. She had students dress up as their favorite storybook characters, and she was known for dressing up herself. Sometimes, she brought her poodle to school.

She was no distant authority figure. Ms. Licata said her young children, who often skimped on details of their days, regularly came home with stories of what Ms. Hochsprung had done that day.

But for all the levity, Ms. Hochsprung also took education very seriously. She was the one who distributed long articles to colleagues about policy debates in Washington and highlighted news from the latest speech by Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.

She was also unusually tech savvy. She kept an active Twitter feed documenting the school — “In a fourth grade classroom right now,” she wrote in a recent message. She said she was impressed “by the caliber of instruction and by students’ deep thinking!”

Ms. Hochsprung believed that many students engaged better with electronic screens than with blackboards, and she made sure her teachers had iPads in the classroom. Then, she organized “Appy Hour” sessions to discuss the most useful teaching apps.

Lillian Bittman, former chairwoman of the Newtown Board of Education, helped choose Ms. Hochsprung for the position. She recalled an eager applicant, filled with ideas and focused on “making sure we were turning out critical thinkers, making sure the children weren’t just turning out rote learning.”

Ms. Hochsprung and her husband had planned to retire someday to the Adirondacks, where they owned a home, a former neighbor, Bill LaCroix, said.

If Ms. Hochsprung was a relatively new face in the school, Ms. Sherlach was a fixture, a reliable ally for generations of children in need of counsel.

“When somebody had a personal tragedy in their lives that affected their children, then Mary would be a part of trying to help them come up with a solution for that child,” said Ms. Bittman, whose three children graduated from Sandy Hook Elementary.

Ms. Sherlach lived in Trumbull, Conn., with her husband, William, a financial adviser with Morgan Stanley in Fairfield. The couple have two grown daughters, a high school choral teacher who lives in New Jersey and a chemistry doctoral student at Georgetown University, according to a biography of her husband posted on his company’s Web site.

As night fell on Friday, mourners streamed in and out of Ms. Sherlach’s home.

John Button, 57, a friend of Ms. Sherlach’s husband, said Ms. Sherlach was getting ready to retire.

“It was going to be her last year — that’s what she said,” he said. “She loved her job,” he added. “She’s done this for her whole career.”

He recalled vacationing in the Finger Lakes region of New York with the couple, who have a house there. He was supposed to play golf on Saturday morning with Mr. Sherlach.

“It’s ironic,” Mr. Button said. “At a time when kids need help, it was the school psychologist that was sacrificed.”

    Two Educators Went the Extra Mile for Students, NYT, 14.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/nyregion/sandy-hook-principal-and-school-psychologist-went-the-extra-mile.html

A Gunman,

Recalled as Intelligent and Shy,

Who Left Few Footprints in Life

December 14, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

He carried a black briefcase to his 10th-grade honors English class, and sat near the door so he could readily slip in and out. When called upon, he was intelligent, but nervous and fidgety, spitting his words out, as if having to speak up were painful.

Pale, tall and scrawny, Adam Lanza walked through high school in Newtown, Conn., with his hands glued to his sides, the pens in the pocket of his short-sleeve, button-down shirts among the few things that his classmates recalled about him.

He did all he could to avoid attention, it seemed.

Until Friday.

The authorities said Mr. Lanza, 20, wearing combat gear, carried out one of the deadliest school shootings in the nation’s history. He killed 20 children and six adults at the elementary school, they said. He then apparently turned his gun on himself. Earlier, the police said, he also killed his mother.

In his brief adulthood, Mr. Lanza had left few footprints, electronic or otherwise. He apparently had no Facebook page, unlike his older brother, Ryan, a Hoboken, N.J., resident who for several hours on Friday was misidentified in news reports as the perpetrator of the massacre.

Adam Lanza did not even appear in his high school yearbook, that of the class of 2010. His spot on the page said, “Camera shy.” Others who graduated that year said they did not believe he had finished school.

Matt Baier, now a junior at the University of Connecticut, and other high school classmates recalled how deeply uncomfortable Mr. Lanza was in social situations.

Several said in separate interviews that it was their understanding that he had a developmental disorder. They said they had been told that the disorder was Asperger’s syndrome, which is considered a high functioning form of autism.

“It’s not like people picked on him for it,” Mr. Baier said. “From what I saw, people just let him be, and that was that.”

Law enforcement officials said Friday that they were closely examining whether Mr. Lanza had such a disorder.

One former classmate who said he was familiar with the disorder described Mr. Lanza as having a “very flat affect,” adding, “If you looked at him, you couldn’t see any emotions going through his head.”

Others said Mr. Lanza’s evident discomfort prompted giggles from those who did not understand him.

“You could tell that he felt so uncomfortable about being put on the spot,” said Olivia DeVivo, also now at the University of Connecticut. “I think that maybe he wasn’t given the right kind of attention or help. I think he went so unnoticed that people didn’t even stop to realize that maybe there’s actually something else going on here — that maybe he needs to be talking or getting some kind of mental help. In high school, no one really takes the time to look and think, ‘Why is he acting this way?’ ”

Ms. DeVivo remembered Mr. Lanza from sixth grade and earlier, talking about aliens and “blowing things up,” but she chalked this up to the typical talk of prepubescent boys.

Still, after hearing of the news on Friday, Ms. DeVivo reconnected with friends from Newtown, and the consensus was stark. “They weren’t surprised,” she said. “They said he always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he just didn’t really connect with our high school, and didn’t really connect with our town.”

She added: “I never saw him with anyone. I can’t even think of one person that was associated with him.”

Mr. Baier, who sat next to Mr. Lanza in the back of their sophomore-year honors math class, said Mr. Lanza barely said a word all year, but earned high marks. He said he knew this only from peeking at Mr. Lanza’s scores when their teacher handed back their tests.

Out of view of his classmates, Mr. Lanza’s adolescence seemed to have been turbulent. In 2006, his older brother graduated high school and went to Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, leaving him alone with their parents — whose marriage was apparently coming apart.

In 2008, they divorced after 17 years, court records show. His father, Peter Lanza, a tax executive for General Electric, moved to Stamford, and in January 2011 married a woman who is a librarian at the University of Connecticut.

His mother, Nancy, kept their home in Newtown, a prosperous, hilly enclave of spacious, newer homes about five miles from the elementary school. Adam Lanza was thought to have been living in the house, too.

Friends remembered Ms. Lanza as being very involved in her sons’ lives.

“Their mother was very protective, very hands-on,” said Gina McDade, whose son was a playmate of Ryan Lanza’s and spent much time at his home, which she described as a two-story Colonial with a pool.

“It was a beautiful home,” Ms. McDade said. “She was a good housekeeper, better than me. You could tell her kids really came first.”

Beth Israel, 43, said she and her family lived down the street from the Lanzas, and her daughter went to school with Adam Lanza. She said she had not spoken to any members of the family in three years.

“He was a socially awkward kid,” Ms. Israel said. “He always had issues. He was kind of a loner. I don’t know who his friends were.”

She said she would speak with his mother on occasion, but said the family was not social.

On Friday, police officers and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation swarmed through the Lanzas’ neighborhood, blocking off streets and asking residents to leave their homes.

Throughout the afternoon, Ms. Lanza’s surviving son, Ryan, was named by some news outlets as the killer.

Ryan Lanza’s identification had been found on the body of his underage brother, leading to the mistaken reports.

Brett Wilshe, a neighbor of Ryan Lanza’s in Hoboken, said he communicated with him by instant message at 1:15 p.m.

“He said he thought his mom was dead, and he was heading back up to Connecticut,” Mr. Wilshe said. “He said, ‘It was my brother.’ ”

    A Gunman, Recalled as Intelligent and Shy, Who Left Few Footprints in Life, NYT, 14.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/nyregion/adam-lanza-an-enigma-who-is-now-identified-as-a-mass-killer.html

‘Who Would Do This

to Our Poor Little Babies’

December 14, 2012
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
and MICHAEL WILSON

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Gradually, the group of frantic parents shrank and was gently ushered to wait in a back room in the old brick firehouse around the corner from Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The sounds of cartoons playing for restless children wafted incongruously through the air, but the adults were hushed. A police officer entered and put the parents’ worst fears into words: their children were gone. The wails that followed could be heard from outside, sounding the end of a horrifying shooting that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in the school.

It was about 9:30 a.m., when the school locks its doors to the outside world, demanding identification from visitors. What happened next sounded different depending on where you were in the school when a normal school day exploded.

Pops. Bangs. Thundering, pounding booms that echoed, and kept coming and coming. Screams and the cries of children ebbed, until there was only the gunfire.

Countless safety drills learned over generations kicked in. Teachers sprang to their doors and turned the locks tight. Children and adults huddled in closets, crawled under desks and crouched in classroom corners.

Laura Feinstein, a reading support teacher, reached for her telephone. “I called the office and said, ‘Barb, is everything O.K.?’ and she said, ‘There is a shooter in the building.’ ”

“I heard gunshots going on and on and on,” Ms. Feinstein said.

Even in the gym, the loudest room in any school on a given day, something sounded very wrong. “Really loud bangs,” said Brendan Murray, 9, who was there with his fourth-grade class. “We thought that someone was knocking something over. And we heard yelling and we heard gunshots. We heard lots of gunshots.”

“We heard someone say, “ ‘Put your hands up!’ ” Brendan said. “I heard, ‘Don’t shoot!’ We had to go into the closet in the gym.”

In the library, Yvonne Cech, a librarian, locked herself, an assistant and 18 fourth graders in a closet behind file cabinets while the sound of gunfire thundered outside.

Witnesses said later that they heard as many as 100 gunshots, but saw next to nothing in their hiding places. What was happening?

“Some people,” a little girl said later, searching for words, “they got a stomachache.”

The shooting finally stopped. Most teachers kept the children frozen in hiding. Some 15 minutes later, there was another sound, coming from the school intercom. It had been on the whole time. A voice said, “It’s O.K. It’s safe now.”

Brendan, in the gym, said, “Then someone came and told us to run down the hallway. There were police at every door. There were lots of people crying and screaming.”

The officers led children past the carnage. “They said ‘Close your eyes, hold hands.’” said Vanessa Bajraliu, 9. Outside, a nightmare version of the school was taking shape. Police officers swarmed with dogs and roared overhead in helicopters. There were armored cars and ambulances.

Inside, the librarians and children had been hiding in the closet for 45 minutes when a SWAT team arrived and escorted them out.

Word spread quickly through the small town. At nearby Danbury Hospital, doctors and nurses girded for an onslaught of wounded victims. “We immediately convened four trauma teams to be ready for casualties,” a spokeswoman, Andrea Rynn, said. Nurses, surgeons, internal medicine and imaging specialists, as well as staff members from pathology and the hospital lab, rushed to assemble in the emergency room to receive an influx of patients from the shooting. An influx that never arrived. Only three victims came to the hospital, two of whom did not survive. The rest were already dead.

“I’ve been here for 11 years,” Ms. Feinstein, the teacher, said. “I can’t imagine who would do this to our poor little babies.”

Another nurse who lives near the school hurried to the scene. “But a police officer came out and said they didn’t need any nurses,” she said. “So I knew it wasn’t good.”

Survivors gathered at the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire and Rescue station house, just down the street. Parents heard — on the radio, or on television, or via text messages or calls from an automated, emergency service phone tree — and came running. In the confusion, there were shrieks of joy as mothers and fathers were reunited with their children.

The parents whose children were unaccounted for were taken to the separate room, and a list of the missing was made. The pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church, Msgr. Robert Weiss, saw the list. “It was around, obviously, the number that passed away,” he said.

The Rev. Matthew Crebbin of Newtown Congregational Church was there, too.

“It’s very agonizing for the families, but they are trying to be very meticulous,” he said. “But it is very difficult for people.”

A woman named Diane, a friend of a parent whose child was missing, said a state trooper had been assigned to each family. “I think there are 20 sets of parents over there,” she said.

In another room of the firehouse, there were the oddly joyous sounds of the cartoons. There were plates and pans of pizza and other donated food. No one touched it.

“There was a multifaith service with people sitting in folding chairs in a circle,” said John Woodall, a psychiatrist who lives nearby and went to the firehouse. “And after that, people milled around and waited for news.”

Outside, reunions continued. News, good and bad, was borne on the faces of the people around the school. Three women emerged with their arms around the one in the middle, protecting her. “We just want to get her home,” one said.

A few minutes later, a mother and father practically ran past in relief, a little girl in a light blue jacket riding on her father’s shoulders.

Brendan’s father had been at home about a mile away with his wife when the phone rang, a call from the automated alert system saying there was a lockdown at the school.

“At first we weren’t too nervous, because you hear of lockdowns happening all the time,” said his father, Sean Murray. “Like if there was a liquor store down here being robbed, all the schools would go into lockdown.”

They turned on the television and heard about the shooting, and how parents were being advised to stay away from the school. They ran to the car and went, and found Brendan waiting.

“It’s sick,” Mr. Murray said. “It’s sick that something like this could happen at an elementary school.”

Bonnie Fredericks, the owner of Sandy Hook Hair Company, said that many of the town’s children had gathered recently for the lighting of the village Christmas tree, down the street from her shop.

Twenty were gone now. “We’ll know all of them,” she said.

Beside her shop, a sandwich board outside a liquor store relayed a simple message, pasted over a sign advertising a beer special: “Say a prayer.”

Peter Applebome reported from Newtown, Conn.,

and Michael Wilson from New York City.

    ‘Who Would Do This to Our Poor Little Babies’, NYT, 14.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/nyregion/witnesses-recall-deadly-shooting-sandy-hook-newtown-connecticut.html

Running

and Hoping to Find a Child Safe

December 14, 2012
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER

NEWTOWN, Conn. — A few minutes before 10 Friday morning, Michelle Urbina was speaking with a customer at the small bank branch that she manages in Bethel, Conn., when her assistant broke in.

“What school does your daughter go to?”

“Sandy Hook,” Ms. Urbina replied.

“There’s been a shooting there,” her assistant said.

As Ms. Urbina headed for the door, her phone began buzzing with text messages from friends and other parents. It is a 20-minute drive from Bethel to the school. The landscape rolled by unseen; a friend from the other end of town spoke to her on her cellphone, relaying news from someone who was monitoring a police scanner. None of it told her what she wanted to know: What about Lenie, her 9-year-old daughter?

From another direction, Ms. Urbina’s husband, Curtis, drove their sport utility vehicle along winding roads toward the school. In the back seat, their 3-year-old son, Harry, was buckled into his car seat, wearing only his pajamas and a coat.

Just about five years ago, the Urbinas moved to Sandy Hook. He had grown up in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium. She was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They fell in love with the peace of their friendly small town.

“We wanted the big backyard,” Ms. Urbina said. “The fresh air. The country. The good schools. It’s an idyllic small town — not materialistic flashy people, just people who smile and say hello to you.”

They knew everyone at Lenie’s school, or so it seemed. Mr. Urbina, a stay-at-home-father, coaches youth wrestling in town, and was in the gym or cafeteria several times a week for practice. Just the night before, the Urbinas had gone to the fourth-grade holiday chorale celebration, overseen by the principal, Dawn Hochsprung.

Even using back roads on Friday morning, Mr. Urbina still had to park a quarter-mile away. He scooped his son under his arm and began running, little Harry giggling at the game of it. “It’s utter fear,” he said. “Your heart stops. Your chest doesn’t move. I’m a dad. What can I do? I’m helpless.”

But running.

Ms. Urbina landed in a knot of traffic that forms on even the best of days in the little downtown. She peeled out of it and pulled into a restaurant lot, parking so fast that she hit a concrete bumper. The school was a good quarter-mile away, and up a hill. She ran, the heels of her work shoes drilling into her feet.

Near the school, Mr. Urbina saw the volunteer firefighters, who pointed him toward their firehouse. The students at Sandy Hook “are always doing fire drills,” Mr. Urbina said. “And incident drill. The fire station is their gathering point. The kids know it.”

It was packed; the little ones, many in tears, were being soothed by their teachers. Parents were already there, scouring the room for their children. Across the room, Mr. Urbina saw his daughter’s fourth-grade teacher.

There was Lenie. They ran into each other’s arms, each sobbing. “I had to put her down because other parents who weren’t so nearby needed to know about their kids, and I wanted to get word to them,” he said.

First, though, he sent a text to his wife.

“I have Lenie,” it read.

Ms. Urbina chugged into the firehouse to reunite with her daughter. She let four friends know their children were safe. In the firehouse, friends were looking for their sons and daughters, so many getting the terrifying news that their children were “unaccounted for.”

The Urbinas drove home together, and for a time, Ms. Urbina kept the television off, but then decided it was futile. Her bosses at JPMorgan Chase called to offer to drive her anywhere to help. She was grateful, but her tasks were intensely local. Lenie, who was in gym class when the trouble started, told her parents that over the public address system, she had heard someone say, “Put your hands up,” and then bang after bang.

Late in the afternoon, Mr. Urbina drove home a boy he was taking care of while his parents awaited word on a brother who was unaccounted for. Walking back to his own house, he glanced at his wife, shook his head, and said, “It’s confirmed.”

Ms. Urbina turned away. “I’m sleeping,” she said. “I’m speaking to you, but I am surely asleep.”

She called a friend on the other side of town, who lived near the restaurant where she had jumped from her car to sprint to the school. “I thought the car might still be running,” she reported. “It wasn’t. But the keys were still in it.”

    Running and Hoping to Find a Child Safe, NYT, 14.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/nyregion/after-newtown-shooting-running-and-hoping-to-find-a-child-safe.html

Nation Reels

After Gunman Massacres 20 Children

at School in Connecticut

December 14, 2012
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

Hundreds of terrified parents arrived as their sobbing children were led out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in a wooded corner of Newtown, Conn. By then, all of the victims had been shot and most were dead, and the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, had committed suicide. The children killed were said to be 5 to 10 years old.

A 28th person, found dead in a house in the town, was also believed to have been shot by Mr. Lanza. That victim, one law enforcement official said, was Mr. Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, who worked at the school. She apparently owned the guns he used.

The principal had buzzed Mr. Lanza in because she recognized him as the son of a colleague. Moments later, she was shot dead when she went to investigate the sound of gunshots. The school psychologist was also among those who died.

The rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which a gunman killed 32 people and then himself.

Law enforcement officials said Mr. Lanza had grown up in Newtown, and he was remembered by high school classmates as smart, introverted and nervous. They said he had gone out of his way not to attract attention when he was younger.

The gunman was chillingly accurate. A spokesman for the State Police said he left only one wounded survivor at the school. All the others hit by the barrage of bullets from the guns Mr. Lanza carried died, suggesting that they were shot at point-blank range. One law enforcement official said the shootings occurred in two classrooms in a section of the single-story Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Some who were there said the shooting occurred during morning announcements, and the initial shots could be heard over the school’s public address system. The bodies of those killed were still in the school as of 10 p.m. Friday.

The New York City medical examiner’s office sent a “portable morgue” to Newtown to help with the aftermath of the shootings, a spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, confirmed late Friday.

Law enforcement officials offered no hint of what had motivated Mr. Lanza. It was also unclear, one investigator said, why Mr. Lanza — after shooting his mother to death inside her home — drove her car to the school and slaughtered the children. “I don’t think anyone knows the answers to those questions at this point,” the official said. As for a possible motive, he added, “we don’t know much for sure.”

F.B.I. agents interviewed his brother, Ryan Lanza, in Hoboken, N.J. His father, Peter Lanza, who was divorced from Nancy Lanza, was also questioned, one official said.

Newtown, a postcard-perfect New England town where everyone seems to know everyone else and where there had lately been holiday tree lightings with apple cider and hot chocolate, was plunged into mourning. Stunned residents attended four memorial services in the town on Friday evening as detectives continued the search for clues, and an explanation.

Maureen Kerins, a hospital nurse who lives close to the school, learned of the shooting from television and hurried to the school to see if she could help.

“I stood outside waiting to go in, but a police officer came out and said they didn’t need any nurses,” she said, “so I knew it wasn’t good.”

In the cold light of Friday morning, faces told the story outside the stricken school. There were the frightened faces of children who were crying as they were led out in a line. There were the grim faces of women. There were the relieved-looking faces of a couple and their little girl.

The shootings set off a tide of anguish nationwide. In Illinois and Georgia, flags were lowered to half-staff in memory of the victims. And at the White House, President Obama struggled to read a statement in the White House briefing room. More than once, he dabbed his eyes.

“Our hearts are broken,” Mr. Obama said, adding that his first reaction was not as a president, but as a parent.

“I know there is not a parent in America who does not feel the same overwhelming grief that I do,” he said.

He called the victims “beautiful little kids.”

“They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own,” he said. Then the president reached up to the corner of one eye.

Mr. Obama called for “meaningful action” to stop such shootings, but he did not spell out details. In his nearly four years in office, he has not pressed for expanded gun control. But he did allude on Friday to a desire to have politicians put aside their differences to deal with ways to prevent future shootings.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, who went to Newtown, called the shootings “a tragedy of unspeakable terms.”

“Evil visited this community today,” he said.

Lt. J. Paul Vance, a spokesman for the Connecticut State Police, described “a very horrific and difficult scene” at the school, which had 700 students in kindergarten through fourth grade. It had a security protocol that called for doors to be locked during the day and visitors to be checked on a video monitor inside.

“You had to buzz in and out and the whole nine yards,” said a former chairwoman of the Newtown board of education, Lillian Bittman. “When you buzz, you come up on our screen.”

The lock system did not go into effect until 9:30 each morning, according to a letter to parents from the principal, Dawn Hochsprung, that was posted on several news Web sites. The letter was apparently written earlier in the school year.

It was Ms. Hochsprung, who recognized Mr. Lanza because his mother worked at the school, who let him in on Friday. Sometime later, she heard shots and went to see what was going on.

Lieutenant Vance said the Newtown police had called for help from police departments nearby and began a manhunt, checking “every nook and cranny and every room.”

Officers were seen kicking in doors as they worked their way through the school.

Lieutenant Vance said the students who died had been in two classrooms. Others said that as the horror unfolded, students and teachers tried to hide in places the gunman would not think to look. Teachers locked the doors, turned off the lights and closed the blinds. Some ordered students to duck under their desks.

The teachers did not explain what was going on, but they did not have to. Everyone could hear the gunfire.

Yvonne Cech, a school librarian, said she had spent 45 minutes locked in a closet with two library clerks, a library catalog assistant and 18 fourth graders.

“The SWAT team escorted us out,” she said, and then the children were reunited with their parents.

Lieutenant Vance said 18 youngsters were pronounced dead at the school and two others were taken to hospitals, where they were declared dead. All the adults who were killed at the school were pronounced dead there.

Law enforcement officials said the weapons used by the gunman were a Sig Sauer and a Glock, both handguns. The police also found a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine.

One law enforcement official said the guns had not been traced because they had not yet been removed from the school, but state licensing records or permits apparently indicated that Ms. Lanza owned weapons of the same makes and models.

“He visited two classrooms,” said a law enforcement official at the scene, adding that those two classrooms were adjoining.

The first 911 call was recorded about 9:30 and said someone had been shot at the school, an almost unthinkable turn of events on what had begun as just another chilly day in quiet Newtown. Soon, frantic parents were racing to the school, hoping their children were all right. By 10:30, the shooting had stopped. By then, the police had arrived with dogs.

“There is going to be a black cloud over this area forever,” said Craig Ansman, who led his 4-year-old daughter from the preschool down the street from the elementary school. “It will never go away.”

Reporting on the Connecticut shootings was contributed by Al Baker, Charles V. Bagli, Susan Beachy, Jack Begg, David W. Chen, Alison Leigh Cowan, Robert Davey, Matt Flegenheimer, Joseph Goldstein, Emmarie Huetteman, Kristin Hussey, Thomas Kaplan, Elizabeth Maker, Patrick McGeehan, Sheelagh McNeill, Michael Moss, Andy Newman, Richard Pérez-Peña, Jennifer Preston, William K. Rashbaum, Motoko Rich, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Emily S. Rueb, Eric Schmitt, Michael Schwirtz, Kirk Semple, Wendy Ruderman, Jonathan Weisman, Vivian Yee and Kate Zernike.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 15, 2012

An earlier version of this article suggested that the gunman in the Connecticut shooting used a rifle to carry out the shootings inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In fact, according to law enforcement, the guns used in the school shooting were both handguns.

Nation Reels After Gunman Massacres 20 Children at School in Connecticut, NYT, 14.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/nyregion/shooting-reported-at-connecticut-elementary-school.html

Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?

December 9, 2012
The New York Times
By KEVIN CAREY

Washington

LAST month The Chronicle of Higher Education published a damning investigation of college athletes across the nation who were maintaining their eligibility by taking cheap, easy online courses from an obscure junior college.

In just 10 days, academically deficient players could earn three credits and an easy “A” from Western Oklahoma State College for courses like “Microcomputer Applications” (opening folders in Windows) or “Nutrition” (stating whether or not the students used vitamins). The Chronicle quoted one Big Ten academic adviser as saying, “You jump online, finish in a week and half, get your grade posted, and you’re bowl-eligible.”

On the face of it, this is another sad but familiar story of the big-money intercollegiate-athletics complex corrupting the ivory tower. But it also reveals a larger, more pervasive problem: there are no meaningful standards of academic quality in higher education. And the more colleges and universities move their courses online, the more severe the problem gets.

Much attention has been paid to for-profit colleges that offer degrees online while exploiting federal student-loan programs and saddling ill-prepared students with debt. But nearly all of the institutions caught up in the 10-day credit dodge exposed by The Chronicle were public, nonprofit institutions. And both the credit-givers, like Western Oklahoma, and the sports machines at the other end of the transaction, like Florida State University, were doing nothing illegal.

A main reason the scandal persists is that our system is built around the strange idea of the “credit hour,” a unit of academic time that does little to measure student learning. The credit hour originated around the turn of the 20th century, when the industrialist-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie moved to create a pension system for college professors. (It’s now known as TIAA-CREF.) Pensions were reserved for professors who worked full time, which ended up being defined as a minimum of 12 hours of classroom teaching per week in a standard 15-week semester.

After World War II, higher education began a huge expansion, driven by the G.I. Bill, a changing economy and a booming middle class. It needed a way to count and manage millions of new students. Credit hours were easy to record, and already in place. That’s why today, credit hours determine eligibility for financial aid and graduation (you generally need 120 for a bachelor’s degree).

But colleges were left to judge the quality of credit hours by affixing grades to courses, and the quality of colleges themselves would be judged by — well, there was the rub. Colleges didn’t want to be judged by anyone other than themselves, and remarkably, the government went along with it. Yes, colleges are held accountable by nonprofit accrediting organizations — but those are, in turn, run by other colleges. When asked, Western Oklahoma’s accreditor said it had never heard of the school’s three-credits-in-10-days scheme and would look into it. But the next scheduled accreditation review isn’t until 2017.

The lack of meaningful academic standards in higher education drags down the entire system. Grade inflation, even (or especially) at the most elite institutions, is rampant. A landmark book published last year, “Academically Adrift,” found that many students at traditional colleges showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing, and spent their time socializing, working or wasting time instead of studying. (And that’s not even considering the problem of low graduation rates.)

The rapid migration of higher education online exacerbates these problems. The notion of recording academic progress by counting the number of hours students spend sitting in a classroom is nonsensical when there is no actual classroom. Perhaps students themselves will decide what constitutes quality, as they choose among the so-called “massive online open courses” being offered free by brand-name universities including Harvard, M.I.T. and Stanford. I suspect those courses that will be most valued will be those where students actually learn.

But the most promising solution would be to replace the anachronistic credit hour with common standards for what college students actually need to know and to be able to do. There are many routes to doing this. In the arts and sciences, scholarly associations could define and update what it means to be proficient in a field. So could professional organizations and employers in vocational and technical fields.

Ending the antiquated credit hour would not only avert abuses involving college sports, but also prevent students of all kinds from taking the path of least resistance toward degrees that may be ultimately worthless.

Kevin Carey directs the education policy program

at the New America Foundation.

    Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?, NYT, 9.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/who-will-hold-colleges-accountable.html

Child’s Education,

but Parents’ Crushing Loans

November 11, 2012
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

When Michele Fitzgerald and her daughter, Jenni, go out for dinner, Jenni pays. When they get haircuts, Jenni pays. When they buy groceries, Jenni pays.

It has been six years since Ms. Fitzgerald — broke, unemployed and in default on the $18,000 in loans she took out for Jenni’s college education — became a boomerang mom, moving into her daughter’s townhouse apartment in Hingham, Mass.

Jenni pays the rent.

For Jenni, 35, the student loans and the education they bought have worked out: she has a good job in public relations and is paying down the loans in her name. But for her mother, 60, the parental debt has been disastrous.

“It’s not easy,” Ms. Fitzgerald said. “Jenni feels the guilt and I feel the burden.”

There are record numbers of student borrowers in financial distress, according to federal data. But millions of parents who have taken out loans to pay for their children’s college education make up a less visible generation in debt. For the most part, these parents did well enough through midlife to take on sizable loans, but some have since fallen on tough times because of the recession, health problems, job loss or lives that took a sudden hard turn.

And unlike the angry students who have recently taken to the streets to protest their indebtedness, most of these parents are too ashamed to draw attention to themselves.

“You don’t want your children, much less your neighbors and friends, knowing that even though you’re living in a nice house, and you’ve been able to hold onto your job, your retirement money’s gone, you can’t pay your debts,” said a woman in Connecticut who took out $57,000 in federal loans. Between tough times at work and a divorce, she is now teetering on default.

In the first three months of this year, the number of borrowers of student loans age 60 and older was 2.2 million, a figure that has tripled since 2005. That makes them the fastest-growing age group for college debt. All told, those borrowers owed $43 billion, up from $8 billion seven years ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Almost 10 percent of the borrowers over 60 were at least 90 days delinquent on their payments during the first quarter of 2012, compared with 6 percent in 2005. And more and more of those with unpaid federal student debt are losing a portion of their Social Security benefits to the government — nearly 119,000 through September, compared with 60,000 for all of 2007 and 23,996 in 2001, according to the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service.

The federal government does not track how many of these older borrowers were taking out loans for their own education rather than for that of their children. But financial analysts say that loans for children are the likely source of almost all the debt. Even adjusted for inflation, so-called Parent PLUS loans — one piece of the pie for parents of all ages — have more than doubled to $10.4 billion since 2000. Colleges often encourage parents to get Parent PLUS loans, to make it possible for their children to enroll. But many borrow more than they can afford to pay back — and discover, too late, that the flexibility of income-based repayment is available only to student borrowers.

Many families with good credit turn to private student loans, with parents co-signing for their children. But those private loans also offer little flexibility in repayment.

The consequences of such debt can be dire because borrowers over 60 have less time — and fewer opportunities — than younger borrowers to get their financial lives back on track. Some, like Ms. Fitzgerald, are forced to move in with their children. Others face an unexpectedly pinched retirement. Still others have gone into bankruptcy, after using all their assets to try to pay the student debt, which is difficult to discharge under any circumstances.

The anguish over college debt has put a severe strain on many family relationships. Parents and students alike say parental debt can be the uncomfortable, unmentionable elephant in the room. Many parents feel they have not fulfilled a basic obligation, while others quietly resent that their children’s education has landed the family in such difficult territory.

Soon after borrowing the money for Jenni’s education, Ms. Fitzgerald divorced and lost her corporate job. She worked part-time jobs and subsisted on food stamps and public assistance.

“I don’t really feel guilt, but I do know that this is all because of a loan taken out on my behalf,” said Jenni, who has a different last name and agreed to be interviewed only if it would not be disclosed. “I asked my mother to move in with me, because I couldn’t stand it that she was living in a place with no heat and a basement that kept flooding.”

The unusual arrangements, and strained family dynamics, can be awkward. Like Jenni, many with student debt problems agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that they not be identified because they did not want to expose their financial troubles.

“It makes you feel like a failure as a parent, to be unable to help your children and to have all your hard work end in a pile of debt,” said one New Jersey man, who took out a second mortgage of $280,000 to help cover his children’s college costs. “I sent my older kids to private colleges, and I was happy to do it because it’s how you help them get started off. But I can’t do it for the youngest, and I haven’t even been able to start the conversation with him.”

Ms. Fitzgerald said she had little hope of a comfortable old age. She has no health insurance. She knows that the odds of finding a good job in her 60s, with no college degree, are slim — and she knows that the government will take part of her Social Security, in payment of her debt, which she said had now ballooned to about $40,000 because of penalties for nonpayment. At one point, she said, the Internal Revenue Service seized a $2.43 tax refund.

Jenni has volunteered to take on her mother’s debt, but Ms. Fitzgerald has refused, saying it is her legal and moral obligation, and anyway, Jenni has her own loans to pay off — about $220 a month — and not much discretionary income. The very suggestion that Jenni might take on her debt annoys her.

“Don’t you think she is doing enough for me now by supporting me a hundred percent, financially, by my living with her and her extending her resources?” Ms. Fitzgerald asked. “The whole idea was for her to get a college education so she can succeed in life; it is hard enough just to do that without being burdened with her mother’s welfare, like I was her child.”

Jenni occasionally jumped in with explanations or clarifications, as she and her mother sat in the living room discussing their situation. When Ms. Fitzgerald talked of being depressed last year, so overwhelmed by the cartons of documents and dunning letters that she threw them all out, Jenni said gently, in an almost maternal tone, “But you’re doing much better now.”

Many young people live with deep guilt that their education has pushed their parents into debt, and perhaps ruined their credit rating. Even those who do not know exactly how much money their parents have, or how much they owe, worry about how their debt will affect their parents’ lives.

One 27-year-old man from East Texas, who earned a bachelor’s degree in California, is now nearing graduation with another bachelor’s degree, in Russian literature, from Columbia University. He said he did not know how much debt he and his mother had accumulated in the course of his educational wanderings, sounding almost paralyzed by the prospect of talking to her about it.

“I should know how much I owe, and it’s sad that I don’t,” he said. “I feel like I’m standing on the train track and I can hear the rumble of the train coming, and I don’t know how hard the train will slam into me.”

In one extreme case, student debt, and the constant creditor calls, were mentioned in a suicide note by the stepfather of a young law school graduate. The guilt has been crushing for the graduate.

Teresa Tosh, 56, a mother of five who works for the county government in Tulsa, Okla., had co-signed large graduate and law school loans for one of her sons, Jacob, who has a different last name. In total, he owes more than $200,000 on his federal loans, in addition to more than $100,000 on the private student loans his mother co-signed.

But like many recent law graduates, Jacob had trouble finding a job, and when he finally found one, an hour from home, the salary was nowhere near enough to cover loan payments. Creditor calls to both Jacob and to his mother became more and more frequent.

Jacob talked to the collectors when they called, and tried to work out payments as best he could. But shortly after one call ended, he and his mother said, the phone would ring again: another collection agent, in another part of the country. Ms. Tosh’s husband, George, a Vietnam veteran who worked from home, concluded that Jacob was lying about trying to work things out, deceiving Ms. Tosh, ruining her credit and leaving her holding the bag.

The household tension grew intense, and in July 2010, Mr. Tosh shot himself, leaving a note saying that he could no longer stand the incessant calls from Sallie Mae, one of the lenders.

“Jake has destroyed us. You can’t tell me that sally mae is getting paid when they keep calling all day, every day,” he said in a note to his wife. “I can’t even answer the phone in my own home no more. I can’t live like this no more.”

Ms. Tosh said she was “not naïve enough to think the Sallie Mae calls were the only reason” that her husband killed himself. “But they were adding a lot of stress,” she said. “They’d never stop calling.”

A few months after the suicide, Jacob moved to Dallas and got a document-review job. The pay is not enough to meet his loan payments — or even full interest — but his creditors agreed to let him make partial-interest-only payments for two years. While his balance continues to grow, that arrangement protected his mother from payment demands for two years.

“It’s made my life so much more stressful and guilt-filled because I know that it affects her,” Jacob said. “I barely have enough money to pay the bills, but if I miss by a day, they call her.”

Jacob pays about $1,200 a month toward the debt, more than he pays for rent. He and his mother are carefully rebuilding their relationship, after a period of great tension. Ms. Tosh traveled to Dallas for his birthday.

“She’s been really good about it,” Jacob said. “It’s always there, but she doesn’t bring it up.”

    Child’s Education, but Parents’ Crushing Loans, NYT, 11.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/business/some-parents-shouldering-student-loans-fall-on-tough-times.html

Student Debt Debacles

October 24, 2012
The New York Times

Students who finance their educations through private lenders often wrongly assume that private and federal loans work the same way. In fact, they do not.

Most federal student loans have rates of 6.8 percent (or less) and offer broad consumer protections that allow people who lose their jobs to make lower, affordable payments or to defer payment until they recover financially.

Private student loans — from banks and other private institutions — typically come with variable interest rates and fewer consumer protections, which means that borrowers who get into trouble have few options other than default. Many borrowers did not learn about the differences between private and federal loans until after they became deeply indebted. And because of confusion about variable rates, they are sometimes shocked to learn what they owe when that first bill arrives.

The problem is serious because private student loans now account for $150 billion of the $1 trillion in total outstanding student loan debt in the country, according to the first annual report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s student loan ombudsman.

The report found that many loan servicers — the companies that collect the payments for the lenders — make it extremely difficult for student borrowers to manage their debts. Borrowers often have difficulty finding out how much they owe or getting information about their payment histories. Some struggling borrowers who need loan modification said that servicers forced them to pay more per month than they could possibly afford, without telling them the payments would not prevent default.

In some cases, those who made late or partial payments were subjected to unauthorized checking account deductions that then led to overdrafts and costly fees. One borrower learned that his loan was put into default when a parent who had co-signed for the loan filed for bankruptcy protection. He reported that he could get no information about how to cure the problem.

Slipshod loan servicing makes private student loans even riskier by increasing the likelihood that people will fall behind in payments. The bureaucratic errors and obstacles mean that conscientious borrowers who took out high-priced loans are not only saddled with crushing debt, they may also have their credit ruined — making it extremely hard to refinance their loans or get future loans to buy a home or start a business.

The federal government needs to open up refinancing and debt relief opportunities for these people, as it did for some mortgage holders. The bureau should also set national standards for loan servicers to require clear disclosure of conditions, advance notice of any changes in the status of the account and prompt resolution of customer requests for information. And borrowers who might be eligible for federal loans should be advised to examine that option before plunging headlong into private debt.

    Student Debt Debacles, NYT, 24.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/opinion/student-debt-debacles.html

Want to Ruin Teaching?

Give Ratings

October 14, 2012
The New York Times
By DEBORAH KENNY

AS the founder of a charter school network in Harlem, I’ve seen firsthand the nuances inherent in teacher evaluation. A few years ago, for instance, we decided not to renew the contract of one of our teachers despite the fact that his students performed exceptionally well on the state exam.

We kept hearing directly from students and parents that he was mean and derided the children who needed the most help. The teacher also regularly complained about problems during faculty meetings without offering solutions. Three of our strongest teachers confided to the principal that they were reluctantly considering leaving because his negativity was making everyone miserable.

There has been much discussion of the question of how to evaluate teachers; it was one of the biggest sticking points in the recent teachers’ strike in Chicago. For more than a decade I’ve been a strong proponent of teacher accountability. I’ve advocated for ending tenure and other rules that get in the way of holding educators responsible for the achievement of their students. Indeed, the teachers in my schools — Harlem Village Academies — all work with employment-at-will contracts because we believe accountability is an underlying prerequisite to running an effective school. The problem is that, unlike charters, most schools are prohibited by law from holding teachers accountable at all.

But the solution being considered by many states — having the government evaluate individual teachers — is a terrible idea that undermines principals and is demeaning to teachers. If our schools had been required to use a state-run teacher evaluation system, the teacher we let go would have been rated at the top of the scale.

Education and political leaders across the country are currently trying to decide how to evaluate teachers. Some states are pushing for legislation to sort teachers into categories using unreliable mathematical calculations based on student test scores. Others have hired external evaluators who pop into classrooms with checklists to monitor and rate teachers. In all these scenarios, principals have only partial authority, with their judgments factored into a formula.

This type of system shows a profound lack of understanding of leadership. Principals need to create a culture of trust, teamwork and candid feedback that is essential to running an excellent school. Leadership is about hiring great people and empowering them, and requires a delicate balance of evaluation and encouragement. At Harlem Village Academies we give teachers an enormous amount of freedom and respect. As one of our seventh-grade reading teachers told me: “It’s exhilarating to be trusted. It makes me feel like I can be the kind of teacher I had always dreamed about becoming: funny, interesting, effective and energetic.”

Some of the new government proposals for evaluating teachers, with their checklists, rankings and ratings, have been described as businesslike, but that is just not true. Successful companies do not publicly rate thousands of employees from a central office database; they don’t use systems to take the place of human judgment. They trust their managers to nurture and build great teams, then hold the managers accountable for results.

In the same way, we should hold principals strictly accountable for school performance and allow them to make all personnel decisions. That can’t be done by adhering to rigid formulas. There is no formula for quantifying compassion, creativity, intellectual curiosity or any number of other traits that make a group of teachers motivate one another and inspire greatness in their students. Principals must be empowered to use everything they know about their faculty — including student achievement data — to determine which teachers they will retain, promote or, when necessary, let go. This is how every successful enterprise functions.

A government-run teacher evaluation bureaucracy will make it impossible to attract great teachers and will diminish the motivation of the ones we have. It will make teaching so scripted and controlled that we won’t be able to attract smart, passionate people. Everyone says we should treat teachers as professionals, but then they promote top-down policies that are insulting to serious educators.

If we don’t change course in the coming years, these bureaucratic systems that treat teachers like low-level workers will become self-fulfilling. As the great educational thinker Theodore R. Sizer put it, “Eventually, hierarchical bureaucracy will be totally self-validating: virtually all teachers will be semi-competent.”

The direction of education reform in the next few years will shape public education for generations to come. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly said that in the next decade, “over 1.6 million teachers will retire,” and our country will be hiring 1.6 million new teachers. We will blow that opportunity if we create bureaucratic systems that discourage the smartest, most talented people from entering the profession.

Deborah Kenny is the chief executive and founding principal of Harlem Village Academies and the author of “Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential.”

    Want to Ruin Teaching? Give Ratings, NYT, 15.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/opinion/want-to-ruin-teaching-give-ratings.html

Attention Disorder or Not,

Pills to Help in School

October 9, 2012
The New York Times
By ALAN SCHWARZ

CANTON, Ga. — When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.

The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance.

It is not yet clear whether Dr. Anderson is representative of a widening trend. But some experts note that as wealthy students abuse stimulants to raise already-good grades in colleges and high schools, the medications are being used on low-income elementary school children with faltering grades and parents eager to see them succeed.

“We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families,” said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, a child mental-health services researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children. “We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.”

Dr. Nancy Rappaport, a child psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who works primarily with lower-income children and their schools, added: “We are seeing this more and more. We are using a chemical straitjacket instead of doing things that are just as important to also do, sometimes more.”

Dr. Anderson’s instinct, he said, is that of a “social justice thinker” who is “evening the scales a little bit.” He said that the children he sees with academic problems are essentially “mismatched with their environment” — square pegs chafing the round holes of public education. Because their families can rarely afford behavior-based therapies like tutoring and family counseling, he said, medication becomes the most reliable and pragmatic way to redirect the student toward success.

“People who are getting A’s and B’s, I won’t give it to them,” he said. For some parents the pills provide great relief. Jacqueline Williams said she can’t thank Dr. Anderson enough for diagnosing A.D.H.D. in her children — Eric, 15; Chekiara, 14; and Shamya, 11 — and prescribing Concerta, a long-acting stimulant, for them all. She said each was having trouble listening to instructions and concentrating on schoolwork.

“My kids don’t want to take it, but I told them, ‘These are your grades when you’re taking it, this is when you don’t,’ and they understood,” Ms. Williams said, noting that Medicaid covers almost every penny of her doctor and prescription costs.

Some experts see little harm in a responsible physician using A.D.H.D. medications to help a struggling student. Others — even among the many like Dr. Rappaport who praise the use of stimulants as treatment for classic A.D.H.D. — fear that doctors are exposing children to unwarranted physical and psychological risks. Reported side effects of the drugs have included growth suppression, increased blood pressure and, in rare cases, psychotic episodes.

The disorder, which is characterized by severe inattention and impulsivity, is an increasingly common psychiatric diagnosis among American youth: about 9.5 percent of Americans ages 4 to 17 were judged to have it in 2007, or about 5.4 million children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The reported prevalence of the disorder has risen steadily for more than a decade, with some doctors gratified by its widening recognition but others fearful that the diagnosis, and the drugs to treat it, are handed out too loosely and at the exclusion of nonpharmaceutical therapies.

The Drug Enforcement Administration classifies these medications as Schedule II Controlled Substances because they are particularly addictive. Long-term effects of extended use are not well understood, said many medical experts. Some of them worry that children can become dependent on the medication well into adulthood, long after any A.D.H.D. symptoms can dissipate.

According to guidelines published last year by the American Academy of Pediatrics, physicians should use one of several behavior rating scales, some of which feature dozens of categories, to make sure that a child not only fits criteria for A.D.H.D., but also has no related condition like dyslexia or oppositional defiant disorder, in which intense anger is directed toward authority figures. However, a 2010 study in the Journal of Attention Disorders suggested that at least 20 percent of doctors said they did not follow this protocol when making their A.D.H.D. diagnoses, with many of them following personal instinct.

On the Rocafort family’s kitchen shelf in Ball Ground, Ga., next to the peanut butter and chicken broth, sits a wire basket brimming with bottles of the children’s medications, prescribed by Dr. Anderson: Adderall for Alexis, 12; and Ethan, 9; Risperdal (an antipsychotic for mood stabilization) for Quintn and Perry, both 11; and Clonidine (a sleep aid to counteract the other medications) for all four, taken nightly.

Quintn began taking Adderall for A.D.H.D. about five years ago, when his disruptive school behavior led to calls home and in-school suspensions. He immediately settled down and became a more earnest, attentive student — a little bit more like Perry, who also took Adderall for his A.D.H.D.

When puberty’s chemical maelstrom began at about 10, though, Quintn got into fights at school because, he said, other children were insulting his mother. The problem was, they were not; Quintn was seeing people and hearing voices that were not there, a rare but recognized side effect of Adderall. After Quintn admitted to being suicidal, Dr. Anderson prescribed a week in a local psychiatric hospital, and a switch to Risperdal.

While telling this story, the Rocaforts called Quintn into the kitchen and asked him to describe why he had been given Adderall.

“To help me focus on my school work, my homework, listening to Mom and Dad, and not doing what I used to do to my teachers, to make them mad,” he said. He described the week in the hospital and the effects of Risperdal: “If I don’t take my medicine I’d be having attitudes. I’d be disrespecting my parents. I wouldn’t be like this.”

Despite Quintn’s experience with Adderall, the Rocaforts decided to use it with their 12-year-old daughter, Alexis, and 9-year-old son, Ethan. These children don’t have A.D.H.D., their parents said. The Adderall is merely to help their grades, and because Alexis was, in her father’s words, “a little blah.”

”We’ve seen both sides of the spectrum: we’ve seen positive, we’ve seen negative,” the father, Rocky Rocafort, said. Acknowledging that Alexis’s use of Adderall is “cosmetic,” he added, “If they’re feeling positive, happy, socializing more, and it’s helping them, why wouldn’t you? Why not?”

Dr. William Graf, a pediatrician and child neurologist who serves many poor families in New Haven, said that a family should be able to choose for itself whether Adderall can benefit its non-A.D.H.D. child, and that a physician can ethically prescribe a trial as long as side effects are closely monitored. He expressed concern, however, that the rising use of stimulants in this manner can threaten what he called “the authenticity of development.”

“These children are still in the developmental phase, and we still don’t know how these drugs biologically affect the developing brain,” he said. “There’s an obligation for parents, doctors and teachers to respect the authenticity issue, and I’m not sure that’s always happening.”

Dr. Anderson said that every child he treats with A.D.H.D. medication has met qualifications. But he also railed against those criteria, saying they were codified only to “make something completely subjective look objective.” He added that teacher reports almost invariably come back as citing the behaviors that would warrant a diagnosis, a decision he called more economic than medical.

“The school said if they had other ideas they would,” Dr. Anderson said. “But the other ideas cost money and resources compared to meds.”

Dr. Anderson cited William G. Hasty Elementary School here in Canton as one school he deals with often. Izell McGruder, the school’s principal, did not respond to several messages seeking comment.

Several educators contacted for this article considered the subject of A.D.H.D. so controversial — the diagnosis was misused at times, they said, but for many children it is a serious learning disability — that they declined to comment. The superintendent of one major school district in California, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that diagnosis rates of A.D.H.D. have risen as sharply as school funding has declined.

“It’s scary to think that this is what we’ve come to; how not funding public education to meet the needs of all kids has led to this,” said the superintendent, referring to the use of stimulants in children without classic A.D.H.D. “I don’t know, but it could be happening right here. Maybe not as knowingly, but it could be a consequence of a doctor who sees a kid failing in overcrowded classes with 42 other kids and the frustrated parents asking what they can do. The doctor says, ‘Maybe it’s A.D.H.D., let’s give this a try.’ ”

When told that the Rocaforts insist that their two children on Adderall do not have A.D.H.D. and never did, Dr. Anderson said he was surprised. He consulted their charts and found the parent questionnaire. Every category, which assessed the severity of behaviors associated with A.D.H.D., received a five out of five except one, which was a four.

“This is my whole angst about the thing,” Dr. Anderson said. “We put a label on something that isn’t binary — you have it or you don’t. We won’t just say that there is a student who has problems in school, problems at home, and probably, according to the doctor with agreement of the parents, will try medical treatment.”

He added, “We might not know the long-term effects, but we do know the short-term costs of school failure, which are real. I am looking to the individual person and where they are right now. I am the doctor for the patient, not for society.”

    Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School, NYT, 9.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/health/attention-disorder-or-not-children-prescribed-pills-to-help-in-school.html

Carroll F. Johnson,

Schools Integrator,

Dies at 99

October 6, 2012
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Carroll F. Johnson, a Southern-born educator who was one of the first superintendents to voluntarily use busing to integrate an urban school district, doing so in White Plains in the 1960s, died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 99.

He had been weakened by a long battle with blood infections, his son, Walter, said in confirming the death.

Dr. Johnson’s commitment to equal educational opportunities for minorities took root in the Jim Crow South of 1941, his son said. At the time, Dr. Johnson had just received a master’s degree in education from the University of Georgia when he watched as Gov. Eugene Talmadge stacked its board of regents with allies to force the ouster of Walter Cocking, the dean of the education school.

The governor said Dr. Cocking needed to be removed because he planned to create an integrated demonstration school.

The firing drew national attention, and it was not far from his mind, his son said, when he went to Westchester County in 1954 to run the White Plains schools. The Supreme Court had just issued its Brown v. Board of Education decision, ending legal segregation in the public schools.

The White Plains system’s student body was about 20 percent black then, with black students largely concentrated in a few neighborhood schools because of housing patterns. Dr. Johnson saw this as de facto school segregation, and he tried to redress it through a number of remedies, including building schools with special amenities to attract both white and black children.

By 1964, however, he had decided that the effort was too piecemeal and that black and white students remained largely isolated from one another. He put together what he called the White Plains Racial Balance Plan, which essentially called for busing hundreds of children so that no school had less than 10 percent minority enrollment or more than 30 percent. He also closed one school that had been overwhelmingly black.

To ease the way in putting the plan into effect, he built alliances with PTA leaders and the editor of the local newspaper. “He was a Southerner and kept his drawl, and I don’t think people saw him coming,” his son said.

The busing plan fell into place with remarkably little resistance. Four years later, the schools could report a rise in test scores for black students, no decline in white scores and no significant white exodus out of the school system.

Dr. Johnson said the key to the program’s success was that the busing went essentially one way: black children being transferred to white schools.

“Our residents wish, for the most part, to provide equal opportunity for all children — even at some inconvenience to themselves,” Dr. Johnson wrote in 1968 in evaluating the program. “But I do not believe that the majority of white parents would willingly have sent their own youngsters into center city schools.”

Dr. Johnson left White Plains in 1969 for Columbia University to become a professor of education administration and director of the Institute of Field Studies at Teachers College. In announcing his arrival, TC Week, a Teachers College publication, wrote that Dr. Johnson’s racial desegregation plan “became a model for other school systems in their desegregation efforts.”

In 1988, the White Plains system instituted a new way to bring racial balance to its student population, letting parents select among the schools in the district, with busing provided to students who live at a distance from the ones they choose.

Carroll Frye Johnson was born in Atlanta to Paul and Mattie Carroll Johnson on Jan. 16, 1913. His father died 18 months later, leaving Ms. Johnson to raise her son on her parents’ farm in Wildwood, Ga. Mr. Johnson received a partial scholarship to attend the University of Chattanooga (now the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). He graduated in 1935.

Six years later, after he got his master’s degree in Georgia, he joined the Navy with the outbreak of World War II. An able swimmer with educational credentials, he was assigned to train recruits to swim under burning fuel. He was discharged in 1945 and went on to earn his doctorate in education from Columbia in 1950.

While working for Columbia, he was a consultant on roughly 150 searches for superintendents around the country, allowing him to further his commitment to moving more women and minorities into positions of power. “He was a champion for school integration, raising academic standards,” said Charles Fowler, who is executive secretary of Suburban School Superintendents, a national association. And, he added, “for significantly broadening the base of students studying to lead America’s schools.”

In addition to his son, Dr. Johnson is survived by his wife, Susan Kaye Johnson; a daughter, Katherine Sussman; a stepdaughter, Gillian Kaye; four grandchildren; a stepgrandchild; and two great-grandchildren.

Dr. Johnson kept a stack of newspaper clippings and letters from his fraught time in White Plains, according to an article about him published on a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Web site. He treasured one thank-you note in particular, from Dr. Errold D. Collymore, a black dentist.

“When you came to White Plains I was very apprehensive,” Dr. Collymore wrote, as quoted by the Web site. “I openly expressed my doubts and anxiety about a superintendent of schools for White Plains who came from Georgia.”

But, he added: “My early fears were unfounded and unfair. I have been greatly impressed with your fairness, your objectivity, your considerable administrative competence and your dignity and unmistakable humanity.”

    Carroll F. Johnson, Schools Integrator, Dies at 99, NYT, 6.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/carroll-f-johnson-schools-integrator-dies-at-99.html

Enrollment Drops Again

in Graduate Programs

September 28, 2012
The New York Times
By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Enrollment in college is still climbing, but students are increasingly saying no to graduate school in the United States.

New enrollment in graduate schools fell last year for the second consecutive year, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools.

The declines followed surges in enrollment in 2008 and 2009 as many unemployed workers sought a haven during the recession. Financial considerations probably played a role in the shift. Students may be dissuaded from continuing their education in part because of the increasing debt burden from their undergraduate years.

Additionally, state budget cuts are forcing public institutions to reduce aid for graduate students, who in some disciplines have traditionally been paid to attend postgraduate programs.

The number of students enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs (excluding law and certain other first professional degrees like M.D.’s) declined by 1.7 percent from the fall of 2010 to fall 2011.

Among American citizens and permanent residents, matriculation fell by 2.3 percent. In contrast, temporary residents increased their enrollment by 7.8 percent.

Temporary residents made up 16.9 percent of all students in American graduate schools, and that figure has been growing as foreign governments pay for more of their citizens to obtain education in the United States, particularly in technical areas. Temporary residents represented 45.5 percent of all students enrolled in engineering graduate programs in the United States, and 42.4 percent of those in American mathematics and computer science graduate programs.

The changes in 2011 varied by discipline, with education having the biggest drop-off in new graduate enrollment at 8.8 percent.

“The states are in financial stress,” said Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “The school systems especially are in financial stress. Teachers are no longer being provided time off to get graduate degrees, and schools are no longer funding principals to go back and get principal certificates.”

The next sharpest decline was in programs for arts and humanities, where new graduate enrollment fell by 5.4 percent, perhaps reflecting that career prospects for such graduates are becoming more limited as colleges lay off even tenured faculty members in these areas.

Health sciences, on the other hand, experienced a big increase in enrollment. The health care industry has been hiring consistently and robustly during the recession and the weak recovery.

The number of new graduate students studying health care rose by 6.4 percent, which was slightly slower growth than the average in the last decade. The average annual change in new graduate enrollment in health sciences from 2001 to 2011 was 9.8 percent.

Enrollment showed more tepid growth in business, which was up by 2.6 percent, and in mathematics and computer sciences, up by 1.6 percent.

While overall enrollment for graduate school declined, the number of applications rose by 4.3 percent. It was the sixth consecutive increase in application volume.

The Council of Graduate Schools did not have data on how many schools the typical applicant applies to, so it was unclear if there were more people applying in 2011 than in the previous year. But there was an increase in the number of people taking the Graduate Record Examinations (G.R.E.), a test that many graduate schools require as part of student applications.

As the number of grad school applications has risen, the share of those applications leading to offers of admission has been falling. In 2007, the acceptance rate across all master’s and doctoral programs was 44.6 percent, whereas in 2011 it was 40.8 percent.

Women continued to outnumber men in the nation’s postgraduate programs, 58 percent to 42 percent, in the 2011 report.

The Council of Graduate Schools, a membership organization for institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada, based its findings on an annual survey of American graduate schools. The latest report reflected the responses from 655 institutions, which collectively award 81 percent of the master’s degrees and 92 percent of the doctorates each year.

    Enrollment Drops Again in Graduate Programs, NYT, 28.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/business/new-enrollment-drops-again-in-us-graduate-schools.html

Chicago’s Next School Crisis:

Pension Fund Is Running Dry

September 19, 2012
The New York Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

One of the most vexing problems for Chicago and its teachers went virtually unmentioned during the strike: The pension fund is about to hit a wall.

The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund has about $10 billion in assets, but is paying out more than $1 billion in benefits a year — much more than it has been taking in. That has forced it to sell investments, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to pay retired teachers. Experts say the fund could collapse within a few years unless something is done.

“There’s a huge crisis,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan research organization in Chicago that works on fiscal issues. “The problem does not get easier by waiting. The problem gets bigger, and starts to become an insurmountable obstacle.”

Having skipped its pension contributions for many years, Chicago is supposed to start tripling them in another year under state law. But the school district has drained its reserves. And it cannot easily turn to the local taxpayers, because of a cap on property taxes. Borrowing the money would be difficult and expensive as well, because of a credit downgrade this summer. One of the few remaining choices would be to make deep cuts in other services.

Like Chicago, many cities and school districts now face pension pressure after reducing their contributions in recent years to save money. Among the funds for different types of workers, teachers’ plans tend to be shortchanged more often, according to research done by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for The New York Times.

The reasons are unclear, but in many states — California, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Illinois, among others — pension contributions must be set by state legislators every year. And since teachers’ pension costs are blended with other education spending, lawmakers sometimes decide to withhold money from pensions to allow more direct state spending on the schools. The teachers’ pension fund for the State of Illinois is in even worse shape than the Chicago teachers’ fund.

What many Chicago residents may not realize is that their school district also has been paying $130 million a year to cover most of the pension contributions required of the teachers, a practice known as a “pickup,” which became a flash point last year in the collective bargaining battle in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s public workers have agreed to make their own contributions, as a concession.

Officials in Chicago know they have a pension problem, even though it has not been front and center in the strike. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has focused on trying to improve the quality of public education, with a longer school day and more meaningful teacher evaluations. The Chicago Teachers’ Union, meanwhile, has been intent on reinstating a 4 percent pay increase, and protecting those who are laid off when failing schools are closed.

Mr. Emanuel has made it clear that he wants to address teachers’ pensions, too. Earlier this year, he tried to curb at least some of Chicago’s ballooning costs by seeking to raise retirement ages, increase employee contributions and trim the 3 percent yearly pension increases that the city’s retirees now receive. He called those increases “the single greatest threat to the retirement security of city employees,” because they drain money from pension funds very quickly.

The State Legislature, which must approve such changes, has said pensions must wait until next year. But Mr. Emanuel says the system is broken and he is not willing to make any increased contributions until it has been fixed. The mayor said earlier this year that making the larger contributions would lead to “direct cuts in our classrooms.”

“Those cuts mean the average class size will jump to approximately 55 students,” he warned.

The teachers union has blasted Chicago for failing to set aside enough money for the pensions, but it has reassured workers and retirees that their benefits are protected by the State Constitution and cannot be reduced. A state law bars strikes in Chicago over pension issues.

Retirees say they are dismayed at the way their fund has been neglected, though they generally believe their benefits are safe.

“In the State Constitution of Illinois, it says that once you receive a pension, it can never be changed to be lower,” said Claire J. Murray, 69, who retired in 2002 with a pension of about $42,000 a year, based on 34 years as a teacher and middle-school counselor.

If the money in the fund ever ran out, “the State of Illinois would have to pay our pensions,” she said. “We’re not just a pension fund, we’re part of the State Constitution.”

Ms. Murray pointed out that teachers in Chicago, as in many cities, do not earn Social Security credit for their years in the classroom. Their pension plan is intended to replace the federal benefit.

She also said it would be unfair to penalize retired teachers for the school district’s failure to set aside enough money for their benefits.

“It’s the Board of Education who kept on taking all these funding holidays,” she said.

Indeed, the State Legislature granted the Chicago school district a break from its pension contributions, starting in 1995. Since then, the city has never contributed the required amount; for many years it put in nothing. All the while, the teachers kept building up their benefits.

Pension fund documents say the teachers continuously made their share of the contributions, 9 percent of each paycheck. But in fact, the teachers have been putting in just 2 percent of their pay, while the school district has been making up the rest of what is called the “employee contribution” every year. The practice began under an agreement reached in the early 1980s that was supposed to reduce future pay raises, keep money in the fund and take advantage of a federal tax break.

Such pickups were not widely known until Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin began his push to make public employees pay more for their benefits and to bar them from bargaining for anything besides base pay. Wisconsin law calls for public workers and their employers to split the cost of pension contributions, but in practice, state and local governments were picking up almost all of the employees’ share. Local and state workers have contended that they sacrificed current pay increases and the pickup should not be considered a giveaway.

Chicago does not have the state’s only pickup. While Illinois says that teachers outside Chicago send in 9.4 percent of every paycheck for the separate state fund, the state really pays most of that too.

Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois and Mr. Emanuel have both called for public workers to increase the amounts they pay toward their pensions. Forcing the Chicago teachers to make their full contributions, of course, would erode much of the salary increases they fought for during the strike.

    Chicago’s Next School Crisis: Pension Fund Is Running Dry, NYT, 19.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/teachers-pension-a-big-issue-for-chicago.html

At a Campus Scarred by Hazing,

Cries for Help

September 18, 2012
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — One student said she feared for her boyfriend’s health and ability to do his schoolwork because he was coming home from fraternity pledging around 4 a.m. with gashes and cuts on his hands and elbows that reopened daily.

A parent said her son returned home with a shaved head and injuries, from running barefoot on a bed of rocks, that required an emergency room visit and subsequent treatment.

Another student said he was hazed night after night, until right before morning classes. He wrote in an anonymous e-mail to the university, “I was hosed, waterboarded, force-fed disgusting mixtures of food, went through physical exercises until I passed out, and crawled around outside in my boxers to the point where my stomach, elbows, thighs and knees are filled with cuts, scrapes and bruises.”

It is a new school year at Binghamton University, one of the most prestigious public institutions in the Northeast. But the most urgent order of business is one left over from the last school year — a hazing scandal that forced the university to suspend pledging and induction at all fraternities and sororities.

The university has a new dean of students and a renewed focus on curbing hazing. But a review of complaints submitted to the administration last year indicates just how overmatched Binghamton has been. While student deaths at Cornell and Florida A&M Universities last year have drawn widespread attention to dangerous behavior in student organizations, the reports, obtained recently by The New York Times, provide a rare look into the fraternity and sorority culture on an American campus.

Sunni Solomon, the university’s assistant director of Greek life from 2010 until July, said in an e-mail, “My entire tenure from start to finish, I was scared to death that someone was going to die.”

No one died. But the reports, mostly anonymous e-mails and phone calls, depict students, parents and alumni essentially begging the university to find a way to crack down on hazing.

One student said his friends seemed “always weary, anxious and even paranoid” as a result of the hazing. “I am worried about their safety as they seem to no longer care about what is done toward them,” the student wrote.

One father cited text messages from his son, which could “only be interpreted as desperately reaching out for help.” He said they included descriptions of being forced to stand out in the cold in his underwear, prevented from sleeping for prolonged periods of time and not being allowed to leave the fraternity all weekend. “To be frank, I am shocked and mortified that this is allowed to go on at your institution,” he wrote.

One junior, who expressed great love for the university, relayed accounts from two pledges. One said her sorority threw pledges into a freezing shower where they had to recite the Greek alphabet. Another reported being forced to eat concoctions meant to make pledges vomit on one another and to hold hot coals from hookahs in their hands. The e-mail concluded: “Save the innocent and naïve who can’t seem to save themselves.”

Forced drinking, a staple of college hazing, comes up in a few reports. There also were reports of students’ getting frostbite from walking barefoot in the snow. One said pledges, blindfolded, driven miles from campus and relieved of their phones, were expected to find their own way home. Another said a fraternity branded pledges on the leg, back or buttocks.

Several reports claimed that some of the hazing continued even after organizations received warnings or after the university suspended pledging.

Officials at Binghamton — part of the State University of New York system — declined to say whether individual students had been disciplined but said 3 of the 53 sanctioned Greek organizations were currently banned from recruiting members. The university’s Web site says one sorority received a disciplinary warning, one fraternity was placed on probation and two fraternities remain under investigation.

Separately, two national sororities canceled charters of their Binghamton chapters in 2011 after a review of the sororities and the Greek culture on campus.

Part of the problem, university officials said, was that few victims were willing to come forward, so allegations were hard to verify. A number of the complaints, which were provided to The Times by someone alarmed at the severity of the hazing, came secondhand or thirdhand from worried girlfriends, alumni or parents.

Only 10 percent of Binghamton’s 14,700 students are members of social or professional fraternities and sororities, making Greek life a less dominant part of campus life than at some other schools. Mere numbers, though, do not tell the tale.

Housed, for the most part, in shabby, rambling houses and in apartments close to the bustling bar scene in Binghamton’s struggling downtown, Greek organizations are central to the campus’s social life. Most students go to parties there. With the distance from campus about three miles, the students are far from the eyes of administrators and the campus police. The problem is compounded by the presence of unsanctioned fraternities, some with rowdy reputations.

Although hazing is a crime in New York State, no one was charged in Binghamton. In April, the Binghamton police visited Alpha Pi Epsilon, also known as APES, an unsanctioned fraternity housed in a 9,600-square-foot Greek Revival mansion near downtown. There had been reports of nightly hazing involving “rigorous exercise, alcohol consumption, paddling and ‘waterboarding’ where the pledges were being hosed down,” a police report said. It added: “Information was also reported that some of the pledges had acquired pneumonia from the ‘waterboarding.’ ”

Sgt. Michael Senio said that without a sworn complaint from someone willing to come forward, the police could not enter the building where the occupants, according to the report, responded with “a lot of attitude and very little cooperation.”

Sergeant Senio said: “I can only speculate what was going on, but we could see the basement, which was like a disgusting-looking dark dungeon with hoses and standing water on the ground.”

Members declined to comment when a reporter visited the house last week.

The excesses of Binghamton were not new. A 2005 editorial in the student newspaper, Pipe Dream, said the university was hypocritical in pretending that pledging was anything other than “a semester of naughty secret hazing.” It continued: “This isn’t a playground. This is a madhouse. We’ve turned Greek life advisers into Casablanca’s Captain Renault who is shocked, shocked to find there’s hazing (and parties) going on here.”

The newspaper’s current editor in chief, Daniel Weintraub, says hazing remains an open secret. “The view of the majority of the student body is that everyone knew all this was happening and no one cares,” he said. “People think, ‘If you want to be hazed, go join a frat; if you don’t want to be hazed, don’t join a frat.’ ”

Samantha Vulpis, president of Binghamton’s Panhellenic Council, representing four sororities, said the university should have focused on the worst offenders rather than groups engaged in what she characterized as benign bonding exercises. “I know what the chapters in my council were doing, and none of it put anyone in danger,” she said.

But Zach Stein, president of Binghamton’s Interfraternity Council, which represents 18 fraternities, said Greek life at Binghamton had to change.

“We’re at a critical tipping point,” he said. “We could either lose the whole system or make it great. It’s not going to remain the same no matter what.”

Brian T. Rose, the university’s vice president for student affairs, said the biggest shock to him was how many organizations were the subject of complaints. “It gave me a sense of pervasiveness about the problem that surprised me,” he said.

April Thompson, the new dean of students, said Binghamton was working with national fraternity and sorority organizations and bringing in advisers to review the system. She said the university was looking for incentives to attract students to recognized Greek organizations, which the university has some control over, rather than unsanctioned ones. The university said incentives could include scholarships for organizations that excel academically, support for events and assistance with recruitment activities.

In a letter to students, Ms. Thompson said organizations must register all members, be in “full recognition” status with the university and, if necessary, sign administrative agreements with the university to take in new members.

Mr. Rose said there needed to be a long-term approach to curbing hazing. “It’s not going to be one semester,” he said. “It’s not going to be one year.”

But he emphasized that unless students were motivated to change the culture, “the game of trying to police 50-something different organizations across I don’t know how many miles of the city of Binghamton is not something we’re going to be able to do.”

Samme Chittum contributed reporting.

    At a Campus Scarred by Hazing, Cries for Help, NYT, 18.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/nyregion/amid-hazing-at-binghamton-university-cries-for-help.html

Young, Gifted and Neglected

September 18, 2012
The New York Times
By CHESTER E. FINN Jr.

Washington

BARACK OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong foundation laid by excellent schools.

Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.

Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.

Public education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.

Today’s systemic failure takes three forms.

First, we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents.

Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and music.

Third, many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to succeed in them.

Here and there, however, entire public schools focus exclusively on high-ability, highly motivated students. Some are nationally famous (Boston Latin, Bronx Science), others known mainly in their own communities (Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills, Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy). When my colleague Jessica A. Hockett and I went searching for schools like these to study, we discovered that no one had ever fully mapped this terrain.

In a country with more than 20,000 public high schools, we found just 165 of these schools, known as exam schools. They educate about 1 percent of students. Nineteen states have none. Only three big cities have more than five such schools (Los Angeles has zero). Almost all have far more qualified applicants than they can accommodate. Hence they practice very selective admission, turning away thousands of students who could benefit from what they have to offer. Northern Virginia’s acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for example, gets some 3,300 applicants a year — two-thirds of them academically qualified — for 480 places.

We built a list, surveyed the principals and visited 11 schools. We learned a lot. While the schools differ in many ways, their course offerings resemble A.P. classes in content and rigor; they have stellar college placement; and the best of them expose their pupils to independent study, challenging internships and individual research projects.

Critics call them elitist, but we found the opposite. These are great schools accessible to families who can’t afford private schooling or expensive suburbs. While exam schools in some cities don’t come close to reflecting the demographics around them, across the country the low-income enrollment in these schools parallels the high school population as a whole. African-American youngsters are “overrepresented” in them and Asian-Americans staggeringly so (21 percent versus 5 percent in high schools overall). Latinos are underrepresented, but so are whites.

That’s not so surprising. Prosperous, educated parents can access multiple options for their able daughters and sons. Elite private schools are still out there. So are New Trier, Scarsdale and Beverly Hills. The schools we studied, by and large, are educational oases for families with smart kids but few alternatives.

They’re safe havens, too — schools where everyone focuses on teaching and learning, not maintaining order. They have sports teams, but their orchestras are better. Yes, some have had to crack down on cheating, but in these schools it’s O.K. to be a nerd. You’re surrounded by kids like you — some smarter than you — and taught by capable teachers who welcome the challenge, teachers more apt to have Ph.D.’s or experience at the college level than high school instructors elsewhere. You aren’t searched for weapons at the door. And you’re pretty sure to graduate and go on to a good college.

Many more students could benefit from schools like these — and the numbers would multiply if our education system did right by such students in the early grades. But that will happen only when we acknowledge that leaving no child behind means paying as much attention to those who’ve mastered the basics — and have the capacity and motivation for much more — as we do to those who cannot yet read or subtract.

It’s time to end the bias against gifted and talented education and quit assuming that every school must be all things to all students, a simplistic formula that ends up neglecting all sorts of girls and boys, many of them poor and minority, who would benefit more from specialized public schools. America should have a thousand or more high schools for able students, not 165, and elementary and middle schools that spot and prepare their future pupils.

With their support for school choice, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama have both edged toward recognizing that kids aren’t all the same and schools shouldn’t be, either. Yet fear of seeming elitist will most likely keep them from proposing more exam schools. Which is ironic and sad, considering where they went to school. Smart kids shouldn’t have to go to private schools or get turned away from Bronx Science or Thomas Jefferson simply because there’s no room for them.

Chester E. Finn Jr.,

the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution

at Stanford University,

is the author, with Jessica A. Hockett,

of “Exam Schools: Inside America’s

Most Selective Public High Schools.”

    Young, Gifted and Neglected, NYT, 18.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/opinion/gifted-students-deserve-more-opportunities.html

The Lows of Higher Ed

September 14, 2012
The New York Times
By GAIL COLLINS

Welcome back, college students! Always nice to see you.

Although we are sort of worried by those bleak stories about student debt, which suggest a lot of you may graduate owing a ton of money and unqualified to do anything more remunerative than selling socks.

This year, Newsweek cheerfully welcomed the Class of 2016 by asking, “Is College a Lousy Investment?” And in The Times, Andrew Martin reported that the Department of Education is paying more than $1.4 billion per annum to folks whose job it is to collect on $76 billion in defaulted student loans. “If you wait long enough, you catch people when their guard’s down,” one debt collector told Martin after garnishing the savings of a disabled carpenter.

Look on the bright side, students. Perhaps when you graduate, some of you will be able to qualify for a good job in the booming accounts receivable management industry.

Higher education is still the key to most good jobs, but the nation is starting to ask some questions about the way we finance it. Shouldn’t there be more of a match between the cost of school and the potential earning power of the graduates? Who speaks for the art history majors? And why is tuition so high, anyway? (Parents, if your kid is planning to take out student loans, you might want to avoid any college where the dorm rooms are nicer than your house.)

“People don’t believe much any more about the altruistic motives of colleges and universities,” sadly noted Pat Callan of the Higher Education Policy Institute.

Not without some reason. In his reporting, Martin uncovered a newsletter aimed at college admissions officers that advised them to avoid using “bad words” such as “cost” or “pay” in their admissions materials. Instead, it suggested: “And you get all this for ...”

In Washington, Congress is holding hearings! The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is considering a bill — co-sponsored by Democrat Al Franken and Republican Charles Grassley — that would require all schools to fill out the same form telling the student loan applicants useful facts like exactly how much per month they’ll be forking over when they start paying.

That would be the superminimum, right? How amazed are you that this isn’t happening already?

“Some of the packages don’t delineate what’s a grant, what’s a scholarship, what’s a loan,” said Franken. “And the information all comes in an award letter, so you’re thinking: Award!”

The Obama administration, which can’t do much about this without Congress, has been working to get the schools to voluntarily adopt a “shopping sheet” that would provide clear basic information so students could compare different schools’ financing before making a choice. “We’ve been encouraged by the feedback from the higher-ed sector,” one of the experts working on the program said. “I think we have 100 individual colleges and universities.”

The good news is that controlling college costs really does seem to be an administration priority. The bad news is that there are more than 4,000 colleges and universities.

People, don’t you think young adults should get the clearest, most easy-to-compare information conceivable before they sign a huge, life-changing loan deal? Don’t you think there should be somebody in charge of calling them up once a week and yelling: “Eight hundred dollars a month until you’re 51 years old!”

Maybe I’m underestimating the ability of teenagers to make serious, well-thought-out decisions about their higher education. All I can tell you is that when I was 21 years old, I signed up to go to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts because I had always wanted to live in Boston. I had no idea the main campus was on the other side of the state until I got there.

Franken is hoping the Senate might take up his proposal next year. I presume you weren’t expecting anything sooner. Congress can’t even get it together to keep the Postal Service from defaulting. And the Senate leaders admitted the other day that they’re not going to be able to pass a bipartisan bill to legalize Internet gambling on poker, which seems to be a really high priority for some important people. If they can’t do poker, they are not going to get to student loan transparency.

The House is planning hearings on student loans, too. The chairwoman of the subcommittee assigned to this task is Representative Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who once said that she worked her own way through college and had “little tolerance” for people who complain about their huge student loan debts.

“New ideas to advocate for financial aid transparency are always welcome in this discussion,” Foxx said in an e-mail on Friday. “But we have to question whether the federal government’s dictating the terms of every college and university’s financial aid communications will actually achieve the desired results.”

So maybe a little less sense of urgency there.

    The Lows of Higher Ed, NYT, 14.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/opinion/collins-the-lows-of-higher-ed.html

With No Contract Deal

by Deadline in Chicago,

Teachers Will Strike

September 9, 2012
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO — Union leaders for this city’s public schoolteachers said that they would strike on Monday morning after negotiations ended late Sunday with no contract agreement between the union and the nation’s third largest school system, which have been locked for months in a dispute over wages, job security and teacher evaluations.

Coming as the school year had barely begun for many, the impasse and looming strike were expected to affect hundreds of thousands of families here, some of whom had spent the weekend scrambling to rearrange work schedules, find alternative programs and hire baby sitters if school was out for some time.

Chicago Public Schools officials, visibly frustrated after talks broke off late Sunday night, expressed concern for the estimated 350,000 students the strike could affect.

“We do not want a strike,” David J. Vitale, president of the Chicago Board of Education, said late Sunday as he left the negotiations, which he described as extraordinarily difficult and “perhaps the most unbelievable process that I’ve ever been through.”

Union leaders said they had hoped not to walk away from their jobs, but they said they were left with little choice.

“This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could have avoided,” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

The political stakes now may be highest for Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic mayor in a city with deep union roots. He took office last year holding up the improvement of public schools as one of his top priorities, but now faces arduous political terrain certain to accompany Chicago’s first public schools strike in 25 years.

Late Sunday, Mr. Emanuel told reporters that school district officials had presented a strong offer to the union, including what some officials described as what would amount to a 16 percent raise for many teachers over four years — and that only two minor issues remained. “This is totally unnecessary, it’s avoidable and our kids do not deserve this,” Mr. Emanuel said, describing the decision as “a strike of choice.”

For days, even as talks went on, Chicago had been bracing for the possibility of a teachers strike — the first since a 19-day stoppage in 1987. In recent days, hundreds of people have called the city’s 311 system and the Chicago Public Schools central offices with questions about whether a strike was coming, and what it would mean. A strike was not expected to affect the 45,000 students in the city’s charter schools, officials said.

The school system, which employs about 25,000 teachers, announced contingency plans in the event of a strike, including a program to open 144 of its 675 schools with half-days of activities supervised by people other than unionized teachers. Officials said that program would also include meals — no small concern since 84 percent of the city’s public school students qualify for the free and reduced meals program.

Ms. Lewis deemed the contingency proposal, which was expected to be able to accommodate at least 150,000 students, “a mess,” and suggested that school officials were expecting families to “put their children with random folks.” For its part, the union on Saturday opened a strike headquarters where members could begin collecting picket signs and other materials to prepare for a walkout.

Negotiations have taken place behind closed doors since November, concerning wages and benefits, whether laid-off teachers should be considered for new openings, extra pay for those with more experience and higher degrees, and evaluations. District officials said the teachers’ average pay is $76,000 a year.

School officials, who say the system faces a $665 million deficit this year and a bigger one next year, have worked to cut costs even as Mr. Emanuel has pressed for what he considers much-needed “comprehensive reform,” including a longer school day.

Teachers have said they are being neglected on issues like promised raises, class sizes and support staff in the schools. By June, about 90 percent of teachers voted in favor of authorizing a strike if a new agreement could not be reached during the summer.

While negotiators handled the private talks, Chicagoans watched what appeared to be a contentious, sometimes personal fight between two blunt and resolute personalities: Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Lewis, who has described the mayor in recent days as a “bully” and a “liar,” and in a recent interview added, “I think the whole idea of an imperial mayoralty where you wave a magic wand or cuss someone out and things happen is untenable.”

Some parents said they were ultimately hopeful about the prospect of improvement in their children’s schools and eager for the changes advocated by Mr. Emanuel, whose own children attend private school. But others said that they thought teachers had been pushed hard, and that a standoff seemed inevitable.

“He has a vision for what he wants,” Jacob Lesniewski, a parent, said of Mr. Emanuel, “and he’s not going to let anything get in his way.”

For the moment, though, parents seemed most worried about something else entirely: how to juggle their way through Monday with no school.

    With No Contract Deal by Deadline in Chicago, Teachers Will Strike, NYT, 9.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/education/with-no-contract-deal-by-deadline-in-chicago-teachers-will-strike.html

Learning as Freedom

September 5, 2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. ROTH

Middletown, Conn.

IN March, a task force organized by the Council on Foreign Relations tried to reframe the problems of the nation’s public schools as a threat to national security. “Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy,” it warned, while also referring to students as “human capital.”

While the report focused on K-12 education and called for better college preparedness, its instrumentalist rhetoric has remarkable affinities with that of critics who see higher education as outmoded. Conservative scholars like Charles Murray, Richard Vedder and Peter W. Wood ask why people destined for low-paying jobs should bother to pursue their education beyond high school, much less study philosophy, literature and history. The venture capitalist Peter Thiel has offered money to would-be entrepreneurs to quit college and focus on Web-based start-ups instead. Business school professors like Clayton M. Christensen tell us that “disruptive innovation” is causing liberal-arts learning to be “disintermediated” so as to deliver just what the “end user” needs.

From this narrow, instrumentalist perspective, students are consumers buying a customized playlist of knowledge.

This critique may be new, but the call for a more narrowly tailored education — especially for Americans with limited economic prospects — is not. A century ago, organizations as varied as chambers of commerce and labor federations backed plans for a dual system of teaching, wherein some students would be trained for specific occupations, while others would get a broad education allowing them to continue their studies in college. The movement led to the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which financed vocational education, initially for jobs in agriculture and then in other industries.

The philosopher John Dewey, America’s most influential thinker on education, opposed this effort. Though he was open to integrating manual training in school curriculums, Dewey opposed the dual-track system because he recognized that it would reinforce the inequalities of his time. Wouldn’t such a system have the same result today?

To be sure, Dewey recognized the necessity of gainful employment. “The world in which most of us live is a world in which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do,” he wrote. “Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.”

Education should aim to enhance our capacities, Dewey argued, so that we are not reduced to mere tools. “The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.” Are we?

Who wants to attend school to learn to be “human capital”? Who aspires for their children to become economic or military resources? Dewey had a different vision. Given the pace of change, it is impossible (he noted in 1897) to know what the world will be like in a couple of decades, so schools first and foremost should teach us habits of learning.

For Dewey, these habits included awareness of our interdependence; nobody is an expert on everything. He emphasized “plasticity,” an openness to being shaped by experience: “The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.”

The inclination to learn from life can be taught in a liberal arts curriculum, but also in schools that focus on real-world skills, from engineering to nursing. The key is to develop habits of mind that allow students to keep learning, even as they acquire skills to get things done. This combination will serve students as individuals, family members and citizens — not just as employees and managers.

Higher education faces stark challenges: the ravaging of public universities’ budgets by strained state and local governments; ever rising tuition and student debt; inadequate student achievement; the corrosive impact of soaring inequality; and the neglect by some elite institutions of their core mission of teaching undergraduates.

But these problems, however urgent, should not cause us to neglect Dewey’s insight that learning in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom. In a nation that aspires to democracy, that’s what education is primarily for: the cultivation of freedom within society. We should not think of schools as garrisons protecting us from enemies, nor as industries generating human capital. Rather, higher education’s highest purpose is to give all citizens the opportunity to find “large and human significance” in their lives and work.

Michael S. Roth,

the president of Wesleyan University,

is the author, most recently,

of “Memory, Trauma and History:

Essays on Living With the Past.”

    Learning as Freedom, NYT, 5.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/opinion/john-deweys-vision-of-learning-as-freedom.html

Addressing Poverty in Schools

July 27, 2012
The New York Times
By JOE NOCERA

About two years ago, Dr. Pamela Cantor gave a speech at a Congressional retreat put together by the Aspen Institute. Her talk was entitled “Innovative Designs for Persistently Low-Performing Schools.”

Cantor is a psychiatrist who specializes in childhood trauma. After 9/11, her organization, the Children’s Mental Health Alliance, was asked by New York City’s Department of Education to assess the impact of the attack on the city’s public school children. What she found were plenty of traumatized children — but less because of the terrorist attack than because of the simple fact that so many of them were growing up in poverty.

“If children are under stress, the ways they respond are remarkably similar,” she says. “They get sad, distracted, aggressive, and tune out.” That is what she saw in the high-poverty schools she visited. Chaos reigned. The most disruptive children dominated the schools. Teachers didn’t have control of their classrooms — in part because nothing in their training had taught them how to deal with traumatized children. Too many students had no model of what school was supposed to mean. “These were schools that were not ready to be schools,” she said.

The traditional therapist’s response, of course, is to recommend therapy for traumatized children. But that’s an impossible solution in a big-city school of 1,000 or more students. Still, Dr. Cantor wondered, would it be possible to design schools that could, in her words, “address the issues poverty poses as they present in the classroom?” She came to the belief that the answer was yes, and, in 2002, she founded a new organization, Turnaround for Children. It’s what she’s been doing ever since.

Part of the reason this work strikes me as so important is the obvious: there are an immense number of children growing up in poverty — one out of three in New York City alone. The good charter schools can take only a tiny fraction of those children; the rest are in public school, far too many of which are dysfunctional.

The second reason, though, is that Turnaround is trying to bridge an important divide. Part of the debate over school reform is about poverty itself, with the reformers taking the view that a great teacher can overcome the barriers poverty poses, while the other side says that the problems of public schools can’t be solved until poverty itself is alleviated. Cantor is suggesting an alternative way of thinking — that students in public schools can do well if the issues they face are dealt with head-on, instead of sidestepped.

I have space to give only the barest outline of how it works. A three-person Turnaround team embeds in a group of schools for three to five years. One works with the principal to create a positive, disciplined culture, where students come to believe they can succeed in school. One works with teachers, showing them tools, for instance, that will allow them to handle disruptions while keeping the other students on track. The third is a social worker who helps train the school social workers to help with the psychological and emotional needs of children in poverty, while identifying the most troubled students, the ones who can drive the entire school. Instead of suspending them, or expelling them, though, Turnaround contracts with mental health organizations to provide them with services. That sends an important signal to the other students.

I should stress that even after a decade, Turnaround is still an experiment, and relatively small. In 2008, it underwent an independent evaluation by the American Institutes for Research, which showed that its schools had far fewer disruptions and were generally calmer, safer, indeed, happier places. But that same evaluation suggested that Turnaround needed to put more emphasis on improving the academic environment in the classroom. That is what Dr. Cantor and her team are implementing now.

Which brings me back to that speech she gave a few years ago. In it, she laid out her ideas about the importance of facing poverty squarely in schools. They struck a chord. Since then, she has spent a great deal of time in Washington, where officials both in Congress and the White House have been receptive to these ideas. In May, a group of White House officials visited a Turnaround school in Washington, where they were impressed by what they saw. Ultimately, if Dr. Cantor’s ideas gain enough momentum in Washington, they could become part of what the federal government — and school districts across the country — expect from schools.

By refusing to accept the status quo, school reformers kicked off an important movement, long overdue. Although I happen to think there is an overemphasis on test scores, the demand for teacher accountability has also been an important step.

Creating schools that are designed from the start to deal with the predicable challenges of poverty — it is the most important thing we can do next.

    Addressing Poverty in Schools, NYT, 27.7.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/opinion/nocera-addressing-poverty-in-schools.html