Anti-bullying advocates would get a lot further in their efforts if they did away with words like “bullying,”researchers explained to USA Today’s Greg Toppo. The word has now grown to cover too broad a scope of behavior – anything from an eye roll to simple lack of desire to end a friendship all the way down to sexual and physical assault. Such range of meaning makes it harder to deliver lessons on bullying to students that they will absorb and take to heart instead of ignore.

Either what schools consider bullying needs to be substantially upgraded, or the worst of the worst behavior needs to be given a new name.

Educators have been “spinning our wheels for decades” in a bid to treat bullying, but they’re often hampered by policies that require mistreatment to be repetitive, for example, part of the classic definition of bullying. That focus also obscures whether specific acts are happening more or less, she said.

Espelage co-led a group of researchers that worked for a year to produce a new primer on bullying, released here on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, the USA’s largest education research organization. The association commissioned the research last year in the wake of several high-profile bullying cases and school shootings.

The fact that “bully” can now mean so many things – most of them relatively innocuous – creates big programs for school systems that are looking to adopt a comprehensive anti-bullying policy. For example, such efforts in New Jersey have galvanized officials, parents and even students themselves to fight what they see are rules that are too restrictive and don’t give school leaders any kind of flexibility.

Speaking in a low voice, the 15-year-old addressed the issue at hand: Whether he had called a girl in his eighth-grade class “horse,” “fat” or “fat **s” — and whether any comments made violated what has been called the toughest anti-bullying law in the country.

“I never made any remarks other than horse,” the teen testified. “I did not have any intent.”

The case before Administrative Law Judge Jeffrey Gerson was brought by the boy and his father to appeal the Ridgewood School Board’s decision that the teen bullied a middle school classmate last year.

The 15-year-old’s adventures in the legal system are not unique. According to NJ.com, students accused of bullying by their schools under the new anti-bullying measure are taking to the courts to clear their names in record numbers.

At least 16 students, parents or teachers have filed appeals with the commissioner of education since New Jersey’s Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights took effect in fall 2011; two have been decided so far. An untold number of others — the state does not keep track — have challenged school bullying findings to their local school boards, the first step in the appeal process.

At the moment 16 does not seem like a very high number — especially when compared to more than 12,000 kids who are cited for bullying each year. But there’s every indication that the numbers will grow and the legal system might find itself overwhelmed.

The post Chief Issue for Anti-Bullying Advocates is the Word Itself appeared first on Education News.

Special education is peppering the news this week as NPR’s State Impact blog reports on an effort under way in Tallahassee, Florida that would give parents more control over their children’s special education plan. Meanwhile in New Jersey, parents of special education students are protesting proposed changes in regulations that govern how special education services are delivered to students that depend on them.

The New Jersey regulations are being revised at the behest of Governor Chris Christie, who has said that the overhaul of special ed rules is one of the priorities of his administration. Among the proposed changes is one that has raised the hackles of parents of kids with special needs; while previously each child was assigned a Case Manager who had to be member of the school district child study team – which is made up of a school psychologist, school social worker and learning consultant – the changes would allow that role to be filled by a special ed teacher or a school counselor.

Parents are complaining that Christie is sacrificing quality of care delivered to students for financial reasons. According to the New Jersey Newsroom, if the proposed changes are adopted, district could achieve some savings because fewer child study team members need to be hired and retained.

Parents also complain that they were excluded from the process of re-designing the State Code and there was a lack of transparency in the process. The Statewide Parent Advocacy Network (SPAN) has asked the State Board of Education to “slow down the process” in which radical changes have been proposed. The State’s proposal would also allow school districts more time to engage in the diagnostic process of determining if the child is eligible for special education and related services. According to the proposed changes, the process could take six months or longer. Given that the school year is only ten months, parents contend that valuable time would be lost in the process, which could be detrimental to a child’s development.

The proposal currently in front of the lawmakers in Florida, on the other hand, has been generally welcomed by parents because it gives them the final say over the decisions made about their children’s education. Although district officials could still propose that a child be moved from special education to regular track and back, the ultimate say-so would lie with the parents. If school district officials disagree, they will need do go through the courts to impose their decision.

Ann Siegel with the advocacy group Disability Rights Florida says these kids are more capable than people think.

“I think they’re kind of forgetting what the special part in special education was,” Siegel said, “and that is to provide that specially designed instruction to meet the unique needs of the students so the students can achieve to the same extent as their non-disabled peers.”

Siegel’s group has represented many students who she says were inappropriately moved to a special diploma track.

The post Florida, New Jersey Parents React to Special Education Changes appeared first on Education News.

According to the investigation report released b the New Jersey Department of Education, Princeton High School has for years been violating rules by allowing chronically absent students to graduate and for failing to keep track of whether their absences were excused or not.

In some cases, teachers who were familiar with students’ family situations didn’t even bother asking them to provide documentation for their absences, simply giving them credit for the class time missed and allowing them to graduate.

Students in New Jersey high schools can not graduate with 9 unexcused absences in a semester or 18 for the entire academic year.

The report said that when investigators asked principal Gary Snyder why students’ excessive absences were overlooked despite the lack of appeals, he initially tried to dodge the question.

“When pressed regarding the appearance of selective application of the policy, principal Snyder cited the students’ known medical/life conditions and indicated that PHS may not send loss of credit/right to appeal notices to the parents of students whose ‘situation’ were ‘known’ to staff,” the summary said.

OFAC said that although they received full transcripts, they were frequently altered to give class credits to students who had been previously marked absent. The information about the records tempering was released by the Princeton school board earlier this week.

The lack of documentation made it impossible for investigators to determine the full scope of the problem and to make a determination on whether every student marked excessively absent actually lacked the excuse to be so. To correct the problem going forward, the report recommends a formalized system both for attendance tracking and appeals. Of the 1,350 student records reviewed by investigators, questions were raised about 130.

A Department of Education spokesman said yesterday that none of the former students will lose their status as graduates.
The school board released a statement agreeing with the OFAC recommendation but criticizing the suggestion that transcripts had been altered improperly.

The district “takes great exception to the omissions, misleading language and incomplete account in the report,” the statement said. “Most of all, it must be clearly and firmly stated that never once were any student records altered in any way.”

The investigation was triggered by an anonymous complaint lodged last year that claimed that school officials including Snyder were failing to enter bad information about students into the electronic record-keeping database. Although investigators uncovered a number of questionable practices, they were not able to come to a final conclusion regarding the initial violation.

The post In Princeton, NJ High School Attendance May Be Optional appeared first on Education News.

It isn’t that teachers and education leaders in Union City, New Jersey haven’t heard of the newest and greatest developments that are supposed to transform education so American students rival those from Finland or South Korea. It’s just that they believe it takes more than pedagogical or technological razzle-dazzle to help kids learn successfully — so they’re keeping it traditional.

Looking in from outside, Union City – a largely minority town in the low-income part of the state – should, like many similar towns, be struggling to get their kids to class every morning, much less actually getting them to graduate and go to college. A closer look at demographics such as an unemployment rate 50% above the national average and with 75% of students are from homes where English isn’t spoken would only strengthen that impression.

Yet after reaching something of a nadir in 1989 when the Union City schools were rated second worst in the entire state, things began to change.

Over the course of the past quarter-century, the situation steadily improved. Now Union City is the poster child for a successful urban school system. From third through eighth grade, students’ scores on the state’s reading and math tests are as good as or better than the statewide average. In 2011, 89.5 percent of the students graduated from high school—more than 10 percentage points better than the national average—and nearly 75 percent of them enrolled in college. Top graduates regularly win state science awards and scholarships to the Ivies, and the school runs a nationally known program for the newest Americans. Some of these kids do remarkably well—two of the top ten graduates in the Class of 2013 came to the U.S. just four years ago, speaking no English.

According to David Kirp writing for the American Prospect, there’s no secret in the turnaround. It isn’t a high-performing charter school or a timely infusion of technology. The district gives control to those people who know the students best – teachers and school administrators. The curriculum taught in the city’s classroom was designed by the best instructors and includes almost no rote memorization and places a focus on problem solving.

Because all schools and all teachers share the curriculum, there’s never a question confronting teachers about what each new crop of students learned in the prior year. Each instructor can pick up exactly where the last one left off — something supporters of the Common Core curricula identify as a selling point to address the difficulty of teaching students who change schools frequently.

Since poor families frequently move among neighborhoods, every school teaches essentially the same material. Close-grained analysis of students’ test results are used to diagnose their individual problems. Immigrant kids develop a solid foundation in their native language before learning English. Beleaguered teachers and struggling students get hands-on help. The schools reach out to parents, providing school uniforms to families that can’t afford them, helping them through the public bureaucracies that distribute welfare checks and green cards, enlisting them as partners in their children’s education.

The post In New Jersey District, Traditional Education Showing Results appeared first on Education News.

Governor Chris Christie and his administration, including Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf, have had enough in Camden, New Jersey, as the city’s education system will come under the direction of the state.

At the Courer Post Online, Phil Dunn details how Camden’s schools have long failed to impress parents, taxpayers and politicians. In the 2011-2012 school year, Camden’s graduation rate declined from an already-dismal 57% to 49% — the second lowest mark in the state.

Christie described the situation with characteristic bluntness:

“Today we are taking the lead because for too long, the public school system in Camden has failed its children,” Christie said at press conference on Monday.

“The situation I believe is dire now and so far gone that we are at a breaking point.”

The average graduation rate in the state of New Jersey is ~86%.

The state’s takeover will be broad. A transition team will conduct a nationwide search to select a leader, and the state government would control finances, teacher hiring and curriculum.

Camden school board member Kathryn Ribay was outraged by the decision to wrest control of the district and tendered her resignation from the board just a few hours after Christie’s announcement:

“This sudden symbolic move, perhaps driven by a fear of the strong, independently minded finalists chosen by the board in its superintendent search, is more focused on publicity than academic options,” Ribay wrote in her resignation letter.

She added, “I cannot participate in the continued disenfranchisement of the City of Camden.”

Only three of the nine members of the Board supported the state takeover.

Teachers unions are displeased as well — especially because they were not consulted in the run-up to the decision.

Christie acknowledged that he had not met with the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, about the plan. The organization released a statement saying that “the track record for state-run districts has been questionable at best” and that it would “withhold judgment” until more details were available.

Urban districts that have fallen under New Jersey control include Jersey City, Newark and Paterson, though Camden will be the first taken over by Christie’s administration.

Camden sits across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, and roughly 40% of its population of nearly 78,000 live below the poverty line. With a local government that is no stranger to corruption — three of the city’s mayors have been convicted of corruption, most recently in 2000 — and which owns one of the highest crime rates in the United States, the police force has been under state control since 2005.

Camden schools spend ~$24,000 per pupil annually.

The post New Jersey to Take Over Failing Camden Schools appeared first on Education News.

The new budget proposal for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie continues to push his education reform agenda with revived funding for school vouchers, NJ.com reports.

The last time Christie touted the pilot program that would see students receive state-funded scholarships to enroll in private and parochial schools, the effort came to nothing. Now, the governor is hoping to ride the wave of his post-hurricane Sandy popularity to make the pilot a reality.

The pilot program would be initially funded with $2 million and open to roughly 200 kids currently enrolled in failing public schools. Families that qualify would receive a voucher that can be used to enroll in any school that accepts vouchers, including private and parochial, as well as different public school outside of the district.

In announcing the program, Christie predicted that getting the pilot off the ground would involve a fight — and he isn’t wrong. The Education Law Center has already weighed to say that Christie doesn’t have the power to affect such changes via the budget. If the pilot program is to exist, it must be created by the Legislature via a separate bill.

“The governor’s attempt to use the budget bill, which is strictly limited to appropriations, to put in place a voucher pilot program that has not gained the support of legislators over the last several years is an illegal end run ,” said ELC Executive Director David Sciarra. “This proposal should be dead on arrival.”

Others said the matter may not be so clear-cut, however, and that the proposal could be enacted through the budget appropriations bill, without separate legislation.

The Governor’s budget contains good news for school districts around the state in the form of $97.3 million increase in school funding. More than half of the state’s 600 school districts will see an increase in their budget, with none suffering a cut from last year. This is good bit of turnaround for districts that have been suffering after Christie cut more than $1 billion from the education budget in 2010.

Christie proposed a modest increase in parts of the higher education budget, including a $17 million increase in Tuition Aid Grant funding to help low-income students pay for college. The state’s private four-year colleges will also get a $1 million increase in funding under the governor’s proposal. But Christie did not propose any large increases for the rest of the state’s colleges and universities, noting they are getting $1.6 billion in state and private funds for building projects.

The post Christie’s Budget Calls for School Voucher Pilot in New Jersey appeared first on Education News.

Awarding credit based on experience outside the classroom isn’t a new concept for colleges and universities, but several schools around the country have now taken it to the next level — schools like the Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey which, according to The New York Times, will grant a student a degree without them ever having to take a Thomas Edison course.

Thomas Edison grants its students college credit for competence in a particular subject, not by how many hours they spend in lecture halls. Students can earn credits based on other university courses, on military training or even work experience. They take proctored exams at a testing center nearest to their home and should they pass, the course credit is awarded.

That is how Jennifer Hunt of Indiana earned her Thomas Edison degree – without ever having left her home state. In a mere 14 weeks, by taking an exam every week at the Indiana University testing center, she earned 54 credits. Her entire degree in business administration and applied science – academic materials included – cost her around $5,300.

Pilar Mercedes Foy, 31, a Thomas Edison graduate whose parents did not go to college, said after she got an entry-level job at PSEG, the New Jersey energy company, she realized that she would need a degree to advance. She earned the bulk of her credits through heavily subsidized evening classes offered at work, supplemented by classes at Union County College and 12 credits from the CLEP Spanish exam. For her, earning a degree without taking on a penny of student debt was enough of a milestone that she invited her husband, parents, siblings, in-laws and nieces to the September graduation ceremony.

While the approach used by Thomas Edison might not be viewed as the harbinger and an advanced look at the future of higher education, what is surprising to most is that there’s nothing new about it. TESC has been accepting and graduating students for more than three decades, although at the time the mistrust, especially among faculty, was high.

TESC President George A. Pruitt has been in his post long enough now to see those attitudes change, although reluctantly. Even for most vehement critics, however, it is very hard to argue with results.

Results have quieted most naysayers, Dr. Pruitt said. For example, Thomas Edison graduates had the highest pass rate on the exam for certified public accountants in New Jersey, in the latest national accounting-boards report. Still, the approach raises real questions about the meaning of a college degree.

Minding the Campus points towards the quote made by a representative of the Institute for Higher Education Policy who referred to TESC students as “nomads” and said that without a campus to attach them to, there doesn’t appear to be anyone to take responsibility for them. It is unsurprising that David Wilezol sees in this attitude utter lack of interest in embracing any kind of higher education model other than the failing system already in place.

The post Could Competency-Based College be the Future of Higher Ed? appeared first on Education News.

New Jersey’s Department of Education held a web-based seminar at the end of January so that school administrators could find out more about computer-based testing in school year 2014-2015. John Mooney reports in NJ Spotlight that while state officials express optimism about this schedule, many of those who will be responsible for carrying out the testing used the webinar to express serious concerns about the plan.

Several transitions are all going on at once in New Jersey’s public education system, and administrators believe that it may not be possible to blend them smoothly. Like many states, New Jersey is trying to adapt to the Common Core curriculum plans so that its standards are the same as other states’. Any changes that have been made will take several years to judge, the administrators point out. In addition, there are concurrent reforms in how the state’s teachers are evaluated. Student test scores may become more important in rating their teachers, at the same time that curriculum has changed.

Schools everywhere are scrambling to keep up with technology. Some schools, which had already invested in computers, will need to upgrade many pieces of equipment. It’s not clear that even technology-savvy schools will have enough computers to manage student testing.

“We are certainly not up to the technology needed right now, and we have only two years before we need to be,” said Teresa Rafferty, interim superintendent in Piscataway, who said the requirements in her district alone will take $1.6 million investment up front.

About one-third of those costs will go to upgrading computers to meet operating system requirements. The rest is needed to ensure that enough computers will be available to test a single grade over the course of a day, perhaps by staggering morning and afternoon sessions.

The testing, too, is new. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is getting ready to do an early pilot study of the testing it’s now developing. This testing will be done entirely on laptops or tablets, and the state plans to have all schools using PARCC’s tests in two years. PARCC issued guidelines on what the equipment specifications will be, so schools can start looking at whether they have what they will need.

New Jersey’s Department of Education doesn’t believe that the tech requirements will be a barrier, since schools have been trying to include smarter technology already.

“The specifications [for the new testing] seem pretty low compared to what districts are doing anyway,” said Bari Erlichson, the state’s assistant commissioner, who is overseeing the effort and has been traveling the state to pitch its merits.

The post Online Testing Nearing Rollout in New Jersey appeared first on Education News.

The Board of Education of Lacey, New Jersey has introduced a new social media policy for its faculty and staff that could see employees threatened with layoffs if they post inappropriate things to their private social media profiles. According to the Lacey Patch, the intent of the policy is to hold the district staff to a “higher standard,” but critics are alleging that it is an attempt to exert control over the private time and personal expression of employees.

The first draft of the policy was approved after a reading at the latest school board meeting and it states – in part – that inappropriate posts, pictures or any other communication made on services like Facebook and Twitter could make non-tenured staff subject to termination and could result in loss of tenure for those who already have it.

“While the board respects the right of staff members to use social networking sites, staff members should recognize they are held to a higher standard than the general public with regard to standards of conduct and ethics,” the policy states.

The policy was not the result of an existing problem in the school district but simply a matter of staying current, board President Eric Schubiger said. It is meant to be a guiding “framework” for the district.

The “higher standard” was stressed repeatedly as the policy was discussed. Schubiger said that it isn’t the policy’s intent to exert control over the employees’ private lives yet considering that the social media rules extend beyond the working hours to the time the staff are off the clock, it’s a difficult assertion to defend. The attorney for the school board, Arthur Stein, said that a lot of distinct policies already take as a given that district employees – especially teachers – are community role models and should behave accordingly both on and off campus.

How enforceable such a policy is remains uncertain, however.

A recent New York Times article noted multiple cases within the private sector in which the decision to terminate an employee over a post on a social networking platform was overruled.

According to the article, labor regulators have declared some restrictions illegal, stating that workers have the right to discuss work conditions freely and without fear of retribution whether at the office or on Facebook.

Private sector employees are not necessarily held to that same “higher standard,” Stein said.

Stein wouldn’t allow himself to be committed to a for-instance. He didn’t say, for example, what the punishment would be for a teacher to be photographed at a bar. He only said that even private behavior could be considered public when it is put on the web for others to see, although if the picture is online as part of a closed Facebook page, that might constitute “mitigation.”

The post Policy Restricts Private Social Media Use for Teachers in NJ District appeared first on Education News.

It’s not uncommon for schools to loan laptop computers to students — and it’s also not unheard of for those laptops to record students’ internet activities and go as far as monitoring students remotely via built-in webcams.

In 2010, a Philadelphia school made headlines when it was revealed that computers loaned to students were transmitting images of students to school administrators — and both students and their families were unaware. The software was meant to help prevent theft and aid in the recovery of school property in the event of a crime, but a family filed suit against the school, which turned into a class action on behalf of 1,800 students, contending that their privacy had been violated.

A Federal investigation resulted in no charges being filed against the district, as the FBI and others concluded that there was no criminal intent. 56,000 images were recorded to help the school police its property.

But legislators in New Jersey are worried that schools in their state could abuse this technology, and the Anti-Big Brother Act (A-2932), sponsored by Ruben Ramos, Jr. (D-Hudson) and Annette Quijano (D-Union), is designed to inform students and their families that their activities may be tracked by the district:

The bill would require a school district or charter school that furnishes a student with a laptop, cell phone or any other electronic device to provide the student with a written notice that it may record or collect information on the students’ activities if the device is equipped with a GPS, camera or similar feature.

Parents would have to sign the notice to show that they know and accept the terms of the borrowing agreement, which include understanding that the district may use tracking technologies.

Penalties for violations appear to be light at $250, but that could add up for a school or district whose policies are mismanaged:

If a school district fails to comply with the bill and does not provide students with the written notice, it would be subject to a $250 fine per incident, per child. The money collected from fines would be deposited into a fund to provide laptops for disadvantaged students.

There appears to be no compensation for individual students or families whose rights are violated.

The bill was approved by a 6-2 vote of the Assembly Education Committee. It will now come before the full New Jersey Assembly for consideration.

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