From the following article:

Lead fears grow in Newark schools, but the problem isn’t new

By BEN FINLEY 14 hours ago

HOW LONG HAS NEWARK KNOWN ABOUT LEAD IN THE WATER?

The district has been tackling the issue of lead coming from water sources, such as old sinks, in some schools since at least 2003, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

John Martin, an EPA spokesman, said the agency found elevated levels in two of Newark’s schools that year. It offered the district help in addressing the problem. But he said Newark turned down the offer because it had its own lead remediation program in place.

Newark schools superintendent Christopher Cerf recently acknowledged that the district has been addressing issues of lead in water sources for more than a decade. For instance, the district had been replacing faucets and adding filters after taps showed higher levels of the toxin.

The district has only started to release test results to the public. But in each year since 2012, an outside laboratory has found elevated levels in the taps of some school buildings. For instance, 15 percent of the water samples taken during the 2014-15 school year showed amounts of lead that require action from school officials.

___

WHAT IS THE SCHOOL SYSTEM DOING TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?

Newark is working with the state Department of Environmental Protection as well as the EPA to tackle the issue. Efforts include testing every tap at every school. The district is also offering blood tests of as many as 17,000 kids who were potentially exposed.

In a press release, superintendent Cerf said last week’s test results prompted him to take action.

“By the time school opened Wednesday morning, we were shutting off all water fountains and other affected sites at any school that had received a positive reading,” Cerf said.

But Newark’s teachers union has criticized the state-controlled district for not taking such action in previous years. And Elise Pivnick, director of environmental health for Isles, a New Jersey-based environmental community group, added, “It’s really an old problem. There’s nothing new here. That water hasn’t changed in the last three years.”

As I noted in my post a few days ago, the water in Newark, New Jersey, has not changed. Nothing has changed there except suddenly the public became aware that Newark had elevated lead levels in the water in some of its schools. It appears Newark has known for some time the district needed to replace faucets and add filters “after taps showed higher levels of the toxin.”

Why new faucets? It’s not the faucets, it’s the pipes. Adding filters certainly seems like a good idea regardless, and I imagine that’s what the above article meant. They bought new faucets that had filters to take out the lead.

I hope they are on top of the water fountains. I am not so worried about hand washing as I am about those fountains. For one thing, fountains are an excuse to get out of class. Kids who drink little water at home may drink a great deal at school. They can’t go to the fridge for a drink they like better. They are served milk at lunch, which is healthy but not exactly a thirst-quencher. New health and nutrition guidelines have often eliminated the pop machines, or resulted in rules that allow pop purchases only after school.

On hot days and after gym, requests to go the fountain come regularly. Especially before my school added air-conditioning (only three years ago) I almost always let kids go during the high heat of fall and late spring. The line of water drinkers was trooping out there, one at a time. When temperatures were in the eighties and above in classrooms, administrators regularly reminded students to stay hydrated. Even in schools with cooling systems, some rooms simply run hot. Many cooling systems cannot begin to keep up with a wall of windows that faces sunside.

Eduhonesty: Are you working in an older school? Encourage your students to bring water bottles from home. I’d add those bottles to the list of expected supplies. Encourage parents to send water. I don’t know how much lead is too much lead, but I suspect Newark’s problem may be the tip of an iceberg. Teachers might even consider bringing in gallon jugs of water and little Dixie cups, especially in elementary school.

The Common Core hit me up the side of the head last year, combined with the full weight of the State of Illinois as it took over my district. To that I’d add the complication of whole new sets of Charlotte Danielson evaluation requirements. With all that new noise to process, it took me awhile to appreciate the meaning of rigid common lesson plans written to a set of standards that were set years above the academic operating levels of my students. I had always had some freedom to create original instruction for my students until 2014 – 2015, despite growing time shortages resulting from other demands, mostly demands related to the rising desperation to raise test scores.

I also lost my favorite principal during the 2014-2015 school year as part of the conditions of a government grant which required replacing school leadership. Time demands unrelated to instructional imperatives soared. For all intents and purposes, I did not have a reliable planning period during much of the 2014 – 2015 year. On lucky days, I salvaged some planning time, but I had math meetings, science meetings, grade meetings, school meetings, and bilingual meetings that I sandwiched into that alleged planning period, at least one meeting daily. On Wednesday, I typically had three meetings. In theory, I was supposed to get half of my planning period for actual planning, but my Dean^[1] had a bad habit of running overtime, sometimes through the whole period. I also had to regularly double up math and science meeting days.

I am sitting at a pleasant oak desk in a quiet blue room. I get up when I want to. I meet former colleagues for lunch and dinner, a number of whom retired before they had intended to do so. I had planned on working one more year, but I hit my personal wall. I hit my can’t-do-it-I’ve-sucked-up-enough wall. I can work hard, but I will not work stupid. I want to nurture my students, and the tests I gave last year felt more like bullying than nurturing to me.

Substituting has been working out fine. As I write this, I am ignoring a website filled with substitute requests for today. The system has been trying to call me since 5:30 AM this morning and I could still step into any number of classrooms for the day. No one will step into many of those classrooms. Many of these requests come from top-flight local districts that pay well, too.

Today I am writing my book, though. Yesterday, I covered for preschool teachers who had IEP meetings. My favorite part was taking colored, sticky Styrofoam, yarn, paper and glue and making brains to tape on traced bodies that the kids had made. I liked playing restaurant, too. Restaurant seems to be a pretty good deal. You get a piece of pizza, then they open the cash register and hand you money. I explained a bit about how it actually worked, while I admired the plastic rectangle students now swipe as part of the process before they open the drawer to hand me random sums of money. I admired original Lego creations. I pretended to eat a lot of plastic food that students made for me. I had a great day.

Eduhonesty: All’s well that ends well, I guess. Those former teachers I meet, though? Some of them were excellent educators. Most or all would probably still be in the classroom if the world had not decided that somehow testing for 20% of a school year — while using tests that many students could not even read — somehow made sense.

[1] I don’t want to say a negative word about my Dean, however. She was the best Dean I ever saw. She worked endlessly, and she sweated the small stuff until kids were seldom tardy, and usually well-behaved in class. When I worked until six in the evening, she was always still in her office.

This post is especially for newbies. Please pass it on.

From CBS News, AP March 16, 2016, 11:42 AM

Student: “Teacher called me “dumbest girl I have ever met”

According to ABC News, Newark, New Jersey, is about to test up to 17,000 children for lead poisoning because elevated levels of lead were found in drinking water there. Apparently,around half of the schools in New Jersey’s biggest city failed their lead tests. The district plans to start with the toddlers in its early childhood centers. Those lead levels are much lower than the ones that afflicted Flint, Michigan, but lead percentages are still above approved levels.

Governor Chris Christie is doing damage control. He claims the elevated lead levels are no crisis, but Newark schools will be testing students to make sure that the lead does not become a crisis. Of course, he does not actually have real data yet. He will not have that data until those 17,000 students are tested. His administration claims that it is “unclear” how long the children of Newark have been exposed, but I would like to make an observation. The lead crisis in Flint happened because the city changed its water supply. Newark has not changed its water supply. That suggests those elevated lead levels may have been streaming out of school water fountains for years.

Seattle had a lead crisis in its water fountains a few years ago. I don’t know if my former district has a lead problem or not. I know the water from bathroom faucets sometimes came out orange. I almost never drank the school water in my last district and I advised the kids to stay away from it too. I had no data to suggest lead was in the water. But I had no reason to believe the district had ever checked for lead or any other problematic substances, either.

Many of our school districts are old. Much of our piping is old and sometimes even ancient by modern standards. Do you work in one of these old buildings? If you do, do yourself a favor. Get a personal water bottle and fill it daily at home before work. Stop by Walmart or Costco and pick up a case of water for your trunk for those days when you use up your water or forget your own bottle. I hate to fill the landfills with those empty pieces of plastic, but I have enough trouble finding my car keys now. A few years drinking that oddly orange water, even filtered through the water fountain, and who knows if I would even know what the keys were for?

Finding lead no doubt proves hugely expensive for the districts that run up against the problem. I can see where a district might decide to postpone that water evaluation until “next year.” And next year, and next year, and next year.

Eduhonesty: I would not trust the plumbing in many of our older schools. Those schools often run hot in warmer weather, too. Some do not have air conditioning. Students and teachers drink water regularly. On some days, my water has names like Nestle, Dasani and Aquafina, etc. I recommend readers pick up some of those waters. If your school water comes in funny colors, I would definitely tell the kids to bring their own water bottles from home, too.

The push to disband public schools in favor of charter schools frightens me. As readers know, I don’t think American education has been doing nearly as badly as many sources claim. Given the rapid influx of English language learners, skyrocketing birthrate to single parents, and significant decline in recreational reading, I would say our stagnant test scores are absolutely a sign of educational success. Under the circumstances, those scores ought to be declining and, in some geographic areas, nosediving.

When people suggest charter schools — which I am not against per se — as a replacement for public schools, I can only wince. I have suggested my daughter open a charter school. She will have the credentials. Between my Masters in Secondary Education and my Masters in Business and Public Management from Rice, I have the credentials. If I had the energy, I could create the plan. I could round up the financing. I would create a real school, too, one dedicated to pulling up children in tough circumstances.

But I shudder to think of the free-for-all if we keep pushing for a widely-based, charter system. Opening all those charters will be essentially creating a system of publically-funded, private enterprises. Even with oversight, many of those schools will be created with a profit motive. I am not against making profits, either, but I think of charities as an example where the charter movement may go badly astray.

That guy at Smile Train? I am sure he has had the best of motives and the charity has done good work, but he also makes a very good living. The Wounded Warrior Project has given around half of its donations to wounded warriors. Many dollars have gone to help disabled soldiers. But when the CEO and COO of the charity were forced to resign, that resignation was overdue. When half of that large pool of donations becomes salaries, parties and other extras, the charity’s original mission has gotten lost or at least badly damaged.

The ABC charter school may or may not set out with the best of intentions. I am sure the Wounded Warrior project started with noble intentions. When salaries are no longer set by union negotiations and involved, community board members, though, we need to ask ourselves exactly how those salaries will be determined. When community school boards are no longer overseeing financial operations, who will ensure that part of the money for computers and software does not quietly become diverted into some charter bureaucrats’ pockets?

Occasionally, America hears stories of school districts that have abused the public trust and stolen funds meant for school children, but there are not many of those stories. Oversight exists and has been developed over time. Oversight by local school boards helps control some factors that might contribute to abuse of funds. Districts hiring processes also help. People go in and out and new hires are chosen for their knowledge of processes. You don’t get a group of people who decide together to apply for grant money to run a set of set of schools. I can easily visualize the scenario where that group of grant applicants sits around drinking beer, eating nachos and discussing the salaries they will give each other.

We could create new state and federal bureaucracies to oversee charter spending, of course, but all I can say about that is NoChildLeftBehindCommonCore, RacetotheTopResponsetoIntervention, PARCCSmarterBalanced, and the Post Office. I should not fail to mention state-takeover-based, required testing for more than 20% of my last year in my mathematics classrooms. We need much less government, not more,

Eduhonesty: Some charters have produced excellent results. Dedicated professionals using public money to create private schools can do an amazing job. But we need to be clear that charters are private businesses with a quasi-charitable justification. If we use them to supplant our private schools, I guarantee the growth of many Wounded Warrior or Cancer Federation Charter Schools. Like charities, the range in quality will be staggering — and America’s children will pay the price.

(Useful knowledge on the classroom walls must be covered for PARCC testing.)
Still writing book, so I will try to keep this short.

Has the Common Core improved American education? ACT and SAT scores remain relatively stagnant. The first few years of the Core have shown no results to shout about.

Of more concern, we are now basing our state standardized tests on the Common Core. As I walked through school hallways last week, I saw many signs that said, “Quiet! PARCC testing.” We have gone into the first round of a two-round testing process that sucks up weeks of school time.

PARCC is acknowledged to be a more demanding test than its predecessors. My concern about PARCC and the Core can be seen in the grim faces of students on PARCC days. We are adding to the long list of failures that extreme testing regularly inflicts on students. I assure readers that many students are suffering during testing season.

Those kids at the very bottom are not much worse off than before the Core and PARCC. If a student did not know most of the answers to the Illinois State Achievement Test, the impact of not knowing most PARCC answers will feel about the same. The world has not changed greatly for our lowest students.

The world has shifted under the kids in the middle and toward the top, however, the great majority of America’s students. Those kids in the middle may have gone from knowing many answers to knowing relatively few answers. Instead of walking out thinking that they probably did O.K., those kids will leave the testing arena with a sense of having been beaten up or even clobbered. The kids toward the top may end up feeling the same, as they take a test with a greater percentage of unknown answers.

The kids at the very top of our academic tiers should be fine. Except for the fact that public schools are frequently boring these kids to tears (or random disciplinary infractions), our kids at the top tend to function well on test days.

The psychological costs from PARCC testing are high. Educational publications wrote about widespread expectations that test scores would fall throughout the country as students adapted to the new, harder standards. The first PARCC administration led to a fall that was almost a freefall in some schools. Given that we were unable to meet earlier, demanded test improvements after a decade of progressively harsher threats from NCLB, the brainstorm that has led government leaders and other Core proponents to believe that America will be able to meet harder standards now can only be considered mysterious. Believing in zombies might not be a much bigger leap of faith.

If our students cannot meet these standards, what will we have gained? I know what our students are losing: They are losing confidence and hope.

My libertarian leanings lean away from unions quite naturally. But I can’t see the flaw in the above argument for union membership. The only power the average worker has today will be in numbers. In and of ourselves, we are all replaceable. We are becoming more replaceable all the time, as the world grows more mobile and technology encroaches on previously human terrain.

This post is for the many people who have been convinced that unions are protecting shoddy workers and somehow taking advantage of us all, as well as the people who know this image of unions to be false. We can point to a few inept teachers who have kept positions because of union interventions, I’m sure, but what percentage of the whole do they represent? I’d venture to say it’s a tiny percentage. I’d like to assert, in fact, that our teachers are doing an impressive job overall. As recreational reading falls, electronics proliferate, out-of-wedlock births rise, poverty congregates in certain zip codes, and students who speak English as a second language become larger percentages of our schools and classrooms, our test scores ought to be falling, possibly even plummeting. The fact that those scores are stagnant tells us that our teachers are fighting heroically against the tide.

In the meantime, I’ll go back to a puzzle that long-time readers have heard before: I don’t understand how America reached this state of antipathy towards unions. What happened to make us think we did not deserve the benefits that unions provide? Portions of the press make it seem as if unions are siphoning off money from the membership and then somehow cheating the public by getting those members unjustly high wages and benefits that employers cannot afford.

Many people seem to be waiting for the government to fix conditions for workers, but a higher minimum wage will not fix those conditions. More likely, McDonalds will install touchscreens to replace some front counter workers. Other businesses will cut workers’ hours to balance out the cost increase from the wage increase. I’ll still support that higher minimum because I believe we need a more rational minimum wage — one that does not obligate so many parents of my students to work two or more jobs apiece just to survive — but that increased wage will not rescue the American worker.

We can’t wait for the government to save us. The government brought us No Child Left Behind. The government championed the Common Core and PARCC testing, even going so far as to threaten schools and students for opting out of that testing. The U.S. Postal service just delivered a three-month-old flyer to my house advertising Christmas specials, a few days after it delivered my daughter’s birthday card four months after I put it in the mail.

Eduhonesty: Unionizing is tough work. Especially in the beginning, people are threatened with financial losses. People lose jobs. People end up standing on cold street corners, facing abuse from employers and sometimes passersby.

But unions bring decent wages, good healthcare, safety protections, vacation time, a decent retirement and other benefits. We need to speak up for our unions. The few incompetent teachers who have been protected by the union are part of the price for those benefits.

Our unions built the American middle class. They provided wages that could buy houses, boats and cars to average Americans. I’d like to ask readers to take time to vocalize their support for unions (those who support them, anyway) to help outsiders understand. We need to bring perspective and balance to the union story. It’s not about a few teachers who did not do their jobs. It’s about jobs that can provide a real livelihood, a retirement, and fair and just working conditions for Americans.

Let’s stand with the thugs.

I have had some reader pushback in the last few days. Many readers think I am being too harsh on the sixteen-year-old kid who stole his teacher’s phone. I understand that position. Good people go into education, the kinds who want to rescue kids, not sue them. But sometimes I think we give too many chances. At ten, a kid should get extra help and extra chances regularly. By sixteen, though, consequences are in order. O.K., maybe the boy should not be in jail, but he should have to pay one whopper of a fine, enough to teach that boy a lesson and, more importantly, enough to teach a lesson to all the kids around him. In my middle school, we expelled a girl for the remainder of one year for blackmailing another girl with possible online distribution of a photo. It’s all fun and games until somebody says, “Do this or I’ll post your photo.” At that point, we have landed deep inside bullying territory. Students need to understand that.

Cyberbullying has become endemic and this particular phone incident is cyberbullying in its purest form. We need to be clear: teachers can be bullied, too. Teachers can be bullied by students, administrators and even superintendents. What should we call taking personal pictures off a phone without permission and then distributing those pictures to students except cyberbullying? The intent was clearly to deliberately embarrass and humiliate that teacher

In my view, one legacy of No Child Left Behind has been increasing, systematic bullying of educators. In some schools, if test scores are not going up, administrators are taking out their frustrations on teachers. Given that those administrators face loss of their own jobs due to poor scores, that behavior may be understandable, but it remains entirely unacceptable. Blaming teachers for problems that stem from home circumstances, lack of recreational reading, and even an influx of students who do not speak English at home has to stop. I have  listened to too many stories in the recent past in which teachers ended up taking the blame for circumstances outside their control.

For one mistake, leaving her phone in a classroom while she watched a hallway during a passing period, this woman lost her job. Somehow, I think those years of lesson planning, teaching, grading and home phone calls ought to count enough to earn her at most a reprimand, but that superintendent’s reaction went completely over the top.

The Superintendent’s comments about the so-called “delinquency of a minor”? The culprit is a sixteen-year-old boy. Those are not his first nude photos, not by years. I’m sure they are not his most explicit either. Older adults often do not understand the effects of living in the internet age, but if that Superintendent does not understand what I just wrote, then I’d say he’s  too old for his job.

She should not have to quit. He should retire, instead.

P.S. If I keep substituting and blogging while also trying to write, this book will never get done. I am going to step away from daily posting for awhile. Or try to, anyway. I’ll be around, but not so often.

For the year 2013, the U.S. government estimates 5.1% of whites dropped out of high school, 7.3% of blacks, and 11.7% of Hispanics. Any kid who is not living in a closed bomb shelter understands how tough America’s job market has become. Why are these students leaving school?

I would like to suggest that many students are leaving because of fictions created by educational leaders, starting with the idea that students can leap huge chasms in their background learning levels if only we push hard enough. When schools shifted to a virtually completely test-based model of success, as part of meeting No Child Left Behind (NCLB) expectations, daily instruction adapted to match questions expected to be encountered on that test. And a great many students began to regularly fail English and math tests now pitched years above their test-documented levels of academic understanding.

Last year, I was required to give my bilingual students exactly the same tests and quizzes as the regular classes in their grade. I had some input into the quizzes, but none into the unit tests, which were prepared by a now-bankrupt outside consulting firm on the East coast. Special education teachers were also required to give identical tests and quizzes. Materials presented were essentially undifferentiated. It didn’t matter if you were a life-time special education student, a new arrival from Honduras, or the kid with the highest state test scores in the grade. You received the same tests and quizzes as everybody else. Then teachers shared data. Failing students were entered in red. My bilingual classes were often a sea of red, especially if a quiz or test had too many story problems. The special education teacher found herself in the same situation.

Eduhonesty: If a performance spreadsheet shows a sea of failure, student after student who did not meet the target, school leaders need to at least consider the possibility that the problem may not be with either the teacher or the students. When handed a quiver of arrows, the fact that I can’t shoot down a passing Boeing 747 does not prove that I am a poor shot.

Regularly failing math and English classes is an excellent predictor for dropping out of high school. When we create instruction likely to precipitate that failure, we should not be surprised that our more “rigorous” approach does not seem to be helping the dropout rate. That Hispanic dropout rate does not surprise me at all now; I have been required to administer so many unreadable tests to my students that I would expect nothing else.

*(https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_219.70.asp)

From http://www.ibtimes.com/south-carolina-student-who-stole-distributed-teachers-nude-photos-hit-felony-charges-2331441: The

“He opened up my gallery for pictures and he found inappropriate pictures of myself and he took pictures from his cell phone of that and then he told the whole class that he would send them to whoever wanted them,” the teacher, Leigh Anne Arthur, told the local affiliate WSPA last week. “The student who actually took my phone and took my pictures turned around and told me your day of reckoning is coming.”

Eduhonesty: I consider felony charges appropriate. Yes, we make dumb mistakes at 16. My decision to finance a drug deal for a dealer friend at 16 would not have led to a slap on the hand, however. My decision to hit my boyfriend with a baseball bat would not have led to a few days school suspension. I am sorry to say that I have heard a few “just a dumb kid” remarks. No, this boy cannot be called a dumb kid. He’s a felon.

He stole his teacher’s phone. I like how news sources keep saying, “allegedly stole.” How much proof do we need? He quickly shared her nude personal pictures with fellow students. Fortunately, the police, at least, appear to be taking his actions seriously. The “alleged perpetrator” has been charged with violating the state’s computer crime act and aggravated voyeurism.

I suppose part of my outrage stems from the fact that I can see myself in this woman’s shoes. A student stole my phone last year, which I believe fell out of a shallow pocket as I walked into school. I’ll never be sure. I do have a password and no one got in to see my innocuous photos. (I also retrieved the phone. That geo-locator function on the phone is amazing. The helpfulness of the local police department was refreshing, too.) No one did me any damage and despite my phone spending a night in a snowbank, thanks to a heavy case and the fact that snow kept passersby from using one side of the street, that phone is charging behind me even now.

Leigh Anne Arthur will know to password protect her phones from now on. I learned from my daughter, one of whose superpowers appears to be, “Donates phones to thieving strangers.” She set up my password protection as soon as I got the phone. But some people out in the world are still regrettably trusting. They should not be blamed for this.

I hope these crimes will cost the “alleged perpetrator” a fair chunk of change, and I would not object to a short jail stint. He tried to scare and humiliate a woman on a whim. He cost that woman her job on a whim. What he did was despicable.