Petition | Create a law that protects children from bullying by teachers | Change.org

Petition | Create a law that protects children from bullying by teachers | Change.org

Dnj - N.J. legislation aims to stop teachers who bully students

Dnj - N.J. legislation aims to stop teachers who bully students

N.J. legislation aims to stop teachers who bully students

Posted 5/18/2012 9:30 AM ET

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By Bob Jordan, The Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

TRENTON, N.J. — Secret school recordings posted on YouTube by a father, with an adult being caught calling the man's 10-year-old autistic son "a bastard," have helped spur an effort to speed the disciplinary process for teachers and other school employees who bully students.

New Jersey GOP Sen. Diane Allen introduced a bill Thursday to expand anti-bullying laws to cover incidents where teachers are the aggressors.

Allen said she was motivated by several recent publicized teacher bullying incidents, including the recordings made by Stuart Chaifetz, who documented what he says was torment of his son for at least six months by public-school special education teachers and support staff at the Horace Mann Elementary School.

"Schools are supposed to be fertile ground where our children can grow into healthy individuals. In those few places where staff members, for whatever reason, treat them with disrespect and disdain, like they did to my son, they can really destroy lives," Chaifetz said at a State House news conference hosted by Allen.

Allen was also joined by 15-year-old Julio Artuz and his parents. Artuz last fall made a cellphone video of an incident where he said was bullied by a Bankbridge Regional School teacher.

Artuz said of the incident, "I really have a hard time talking about it, but I just want this to stop. I don't want anybody else to feel the way it made me feel, the lowest I'd ever felt in my whole life."

Allen said her legislation would speed the disciplinary process for teachers and other school officials, including those with tenure, found to have engaged in bullying, intimidation, or harassment of students.

Under the proposal, reported incidents of bullying by teachers must be investigated by the school's anti-bullying specialist within 10 days.

New Jersey Education Association spokesman Steve Wollmer said Allen's proposal eliminates due process rights, making it unlikely to survive a legal challenge, "because it would allow no more appeals to a neutral third party," he said.

"We all agree bullying is unacceptable by a student or a school employee or anybody and should be dealt with immediately," Wollmer said.

He said the union has proposed that the state could provide better flexibility in disciplinary actions by borrowing from practices in Massachusetts, where action on dismissing a teacher is in the hands of outside employment arbitrators.

"Everyone has a right to due process, but that process must be timely in fairness to both the student and the school employee," Allen said.

Artuz was allegedly bullied by teacher Steve Roth. Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin said in a new ruling Roth had engaged in "conduct that was intimidating and bullying" but said that removal of his tenure wasn't warranted, ordering instead that Roth should forfeit 120 days pay.

The local school board responded to the ruling Thursday, releasing a statement that it "respectfully disagrees with the recommendation of Judge Masin to permit Steven Roth to retain his job after serving a suspension for the remainder of the school year."

The school board will file exceptions to the judge's decision with state Education Department in a bid to terminate Roth's employment.

When the School Says No, How to Get the Yes!: Securing Special Education Services for Your Child: Vaughn Lauer: 9781849059176: Amazon.com: Books

When the School Says No, How to Get the Yes!: Securing Special Education Services for Your Child: Vaughn Lauer: 9781849059176: Amazon.com: Books

When planning a child's Individualized Education Program (IEP), it is vital that parents and educators are involved in collaborative decision making. This book offers parents of children with autism and other disabilities a unique way of approaching and tackling the problems that can arise relating to the provision of special education services.

Taking a structured, cooperative approach to IEPs, the easily applicable six question process enables parents to determine the needs of their child and obtain the services required by asking key questions during IEP meetings. Explaining the approach through real life scenarios and issues, this book demonstrates how to achieve effective collaboration with school personnel, ensuring the child receives the appropriate and necessary educational program and services.

Providing a practical, structured approach to IEP planning for parents and offering insight into the parental perspective for educators, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in IEP meetings.

School performance reviews mislead : Stltoday

School performance reviews mislead : Stltoday

The annual review of school district performance by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education claims to show how well each school district in the state performs. It doesn’t. All it really shows is the relative wealth of the population in each school district.

Compare the performance scores with rates of participation in the federal school lunch program. The correlation between poverty and low performance scores is striking. I made such a comparison for 52 local education agencies in metropolitan St. Louis that operate high schools. I excluded education agencies that did not offer high school from the comparison, because the challenges of high school and elementary school are so very different as to make any comparison between the two meaningless. I used participation in the free and reduced price lunch program as the measure of poverty, even though it does not register differences in the intensity of poverty, for example, or distinguish between someone new to the program and someone who has always lived in poverty. The degree to which different levels of participation in the subsidized lunch program tracked accreditation levels, however, was stunning.

DESE ranks districts into four levels of accreditation.

In only four of the 20 districts whose scores would earn them the “accredited with distinction” label were more than one-third of the students eligible for free or reduced price lunch, and none of those enrolled more than 3,000 students.

In none of the 27 districts that would earn accreditation without distinction were fewer than one-third of the students eligible for free or reduced price lunch (and in only two were fewer than 40 percent of the students eligible for subsidized lunches). In only one of those 27 districts were more than 60 percent of the students eligible for the federal lunch program, and that district had the lowest performance score of the group.

In the three districts that would fall into the “provisionally accredited” category, 62 percent, 72 percent, and 90 percent of students participated in the subsidized lunch program.

In all four of the districts that would be unaccredited (five if one includes the Construction Career Center), the proportion of students eligible for subsidized lunches exceeds 85 percent.

One reason that DESE’s performance review tells us more about family wealth than school performance is that it measures things on which families have great influence. Fully one-half of the possible 140 points on the accreditation scale are based on student scores on tests purchased from textbook publishers. Another 20 points are based on the results for students taking college entrance exams. The other 50 points are based on graduation rates (30 points), attendance (10 points), and the proportion of graduates placed in college or a job within six months (10 points).

The problem with the tests is that they measure so much more than just academic achievement. They measure a complex combination of traits, which includes achievement, but also includes culture and motivation. DESE and test publishers ignore that complexity by assuming a sameness to families and people that doesn’t exist.

One culture? Not quite. A question that assumes familiarity with golf, for example, introduces a cultural bias against students who grow up in families and neighborhoods unfamiliar with the game.

Everyone is equally motivated? Not so. Psychologists have found that some individuals are internally motivated to always try to do their best on tests, even it they can’t perceive of any benefit from doing so, but others aren’t. It is possible that in life children from more privileged backgrounds more often learn that effort brings rewards, and children from disadvantaged circumstances more often learn that it doesn’t.

Recent research also shows that poverty affects one’s performance on tests. When people living in poverty are most secure, they perform as well on cognitive tests as people who are well-to-do. But, when they are most financially stressed, they perform worse on the same tests.

In science, one has to isolate a variable to measure its response. Missouri’s achievement tests, in failing to isolate academic achievement from cultural influences, motivation, and poverty, fail to really tell us anything about academic achievement or school performance.

Peter Downs is a former member of the St. Louis city school board and author of “Schoolhouse Shams: Myths and Misinformation in School Reform,” from Rowman & Littlefield Education.