I want to thank Liz Kruger for her recent post on the Healthy Teens Act (S.1342) which (to quote Senator Kruger):

...will create a system for providing grants to schools for the purpose of developing age appropriate, medically accurate sex education. The legislation also stresses that curricula be developed that encourages communication about sexuality issues between parents and their children.

This bill is one I have highlighted before and I want to back Senator Kruger on this one. My own State Senator, Velmanette Montogomery, has been pushing for this one for some time and has even hosted a program on BCAT on the issue.

And I got this some time back from NARAL via email:

New studies show that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted infection (STI). In New York, 40,000 teens will become pregnant this year.

Our young New Yorkers deserve better.

We only have a couple of weeks left in this legislative session and rather than attempting to impress voters with a long record of accomplishment, the strategy of the Senate leadership seems to be to avoid doing much of anything. That said, it is an Albany tradition to always seem to save most of the legislative work – for better or for worse – for the last few days, so I haven't completely given up hope that we can still get some important legislation passed.

Before the session began, I outlined a number of key priorities – issues that I hoped the pressure of a hotly contested election season might prompt action on – one of which was the Healthy Teens Act (S1342). This year the bill passed the Assembly on March 17 by a vote of 130 to 14, and passed the Senate Health Committee May 20 by a vote of 13-4. This is the farthest the Healthy Teens Act has ever come in the legislative process.

This last weekend Joy and I attended two events of political interest to New York. First I want to mention that on Saturday Joy participated in the 3rd annual Center for Anti-Violence Education's Punch-a-thon held in a very wet Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park. The Center for Anti-Violence Education (CAE) teaches women, children, teens, and LGBT individuals verbal and physical strategies to protect themselves and break cycles of violence in their lives and communities. CAE has a commitment to serving low-income families and offer our violence-prevention courses on a sliding fee scale. Courses for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault are free of charge, and free childcare is available at all classes. The annual Punch-a-thon raises money to pay for self-defense and violence-prevention courses to those who can't afford it. I sponsored my wife in this event and she, like most of the participants, did 1000 punches. In all the event raised $5000 to date with more hopefully coming in. The political angle was that several elected officials had promised to show up.

No...not "Jon Stewart." I'm talking about John Stewart, Provost of John Muir College at the University of California, San Diego. I found out this morning that John Stewart, a man who had a profound affect on my life in college, died last year.

[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger natbell and crossposted from Edwize.]

The UFT has begun gathering input from the community about mayoral control of city schools and what it has meant for the city’s 1.1 million school children. The law that temporarily authorized centralization of the system has been in place for six years, and is scheduled to sunset in 2009.

A union task force is holding hearings in each of the five boroughs, where parents, community members and other stakeholders are evaluating whether the law should be continued, modified in some way, or allowed to expire. The community’s input will help the union develop its own position on the law.

[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger Leo Casey, and crossposted from Edwize.]

New York Measuring Teachers by Test Scores: so reads the headline on the front page of the New York Times which announces the NYC Department of Education's secretive pilot project to use value added statistical measures of student standardized test scores to examine the performance of teachers. The teachers and their schools will not be informed that they are the subjects of this study.

The DoE's "value added" project is a fundamentally flawed exercise which can not possibly deliver what it promises. It is being pursued, with the full knowledge of its flaws, because technocratic ideology trumps sound educational practice at Tweed. Moving forward with such a flawed project is extraordinarily irresponsible because "value added" -- the idea that one should measure how much academic progress students have made, rather than just their absolute academic standing -- holds promise as an useful tool in the repertoire of schools and educators. But the way in which it is being recklessly pursued by Tweed will cast discredit on the entire enterprise.

What is our role, the student's role, in our society?

As it stands now we are the constant object of the education discussion sentence. My english teacher told me (and mind you, this was last year... in my junior year of high school,) that a simple sentence contains three parts: the subject or actor, the verb or action, and the object or that which is acted upon

As in: "The Department of Education (that's the subject) puts (the verb) children(the object) first (I guess that's an adjective)."

In the American education debate, we are acted upon by many subjects: The Department of Education, who treats us like products, numbers that need to be manipulated so that they can look real good, the City, that treats us as criminals who need to be babysat by the NYPD for a couple of hours a day, and our Teachers, who people assume can snap their fingers and turn us into brilliant astrophysicists ready to herald in a new age of American economic glory.

I wouldn't want to hazard a guess as to what Joe Williams (of the horribly misnamed Democrats for Education Reform) set as his New Year's resolution, but he starts off the year with a post accusing New York City Councilman Robert Jackson of "pimping himself" (Jackson is also Chair of the City Council's Education Committee). Here's what Jackson said, that Joe Williams disagreed with.

Stay classy Joe

[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger Jackie Bennett, and previously posted on Edwize.]

What is going to happen in our New York City high schools now that Joel Klein has based 55% of the high school progress reports on the number of courses students take and pass. Consider this: if students don’t pass, the school’s grade will suffer, and punishment may follow. Klein will fire principals and close the schools.

And to make things worse, Klein has also sent out signals that it’s a good thing when schools find creative ways to give a student credit. For example, Klein instituted a policy of seat-time credit (credit recovery, as it’s euphemistically called) wherein students who fail a class because they didn’t do much work can hand in a project of some kind to a different teacher after the course is over, and have that grade reversed.

As of this year my younger brother is no longer a public school student. Like me, he attended public elementary and middle schools, however, when it came to choose a high school, he and my parents decided that he would do better at a private school. Fortunately, they made a good decision for my brother. He is now at a school that he loves, he really succeeds in and he feels does a good job in educating the students.

Out of curiosity, I asked him what the difference was between the public school he had attended and his current school in terms of educational value. His answer was quick and simple: the adults in the building have time to care about the students.

In the NYC education system, the first step to improving schools is creating a situation in which educators have time to care about the students. This can only come for significant reductions in class size and teacher load.