How much success can you really buy your kid? "Push for A's at Private Schools Is Keeping Costly Tutors Busy" is the headline on one of the most-read pieces in today's New York Times, and if you enjoy pausing in your morning for a little mockery at how the top 1 percent live (followed by a secret fear that your kids will never, ever be able to keep up), it's well worth your time. You can enjoy contemplating the six-figure tutoring bill of one student from Riverdale Country School or the statement by a former parent from the same school that "no family gets through private school without an SAT tutor." (Funny, I always thought it was supposed to be the kid getting through school.) You can ask yourself whether, as the founder of a service whose tutors charge from $195 to $795 for 50 minutes claims, the real reason behind the apparent rush to "prepping" assistance is "ambitious and intellectually curious students signing up for difficult classes" or something else.

This outing of the tutor phenomenon among the extremely wealthy elite is nothing new. When former Dalton English teacher Anisha Lakhani wrote Schooled in 2008, the novel (which featured a newbie private school teacher who quickly realizes that most of the work she's grading is not the work of her students, but the work of their tutors, and soon gets sucked into the lucrative world of tutoring herself) was broadly considered to be a roman à clef. Her students excoriated it and many fellow teachers anonymously toasted it. Just as in today's article, the school in the book discouraged tutors in public (the director of academic studies at Riverdale told the NYT that the school discouraged tutors, made its own teachers available for extra help, and were "troubled by the inequity" that exists when some families hire tutors) but privately accepted them and welcomed the results: better test scores, grades, and college admission chances. The anonymous mother of the Riverdale student with the Lamborghini tutoring budget was blunt. "The policy is that you are not supposed to have a tutor," she said. "The reality is that they all have them."

And will surely still have them, no matter how many NYT commenters call the practice "obscene" and point out that it may prepare student to pass exams but does not prepare them to face life's challenges on their own. Maybe, if you can and will fund that kind of help for your child in high school, the goal is not to produce an adult who can weather difficulties, but rather, one who knows that if those difficulties are financial, he'll never see the need. That's a role for which most of us don't have to worry about prepping our kids.

Tags: education, private school tutoring, schooled, tutors

What does it take to get a school employee fired these days? That’s the question many are asking in California after the disturbing case of a Berkeley High School counselor who remains employed after administrators found that he had spanked, stalked, and propositioned a student.

According to the complaint [pdf] filed Monday in federal court, high school student “Lilah R” was subjected to six months of chronic sexual harassment at school by her guidance counselor, Anthony Smith. She says that he engaged in such supremely creepy acts as spanking, excessive hugging, caressing her thighs and hair, rubbing his face into her chest, and smelling her neck. He lurked outside her classrooms and summoned her into his office to discuss matters like her beauty, womanly scent, and clothing choices, and whether she slept in the nude. He also asked if they could work out together at the gym and stay in touch over the summer so he could “share some feelings” with her.

It’s an account Berkeley Unified School District doesn’t deny: After Lilah reported Smith’s abusive behavior last spring, the district conducted an internal investigation and concluded that Smith had indeed "engaged in inappropriate and unprofessional behavior contrary to District policy"—not to mention state and federal sexual harassment laws—and that the school would take “appropriate personnel action.” This, it turned out, meant putting Smith on administrative leave for the duration of the investigation, which lasted less than a month. No dismissal, no transfer, not a single directive to limit contact with the victim. After the district refused the family’s repeated requests to transfer or remove Smith, Lilah obtained a temporary restraining order from a judge requiring Smith to stay 100 yards away from her at all times. But the school still wouldn’t budge. Lilah’s only consolation was a promise from the vice principal that she would be assigned to a different counselor with an office on a different floor.

Why is the school district willfully ignoring such egregious sexual misconduct? The answer, according to the school district, is union politics. Superintendent William Huyett, one of the other defendants named in the federal lawsuit, told Lilah’s family that collective bargaining with the school union would prevent administrators from transferring or dismissing Smith. Adding insult to injury, Huyett’s office told Lilah that the case was now more an issue of her “feelings” and the counselor’s conduct was neither “severe” nor “pervasive” enough to qualify as sexual harassment, so no dice on the transfer request. If Huyett had decided to classify the behavior as harassment, he would have had greater discretion to remove Smith.

Since the outbreak of pro-union protests in Wisconsin two months ago, there’s been an outpouring of popular support on the left for collective bargaining rights for educators; we’ve been reminded of how much unions have done to secure living wages and humane working conditions for public employees.  Cases like this one are difficult to reconcile with that vision of collective bargaining: I’d hate to think progressive labor policies are shielding an obvious sexual predator from discipline and subjecting a child to a hostile educational environment. And I’d also hate to think that a few isolated cases are providing fodder for those who seek to tear down policies designed to help working families.

Tags: collective bargainings, education, high school, sexual harassment, unions, wisconsin collective bargaining, wisconsin teachers unions

Max Read of Gawker thinks he has you all figured out.  After posting on a story about a Quebec-area school secretary who was outed as a "porn star" by a teenage boy who has absorbed the lesson that women in sex films should be treated like crap for generously relieving you of sexual tension, Max goes on to faux (at least, I think/hope faux) defend the decision to suspend her by saying, "Would you want your child taught by a porn star? Or, not taught, so much as, some of the documents pertaining to your child might be handled by a porn star. That really brings it home, doesn't it?"

All joking aside, it's not only irritating that sex workers are being conflated with child molesters in the 21st century, but that the school reacting this way sends the message to young men that it's A-OK to be a consumer of sex work, but the providers of it are tainted women who should be punished.  I don't care where you fall on the pro- or anti-sex-work divide, but the double standard for workers and customers galls me to no end.  You might want to argue that a sex worker isn't a good "role model," but far worse in the role model department is sending the message that sex workers are for using and then throwing away.

This story is reminiscent of the story of Melissa Petro from last fall, a woman who paid her way through college and grad school with sex work, and who was fired from her job as a teacher when she wrote about it for adult audiences that had nothing to do with her school.  It was a big scandal at the time, but I hold out hope that Petro's honesty and normalcy helped society move a little closer to opening up to the idea that nothing bad is going to happen if we collectively stop ostracizing sex workers. They don't bite, at least not in larger numbers than the public at large.

I'm honestly surprised that things like this don't happen more often.  Education is a female-dominated profession, and it's one that requires extra degrees and education but doesn't pay as well as other professions that have similar requirements.  Getting the education to become a teacher means incurring that much more debt that's much harder to pay off on your relatively low salary.  Paying your way through school as a sex worker has got to be tempting to quite a few women on the road to being a teacher.  Same story with supplementing the small salary of a school administrator with sex work on the side.  Seems to me that the simplest prevention if you really think this is a problem is making sure that education pays well enough that sex work isn't a temptation.

Tags: education, Melissa Petro, quebec

Kelley Williams-Bolar has been found guilty of two third-degree felonies in Ohio for falsifying residency documents to send her girls to school in her father's suburban school district rather than her own poorer one. The afrosphere is livid. Noted one (not entirely coherent) black blogger:  "The judge actually wanted to give her two consecutive five-year sentences and reduced it to 10 days in prison and THREE YEARS on probation plus 80 hours of community service. WT..??! As a result of two felony convictions, Williams-Bolar is being denied completing her teacher training certification. A better job thwarted because she did what so many parents do all the time here in NYC."

Every September, I wait for the crush of stories like this one, having grown up in the inner city where such ruses are the norm. How our better-off relatives must have feared the onslaught of "requests" to "lemme use your address, Auntie. It's for the kids." But this story is unusual in the lengths to which both the mom and the school district went to "get" each other. Williams-Bolar apparently wouldn't back down from insisting that her kids lived at the given address even as the equally dogged district hired detectives to trail and film her. I'm guessing that cost more than the $30,500 in purloined tuition the school claims to be trying to prevent. But we all know none of this is the point.

Obviously, the district, and the courts, were trying to make an example of Williams-Bolar to stem the tide of what all know to be a tsunami of wrongful registration. But the real issue here is the fairness of confining school tax dollars solely to the communities which generated them. That's always struck me as selfish at best, racist/classist at worst.

These are difficult questions but here's one I don't find difficult at all:  Would I also do whatever it took to get my kids an excellent, let alone safe, education?

Tags: criminal justice system, education, Ohio, school districts, school funding

The Daily Beast thinks it's figured out where kids are the brightest. The Beast used data from last year's National Assessment of Education Progress, a nationwide standardized test, to rank states on educational achievement and put together a feature on "States with the Smartest Kids." The title's annoying (these kids aren't the smartest; they're the best at taking standardized tests), but it's an interesting read.

The results are mostly unsurprising. Educational outcomes and income tend to track pretty closely, so we expect to see Massachusetts at the top of the list and Mississippi at the bottom, and we do. But there's one place that completely, unfortunately, flips that script. Start from the bottom and work your way up, and you've got Mississippi, which checks out, and then Washington, D.C., which, what? "The wealthiest and most educated region in the country" is producing students who test worse than impoverished kids in West Virginia, immigrant-heavy classrooms in New Mexico, and still-chaotic post-Katrina school districts in Louisiana? Yup.

Washington is brimming with young, well-educated, well-off people starting families. But obviously their kids aren't going to public school in D.C. They're moving to suburbs in Maryland or Virginia (some of the richest in the country) or sending them to pricey private schools in the District. And who can blame them? If I had kids, I don't think I would want them in schools that have even Teach for America true believers fleeing, either. But the unfortunate result of this voluntary economic segregation is a failing school system and thousands of kids who will be raised in the nation's capital but can't fully participate in the opportunities it offers.

Tags: education, private school, public education, public schools

When I saw that the Daily Beast had published an article about how parents intervening in bullying situations may not always be for the best, my heart leaped with joy. "Finally," I thought, "We're going to have a grown-up discussion about the brutal realities of bullying instead of just a bunch of lip-smacking from adults claiming they always oppose it." Sadly, it was not to be. The article is just scolding parents not to overreact for fear that their kids won't be tough enough if their parents fight their battles for them. There was no acknowledgment of the possibility that parental interference could backfire and make the bullying worse.

Bullying, like bigotry, is one of those things that everyone swears up and down they oppose, but reality tells a different story. Both ideas of how to handle conflict and bullying in school offered in this story rest on the incorrect assumption that school authorities disapprove of bullying in practice. If the parent calls, the assumption is that the school will take effective anti-bullying measures against the perpetrator. If the parent leaves it up to the child to stand up for herself, the assumption is that the school will allow this standing up to happen. In my experience, and in the stories I've heard from others who were bullied, this simply isn't true. Often, if a bully is tattled on, the school will nominally punish the bully but allow the bully to use this as an excuse to blame the victim for the punishment and double down in retaliation. And, if a bullied student stands up to the bully, often the person defending herself will be the one punished while the bully is let off with equal or lesser punishment, even though the bully started it. Zero tolerance policies often make this worse, by giving school authorities an excuse to take it out on the kid who defended herself, by citing their supposed requirement not to look at context.

The ugly truth is that kids get bullied because they're not conforming to some social standard the bullies hold, and often the adults in charge agree with the bullies on the social standard, which makes them side all too often with bullies against the bullied. This is the most under-discussed aspect of the problem, by far. The only people who seem to be talking about how bullying is a direct result of larger social messages about conformity are a handful of people talking about homophobic bullying, and how it reflects larger social messages about queerness that the bullies are absorbing and acting out. And even in this case, most of the discussion around things like the It Gets Better Project are mealy-mouthed condemnations of bullying without looking at root causes. Until the adults in charge vigorously disagree with the bullies on subjects such as, "Kids who are unathletic are second class," or, "Kids who don't conform to rigid gender roles are threatening," there isn't going to be much we can do about bullying.

Photograph of an anti-bullying pamphlet by Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: Bullying, education, it gets better project

—Meg Whitman’s oil and gas investments may compromise her candidacy for governor of California. [LA Times]

—Dozens of vodka-swilling Brighton Beach natives plead and push their way into auditions for the Russian version of Jersey Shore. [NYT City Room blog]

—Women can now experience the freedom of peeing upright with a new flushable paper funnel. [Salon]

—Sources say that Obama officials fired White House social secretary Desirée Rogers for being too fabulous. [New York Times]

—Despite a mountain of evidence promoting longer school days, states are cutting back on full-day kindergarten programs. [The Daily Beast]

—A bill recently passed in Georgia outlawing race- and sex-selective abortions, further stripping away women’s reproductive rights. [Salon]

Tags: abortion, brighton beach, california, Desiree Rogers, education, jersey shore, kindergarten, Meg Whitman, politics, white house

—As the rest of the industrialized world gets fatter, Japanese women bully each other into getting skinnier. [Washington Post]

—How do we build better teachers? [NYT Magazine]

—A study in Britain reveals that 73 percent of young people believe frank discussion of sexual disease is key to a long relationship. [BBC News]

—Students, parents, and educators in California protest cuts in the state education budget. [New York Times]

—Americans know nothing about birth control. [Feministe]

—Utah lawmakers remove “reckless” terminology from new abortion bill. [Salon]

Photograph of woman by Junko Kimura/Getty Images News.

Tags: abortion, anorexia, birth control, california, education, Japan, relationships, sex, utah, weight

It's been hard for me to support the Obama administration in the past few months because of what I perceive as an epic failure on the health care front. Even Obama's thumping of House Republicans seems like too little, too late, as though he just realized that they fully intend to block any national progress and then run against Obama as a failure—a strategy bloggers and pundits have been telling him was the Republican strategy from roughly day one. But then I read articles like this one on the reworking of No Child Left Behind, and I am reminded that there are good aspects to having such a wonky president, even if he occasionally falls behind on his political battles.

The reason this wonky nonsense gives me confidence is that it manages to do what Obama always claims he wants to do, which is take good ideas—wherever they come from—and use them and refine them to be better ideas. And I can't say I completely object to the selling point of No Child Left Behind, which is that the federal government should have educational standards and accountability. My problem with it was that it always seemed a bit dangerous to suggest that a highly punitive approach is appropriate for education, since punitive approaches on the administrative level end up trickling down to students, and most evidence shows reward-based learning is a lot better than punishment-based learning. And, sure enough, schools seem to prefer weeding out the students who are a drag on their scores over actually getting them up to speed.

The "one high standard" promise of NCLB is also straight-up unfair. For students who live in districts where they're far more likely to have adequate nutrition, rest, and family involvement, getting kids to pass a standardized test isn't that big of a deal. Kids whose parents are crippled by poverty, however, don't have those advantages, and it encourages more of the dreaded "teaching the test," instead of educating the students. Focusing strictly on standardized testing is highly criticized for missing the point of education as well. Though I have to point out that "teaching the test" neatly aligns to conservative demands that education be nothing more than accounting and literacy skills and stays the hell away from teaching critical thinking that would probably do some serious damage to long-term Republican prospects.

The administration wants to get away from teaching the test, and instead return to framing education as preparation for life, with a standard for graduating students "college or career ready." Money is also being shifted in a way that emphasizes rewarding schools for taking action, instead of punishing them for failing to achieve test scores. It's going to be more complicated, but there is more potential for effective improvements. And the wonky Obama administration is just the crew to handle such a complex task.

Tags: no child left behind, Obama, standardized testing

Kerry, Emily, KJ, I have to admit, I don't see why there's so much fuss if some schools want to get the kids out of their seats and into the garden. I guess we've all been reminded that Caitlin Flanagan is quite adept at making us stand around feeling guilty while she scampers off to direct her servants around her own garden. Of course, if schools really are trying to relate gardening back to other subjects, they've given her ammo for her smarmy dream-killing. But honestly, what's so wrong with getting kids out in the garden for part of their day?

Maybe I have a different perspective on this, having attended junior high and high school in a rural school district. Half of my high school class took some agricultural classes, and many of them took as many as the school offered, presumably because they intended to have an adult life working on a ranch. But even kids who looked forward more to ordinary office jobs got something out of the class, if only the chance to break up the monotony of the school day by going outside and working with animals. More than that, I'm sure it opened their minds up to what kind of things they were capable of. Even someone who doesn't intend to work on a ranch one day could probably get something out of knowing that she could if she wanted to.

I took a lot of subjects in school that are sacrosanct that I would have far preferred to replace with gardening. Art class was torture for someone who hasn't even mastered legible handwriting, for instance. But as an adult, I actually gardened, and having some foreknowledge of how to do it probably would have prevented many mistakes. Home economics was a complete waste of my time. How much nicer it would have been if we could have gone outside and gardened instead!

Our country is obsessed with the obesity epidemic, and for that reason, we'd never, ever suggest that P.E. be removed from the curriculum because no one is learning math skills from it. P.E. coaches don't have to justify sports with claims that keeping score improves math skills. Flanagan can mock the idea that knowing more about where food comes from improves food choices all she wants, but there's a value to really thinking of food as something that comes from the ground and has a specific form, and not something that comes in a box pre-processed. It was gardening that demystified food for me and convinced me that I could and should cook, long before I ever read a word Michael Pollan wrote on the subject.

Sure, having a gardening class for the kids isn't some great fix-it for all the ills that plague our schools. And certainly, there's a whiff of condescension to only providing these gardens in lower-income schools. (Still, I'll bet more than a few fancy private schools have gardens for the kids.) But I bristle at Flanagan's equation of an hour a day sprinkling water over plants with a water can and the backbreaking work of those who make a meager living working the fields for Big Agra. To equate the two mostly indicates how little Flanagan understands of either. And her entire diatribe about fresh produce in the grocery stores is exactly the kind of glaring logic hole that her pretty prose cannot cover—since when does having a kid goof off with a kid-sized hoe for an hour prevent that same child's neighborhood from having a decent grocery store?

Photograph of gardening by Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.

Tags: caitlin flanagan, gardening