TEACHERS AT RISK

Dan Janke knew something was wrong when he walked into the principal's office and found the superintendent waiting for him. When Janke sat down, the school administrators delivered a shocking message: Janke, an art teacher in the New Ulm, Minn., public schools, was suspected of sending sexually explicit e-mails to sixth-grade girls.

Janke was sent home that afternoon, suspended while police investigated. Within days, the truth came out. Two seventh-grade boys had posed as their teacher in an online chat with the girls.

Every teacher can recall times when a student has tried to get even. But the revenge assumes a new dimension online, where children raised in front of the computer often hold the upper hand. From New York to California, students are facing suspension, expulsion and even criminal charges for online spoofs targeted at teachers and school officials. In Florida, a high school English teacher sued a student who she said posted her picture online, along with sexually explicit comments.

This month, some Coon Rapids middle-schoolers got a bogus e-mail purportedly from one of their teachers, inviting them to visit him on MySpace. When they clicked on the link to the popular networking site, they were taken to a Web page filled with pornography and hate speech. Other assaults come on Web sites such as Ratemyteacher.com, where students can grade their teachers on a scale of 1 to 5, complete with nasty comments and frowning cartoon faces.

For educators, Internet harassment is "one more stressor to add to a very stressful job," said Sandy Skaar, president of Anoka-Hennepin Education Minnesota, the teachers' union in the state's largest district.

A student with a grudge - or playing a misguided joke - can put out a damaging message to thousands of people. With the Internet, adolescents have a powerful megaphone. Do they have the maturity to use it responsibly? Janke doesn't think so. "We don't let people drive until they're 16," he said. "They can't vote until they're 18, and they can't drink until they're 21. Yet kids in the third grade are on the Internet. "We have given them this big responsibility, when they're not ready for it without proper supervision and training," Janke said. "It's a dangerous thing."

Teenagers operate in a different world from adults, said Ascan Felix Koerner, a University of Minnesota professor who studies adolescent communication. "The moral compass fails them sometimes, and they're not fully appreciative of the consequences," he said. "They might create a website, and their peers would take it as a joke, and they perceive that adults would take it that way, too."

Kirk Bauermeister didn't know he was on MySpace until his teenage daughter told him. Students at the middle school in Costa Mesa, Calif., had created a fake MySpace site for Bauermeister, the school principal. "The anonymity of it makes it real scary," Bauermeister said. "It gives people the ability to do and say things they'd never do in real life."

Many schools have blocked access to MySpace on school computers, but Bauermeister said it's often futile: "As soon as we block it, they find a way around it."

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FAILING THE CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL EXIT EXAM IS NO BAR TO COLLEGE ADMISSION

So who needs to read and write to go to college?

Students who do not pass will not graduate and will not receive a diploma, yet that does not necessarily mean the door to college is closed. It is possible, in fact, to get a bachelor's degree or higher without a high school diploma - as long as students go to community college first. While a diploma or its equivalent, such as the General Educational Development certificate, are required to enroll in CSU or University of California campuses, no such requirement exists at the state's two-year community colleges. Community college enrollment is open to anyone 18 or over.

Still, some campuses are watching the state's exit exam figures and are expecting they will counsel students on their options if the exit exam proves too tough. "Our counsel would be to go to community college," said Jeff Cook, executive director of enrollment services at Cal State East Bay - where he anticipates a "minimal" number of would-be freshmen will be turned away in the fall because they have not passed the exam. Once a student completes 60 units of transferable credits at a community college, they are eligible to transfer into CSU, Cook said. By that time, a diploma does not matter. "Once they've earned 60 units, the CSU doesn't look at their high school record at that point," he said.

Ditto at the University of California, said spokesman Ricardo Vazquez. But UC officials may also grant some wiggle room to would-be freshmen who have not passed the exit exam. "The university assumes that all students offered admission to UC will have passed the California High School Exit Exam, but if it turns out that is not the case, then individual situations will be reviewed by campuses on a case-by-case basis," he said. "Given our rigorous admission standards, we assume that all students will have passed the test," Vazquez said. "We expect very, very few, if any, of those cases."

Community colleges have varying degrees of concern about the exam and its impact on future students. "You don't need a high school diploma to go to a community college, you don't need a high school diploma to get an (associate of arts) degree, and you don't need a high school diploma to transfer to a four-year university from a community college, so it's not an issue for us," said Barbara Christensen,

More here




UK: Headteachers hit out at new "babysitting" role: "Schools will become 'a national babysitting service' as a result of government plans to force them to open from 8 am to 6 pm, the leader of Britain's biggest headteachers' organization said yesterday. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said it meant a 50-hour school week for some children -- with headteachers seeing more of them than their parents."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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