This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Tuesday, June 18.

A little over two years ago, the Georgia Supreme Court declared the state chartered schools unconstitutional in a controversial 4-3 decision.  

It was a big blow to the school choice community nationally.  But in no time a movement developed in the state to overrule their own Supreme Court by amending the constitution.  They got supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, and then last November, a statewide referendum to put state chartered schools back in action, by an overwhelming 17-point margin.

So after all that effort to make these schools legal again, many were anxious to see the explosion of new Georgia charter school applications that had to be postmarked last week.  How many people would apply?  To some, the drumroll turned to cricket sounds.  15?

Andrew Lewis of the Georgia Charter Schools Association wasn't thrilled.

In the first couple of years of the commission in year one, if my memory serves me correctly, there were 56 applications so we’re seeing a tremendous drop off in the number of applications and that is an area that the state of Georgia we need to evaluate on why are we not seeing more individuals or groups coming forth with petitions and what can we do as a state to help whether within our state or bringing interested parties from outside the state to help communities establish high quality public school choices utilizing the charter sector.

An important caveat: The commission can only act on applications after they’ve been submitted to local school boards and then denied by local schools. 

There are other charter schools in Georgia that were not affected by the Supreme Court action because they were chartered by local school boards.  A method some have called asking McDonald's to authorize Burger Kings.  Georgia has 122 of that kind of charter schools, representing just 65,000 of the state's 1.7 million kids in the public schools.

Bonnie Holiday, Executive Director of the commission, says she thinks there’s plenty of interest in the movement, however, and that more petitions will come in the future after people have had more time to understand the new process.

I think that parents are becoming more and more savvy about the educational options available to their students and people are less willing to accept poor performing schools just because they live in an area where the schools are low-performing. As a result, I think that charter schools are gaining in popularity and I think that in cases where petitioners bring high-quality applications to their local board and they aren’t approved, they can come to the commission.

The commission will announce how many of the 15 schools will be approved this October, and the earliest any of the schools could open will be next fall, the fall of 2014.

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© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Monday, June 17.

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad signed a bill to boost the state’s tax credit scholarship program by nearly 50 percent in overall funding. And, for the first time corporations, estates and trusts will be eligible to donate to the private school scholarship funds, in addition to individuals. 

To be sure, it is still just a drop in the bucket when in terms of overall funding level. The new law boosts the program from what had been an $8.75 million dollar cap, to a new $12 million dollar cap. But this progress in school choice may beget more progress down the road. Don Racheter, of the Iowa based Public Interest Institute, says he’ll take this deal. 

We haven’t been able to get vouchers and we haven’t been able to get expanded open enrollment, but what this bill does is it makes it more likely that a student of modest means who wants to opt out of the bureaucracy laden government school monopoly system and go to a Christian school, a private school,a Montessori school, whatever their parents decide is the right choice for them, will be able to get financial assistance to do so.

Tax credit scholarship laws have faced fewer court challenges than vouchers because they involve money that was never the government’s in the first place. Still, despite overwhelming support in the state house for this expansion, there are critics. Tyler Marsh, a professor of education at Iowa State University, told us Brandstad was at it again regarding privatizing education and that parents might be misled into thinking that a private school is necessarily better.

I think its bad for public education, because it redirects what would be tax dollars to private schools. And while I definitely do not agree with the idea of private schools,  I do disagree with the notion of privatizing public education in the United States. I would tell them to look at state, district, and federal policies to determine whether or not their student would be better served at a different school because oftentimes these policies affect private schools as well.

As you might expect, Don Racheter disagrees with that assessment, saying parents are in the best position to decide where their children should be educated.

Parents can decide or should be able to decide or should be able to decide on whatever basis they want, whether its filling in bubbles on test or having a teacher who yells at their kid or having a teacher who shows football films during supposed government education classes. Parents should be able to choose whether their kids are getting a good education or not, and if they want to go to the Racheter Academy or to the Montessori School or the Christian school and they should have tax dollars to support that choice because when people choose everybody wins.  

In other news, Choice Media is the best education news Twitter feed there is. Follow it today.

© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Friday, June 14. 

Dateline Philadelphia: Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. announced last week the district would lay off nearly 4,000 district employees, including 676 teachers. Back in March, the district announced it will be closing 23 public schools, but they insist there will be no correlation between building closures and who got the pink slips.  That's because according to the collective bargaining agreement, teachers can only be laid off based on seniority.  That said, principals do have some autonomy.  They have been given budgets for next year, and they can fight to keep certain positions in their school, just not particular people.   

For example, say you’re a principal in Philly, and you want to keep an outstanding math teacher who’s been in the district for six years. You can tell the district you want to keep that position, probably but cutting some other position instead.  But you may find that it’s been filled by another teacher who’s been with the district for seven years. She may have previously worked in one of the schools that will be closed, and now wants to transfer into your school to take that position you protected. That teacher you love? She gets the pink slip.

Fernando Gallard of the Philadelphia school district said they’re merely following marching orders.

This is a very devastating number of layoffs for us. With the teachers it is based on seniority and is driven by the contract agreement. We have to follow our collective bargaining agreement that we have in hand. We are working on a new bargaining and are in the midst of those conversations at this time.

Gallard said he didn’t know how the district would handle if multiple teachers for a position had the same seniority, but it would likely come down to hiring date.  

Managing teaching staffs with a seniority rule, also known as LIFO, or Last-In, First-Out, is a generally unpopular policy when people have bothered to ask the public.  A Quinnipiac University poll from 2011 found that 85% of New York state voters felt that teacher layoffs should be based on merit as opposed to seniority.  Even 63% of so-called union households opposed LIFO.

But often the practice lives under-the-radar and isn't widely talked about until a major staff reduction comes along like this one in Philadelphia, which brings the practice out into the light.

Nancy Waymack of the National Council for Teacher Quality said there’s plenty of reasons to be concerned about layoffs based on seniority. She said there’s always a chance laid off teachers may be called back to fill a need in the district, but they’ve often already moved on.

When we looked at previous layoffs, we saw a lot of teachers who got layoffs were eventually called back but found work in other places. This could be a problem for a number of reasons. They may be people who are beginning their careers and may be outstanding teachers in their field but not in a place where they have enough security to wait it out and see if there will be a callback. They have to go look for another job in the meantime.

Waymack says most of the country is moving away from seniority as the most important factor in staff reductions, and she believes that's a good thing.  

 I think this is an area where the policies are changing in a lot of places. Pennsylvania is one of I think 11 states now that base layoffs by on seniority which is fewer than it's ever been in the past. I think we'll continue to see more states move toward flexibility in the district level or require performance to be a part of the layoff process. 

Also in the news lately for school closures, Chicago, a district that announced the closure of 50 schools last month.  That district has not indicated whether teachers will be laid off, or just transferred. 

Some Ed Reform Minute readers may not realize it's also a podcast.  You can subscribe via iTunes, or on your smart phone, through either the Stitcher or TuneIn apps.

© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Thursday, June 13.

Next month, the Douglas County, Colorado school district will launch a new teacher pay plan that is still unthinkable to pretty much every other school district in the country.  It will institutionalize paying math and science teachers more than gym teachers.

In fact, the folks in Douglas County, a suburb of Denver, have defined five different pay bands for different types of teachers, based on how much competition there is for their skill sets in the job market.  Brian Cesare, the district's chief human resources officer says the idea isn't strange at all if you've worked in the private sector.

The idea came about because I've spent 20 years in the private sector in GE, Microsoft, places like that. When I got into education I said, "Why are we paying everybody the same? We have 70 different types of teachers, how can we imagine they're all the same?

If you're the type who resists common sense assumptions until there's data in front of you, Harvard professor Marty West undertook a study published by the Brookings Institution a couple of months ago finding what most of us would have expected -- that math and science teachers indeed can make more by leaving public education than other kinds of teachers.

We took data on all teachers in Florida public high schools for about five years, from 2001 to 2006, and about 3,500 of those teachers left for a new job in the state of Florida during that time. We were able to get information on what they earned in those new jobs from the state's unemployment insurance system. This let us compare the earnings of teachers in different subject areas both while they were teaching and in their new careers.

What we found is that while they were teaching math and science teachers earned basically the same as teachers in other subject areas relative to high school english teachers, they earned about two percent more. But when they left for other jobs, they were earning about 10 or 15 percent more immediately when they move into those jobs and you'd expect that that differential would grow over time.

It turns out that this kind of differentiated teacher pay has been talked about quite a bit in the past, it just never gets implemented as a standard practice. 

In 2008, California Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill to give math and science teachers more money, provided a huge hurdle was crossed -- both the local district and the union would have to agree it would be okay.  But five years after becoming law the bill's author, Gloria Romero, doesn't know of any district in California where it actually happened.

Georgia State Representative Brooks Coleman sponsored a bill in 2009 to offer math and science teachers bonuses of as much as $6,577.  It became law too, but it was only a static bonus amount not designed to change over time, much different than an overall higher pay track, and even that didn't get funded for the first couple years.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie also proposed paying math & science teachers more than gym teachers in 2011.  The spokesman for the NJEA teachers union quickly responded with, "What's he got against gym teachers?"  The idea never materialized in New Jersey.

The pushback against differentiated pay took a different turn in 2010, when the President of the Washington State Teachers Union provided a new and novel reason to oppose paying math and science teachers more.  She told the Seattle Times editorial board that, "It's also a gender issue. It means you're paying men, by and large, more than you're paying women," explaining that a higher proportion of math and science teachers are men.  No word on whether anyone asked her if that gender test standard should be applied other kinds of raises, like years of service, in case they might also present a discriminatory gender skew.

Even U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been on board with advocating for higher pay for math and science teachers.  He talked about it back in 2009, and the suggestion fell on deaf ears.  

There's just one place that is institutionalizing pay differential for harder-to-find teaching specialties, Douglas County, Colorado.  Not surprisingly, it's received pushback there as well.

The Denver Post writes that the local teachers union president, Brenda Smith, says the prospect of different pay bands has created tension in schools as teachers have wondered aloud why colleagues down the hall were valued so much more than they were. The story doesn't say whether she thinks paying the hardest working, most effective teachers, and the least conscientious, least effective teachers the exact same salary causes morale problems too.

Brian Cesare of the Douglas County district explains how they are rethinking teacher pay.

There is a lot of work going on across the county on pay differential for performance. So if you remember the old step and lane to have the education level across the top and the years of experience down at the bottom that's been around for 92 years, we didn't think that either variable married up to the reality of what we're looking for. So we wanted to replace those two variables. It's easy to replace one of them with the work that's being done in other districts, which is the performance.

What nobody in the country is doing is looking at pay bands for different teachers and recognizing that a P.E. teacher is different than a nurse, than a psychologist, than an audiologist, and differentiating market pay on those positions and having a second variable. What we have now is we have a variable for performance and we have a variable for at, above or below market.

For an illustration of both superb performance and a hard-to-find teaching specialty, cut to Grosse Pointe Michigan, where the science teacher Gary Abud has been named Michigan teacher of the year. According to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy story earlier this week, despite these facts Mr. Abud still won't be compensated any more than the state's average teacher.  In fact, it says Mr. Abud will make about $21,000/year less than the average teacher in the state, even though he's in a hard-to-staff teaching area of science, and he's apparently quite talented and devoted.  The current union contract says his science qualifications and his excellence must mean nothing when it comes to his compensation.

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© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Wednesday, June 12.

A recent report by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution found that ability grouping is increasing.  

Some of our more veteran listeners may remember being grouped by reading ability back in the day. At one point in time, schools were keen on applying bird euphemisms to each level so as to not embarrass anyone. For example, advanced kids could have been called cardinals, average kids might have been called bluebirds, and so forth. A previous Ed Reform Minute highlighted the subject of whether kids should be grouped by intellectual ability.

Though the practice has been around since the early 1900’s, educators have gone back and forth on whether or not to separate kids by their cognitive abilities, putting the smart kids in one class, and the slower ones in another. More recently, the method fell out of favor in the 80’s and 90’s when detractors claimed it promoted divisions between racial and socio-economic groups. Loveless explained the fear had been that students of a lower-socio-economic background would be shuffled into a low-level instruction group for life.

Critics charge that what happens is once we groups kids they tend to stay in those groups. Low-group kids stay in low groups, they receive a different kind of instruction, a lower level instruction than those in high groups. Critics believe that those groups cements in these racial and socio- economic differences in terms of performance.

The problem with this argument lies in its alternative: teaching to the middle. If teachers only teach to the average students, that leaves advanced kids bored, while the slower kids struggle.  

As we said, according to the Brookings report, it seems like ability grouping has returned with a vengeance over the last 10-15 years. From 1998 to 2009, Tom Loveless says the percentage of fourth grade teachers admitting they had grouped students by reading ability jumped from 28% to 71%. Fourth grade math ability grouping isn't quite as popular, but is now up to 61%. (From 48 percent in 1992 to 61 percent in 2011.) Loveless said the increase could be attributed to the realization of how differently kids learn.

There seems to be a bit of a revival in terms of the basic idea that we don't need to treat all kids exactly the same. I think it's not just with gifted kids but with those that are struggling and falling far behind their peers. There is the idea that we need to do something different with them. There seems to be an acceptance to the fact that the road to equality doesn't mean having all the kids do the same thing at the same time. 

Joann DiGennaro, President of the Center for Excellence in Education, supports ability grouping, but warns that its effectiveness relies on constant reassessment to make sure the student group assignments stay current. 

Particularly for the student is extremely precocious and academically talented, we know that ability grouping does work. If you take a student and put them into one group, and not administrate indecies to see that the student is continuing to progress or that the student needs to be taken out of that ability group, then ability grouping isn't good. But I believe that people are coming to realize the importance of maximizing individual potential in such a way.

In other news, a little talked-about New York state law allows parents with kids in failing schools, like most of the schools in Buffalo, to apply to transfer out.  You can find the story listed as Choice Media's today's video in the middle section of the homepage.

© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Tuesday, June 11.

Breaking News: Not every child learns at the same pace. Teachers can't always speed up for the advanced kids,       or slow down for the students who need more time to understand the material. This is where some for-profit education resources are stepping in, to close the gap on both ends of the spectrum. Mathnasium, a year-round learning center focused on, what else, math, has centers in 42 states, as well as 15 countries. It's a simple premise: Specialized math tutoring centers that will address the specific learning level and rate of a specific kid.

Another interesting part: this is a franchised business, where individual entrepreneurs can own and operate a Mathnasium  Learning Center in their own town.

Alan Flyer is the owner of the Mathnasium Center in Roslyn, New York.  He explained the important of individualization.

What we do is we focus on the individual student, and that may seem obvious to some. The goal is not to say well you're in a certain grade or you're a certain age or you go to a certain school or you have a certain teacher, therefore this is what you need to learn in math. What we do with kids when they come in is we give them an assessment, an oral and a written assessment, so we can figure out exactly where their gaps are, where their strengths are, their weaknesses, and we focus on those things specifically. Every child that's in the center has their own book of materials that custom geared towards them, so they can get the math help that they need. 

It's not hard to understand why a company might specialize in math.  The 2011 Nation's Report Card,also called the NAEP test, showed only 35% of American 8th grade kids are proficient in math.

Another advantage Mathnasium can offer over the traditional public schools is year-round service. Summer slide is the term used to describe all the content kids forget over June, July and August while most schools are closed.  Mathnasium Centers are open.

Very often kids over the summer if they don't do anything academic, if they don't have some kind of brush up, they'll lose  anywhere from two-two and a half months worth of math knowledge over the course of the summer. so they come back to school in September and it's filled with the teacher reviewing a lot of stuff that the kids forgot. The kids that come to Mathnasium not only don't they forget it, but they move ahead and learn some new things. They really get a leg up when they get to school in the fall, they really hit the ground running.  

As we mentioned, the franchise nature of the business means that you, the gentle listener to this podcast, could potentially become a franchise owner yourself, and open a Mathnasium center. No bureaucracy. No unions. No genuflecting before charter authorizers.   If you can invest $37,000, believe in their method, and want to open your own Mathnasium, they're ready to take your call.

There's some great things about our school district, and then there are some things that are not 100 percent. It's nice to be able to find what a student needs specifically in an area and be able to help them move ahead. It's great when we have a student who doesn't understand something and then we explain it and the lightbulb goes on, that's just a fantastic moment. I really feel it's very rewarding, and that's the main reason I decided to do this.

This summer the Mathnasium enrollment will be 18,000 students.

In other news, the Choice Media video in the middle column of the home page is a CNN story of a 101-year old Iowa woman getting a high school diploma.  In the words of my late Great Uncle Hugh, "Never Give Up."

© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Monday, June 10.

The American Association of School Administrators, or AASA, has released a new report,       Rethinking the Special Education Due Process System.

What has come to be known as the due process system in special education refers to how parents handle the miseducation or mistaken classifications of their special needs kids.  So often, the system forces these parents turn to lawyers and lawsuits to address these problems because in many places it's the only way to make a school district listen to them.  At hearings, both sides bring in experts and call in witnesses. The party that loses has the option to appeal to state and federal court. As you can imagine, this process is arduous and draining, both financially and emotionally, for parents and schools.

The new report describes how this wastes millions of education dollars on legal fees.  The report says this "impedes the ability of school personnel to provide enhanced academic experiences for all students with disabilities because it devotes the district’s precious time and resources to fighting the legal actions of a single parent."

Instead, the report recommends new dispute resolution practices that don't involve lawyers.  It proposes outside, state-approved Individualized Education Program, or IEP facilitators be used to resolve disputes with parents.  If parents still weren't happy, they could appeal to trained mediators.

The report also included a survey of superintendents.  It says even the districts that chose to settle with a parent prior to the adjudication of the due process hearing spent on average $23,800 on the dispute.

Sasha Pudelski is with the American Association of School Administrators and the author of the report.

We know that many parents can’t take advantage of the current due process system because it unfortunately requires them in most cases to hire a lawyer. There’s an uneven playing field for low-income parents, or parents who are not as savvy or who don’t speak English well to take advantage. We felt that if we were to have a system that was intended to protect the rights of students with disabilities, all parents and all families would be able to take advantage of that system. 

An open question would be how independent would these facilitators and mediators be, and if these people were part of the government education complex, would they become co-opted by it?  As expensive as the legal system is, one might argue, it's at least not a part of the education bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, short of a school choice model, where parents could pick another school, legal remedies remain the only recourse for thousands of parents who feel their special needs kid is being underserved.  A 2009 report by Tracy Mueller in the Journal of Disability Policy Studies estimates the money spent on special needs conflict resolution each year at $90 million -- money mostly going to law firms, instead of the classroom.

All the latest news in education reform at ChoiceMedia.TV.

© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Friday, June 7.

Flipped Learning Network is hosting their sixth annual FlipCon    just outside Minneapolis, from June 17-19, sponsored by      textbook giant Pearson. As many of us know, the flipped learning model means instead of class time for lectures, and students hoping to clarify the material with homework, the "flip" means students can watch pre-recorded lectures on their own time and then use class time for clarifying questions. Advocates claim, among other things, it allows students to take a more active role   in their education, by letting them easily repeat difficult sections   of a video lecture.

Pearson, which has been called the largest education company in the world, has been driving hard toward online learning tools. A profile story in MIT Technology review last fall, in fact, said Pearson aims to be a "one-stop shop for digital education."

FlipCon, the conference, will feature the traditional keynotes and wonky discussions, but also a panel of students to talk about the flipped classroom model. Kari Aftstrom, Executive Director of the Flipped Learning Network, said student perspective too often ignored at these kinds of things.

It’s really important to us whenever we have trainings or workshops or the annual conference that we hear from the student perspective. We will have a panel of students from 5^th grade through seniors in high school. They will be sharing with us their honest opinions of flipped learning, and believe me, they give you their honest opinions.

Flipped Learning Network co-founder Jon Bergmann said the best type of lesson plan is one that has the student asking questions.

A good education is the intersection between content, creativity and relationship. We believe the foundation    building the relationship between the teacher and the student. That is done in the context of the content. We also need to bring in the curiosity where the kids are bringing in some of their own stuff. 

Tickets to attend FlipCon are sold out, but you can still sign up   via live webinar. There will also be recorded videos available on the Flipped Learning Network website.

As a Pearson sponsored event, you may not be surprised that names like Khan Academy, K12 and Connections Academy, do not appear on the FlipCon conference agenda.  

But right on queue, if you want to hop on a plane in Minneapolis on the travel day of June 20th to San Antonio, you'll arrive just in time for the State Education Technology Directors' Association Annual Convocation, where companies like K12 will be on-hand. 

All the latest news in education reform at ChoiceMedia.TV.

© 2013 Choice Media 

This is a Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Thursday, June 6.

The Achievement School District has named nine charter school operators that will take the wheel of failing Memphis schools. In
a previous Ed Reform Minute, we told you about the Tennessee Achievement School District, or ASD, which is the special state school district in charge of turning around chronically failing schools. Specifically, their goal is to take schools in the bottom five percent and make them top 25 percent schools within five years.  The announcement this week will greatly expand the purview of the Tennessee ASD, quadrupling it from 1,585 to   roughly 6,000 by the 2014-15 school year.

Margo Roen, the Director of New Schools for ASD, said the strategy is to provide the best possible school experience for students who might not otherwise get it. 

Right now we have thousands of students in Tennessee that are zoned to attend schools that are in the bottom five percent. Essentially where they grow up, where they’re born, dictates that they’re going to end up getting an education that’s subpar for their entire life. This is a drastically better educational experience while they're in school in the day, which should hopefully catapult them to a new level of opportunity.

The so-called turnaround model, where the kids and school   building stay the same, and the only thing that changes are the adults, has already been tried in a few cities and is gaining momentum. Philadelphia is one such place where the Mastery Charter school operator has taken failing schools and turned them around.  In fact, President Obama commented on how well   they've done.

There is a charter school called Mastery in Philadelphia, and in just two years, three of the schools that Mastery has   taken over have seen reading and math levels double, in some cases triple.

Turnaround schools, as many of us know, are the ideal counter to the idea that charter schools find success only by cherry-picking the best students, or subtly encouraging struggling students to find another school.  Also, those who attribute low performance to poverty have a hard time explaining how simply changing the adults in a turnaround models to a charter school operator can improve scores.  

In Memphis alone, the plan is for as many as 33 public schools to be taken away from the local district and given to the state Achievement School district. 

In other news, the North Carolina Lieutenant Governor released a new video opposing Common Core State Standards.  You can find it on today's ChoiceMedia.TV homepage.

© 2013 Choice Media 

This is the Choice Media Ed Reform Minute for Wednesday, June 5.

A recent crackdown on what has been perceived as an emerging safety risk in the classroom: children playing   make believe. In the aftermath of Colombine, Sandy Hook, and other tragedies, many schools have adopted zero-tolerance weapon policies. It begs the question, where is   the line between responsible steps to minimize risk and a paranoid over-reaction?  Just in case you consider yourself in the "can't be too careful" camp, we offer the following.

Dateline: Suffolk County, Virginia, where a second-grader was suspended for pointing a pencil at another student and making gun noises. 

Trappe, Maryland, two first-graders were allegedly suspended for pointing their fingers in a gun shape at one another. They were playing a game of cops and robbers.

Florence, Arizona: A high school freshman boy was suspended for having a picture of a gun on his laptop as the desktop wallpaper.

Baltimore, Maryland: The oddest and most delicious incident came also in Maryland, where a second-grader was suspended for two days. His crime? Inadvertently biting his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun.

Are administrators overreacting? If the child's intent isn't to harm, what purpose does punishing him serve?

To many in the education reform community, there cases are further proof that common sense isn't usually the calling card of entrenched government bureaucracies. 

Kenneth Trump, President of National School Safety and Security Services, said the majority of school   administrators have too little experience in the area of school discipline, and so they overreact to the very rare,   but legitimate school tragedies, which are hyped by endless media coverage.

I think certainly, when we’re looking at anecdotal cases, whether it’s a kid who’s doing something with   a Pop Tart or someone who’s suspended for playing cowboys in a childhood, normal age and   developmental issues is inappropriate. I think one of the reasons we see that is we have a new wave of administrators who are coming into their roles in education with little training on school discipline. Sadly, we can’t legislate common sense.

Even in cases where truly violent tendencies are identified in children who may have truly started down a dangerous path, these automatic suspensions may not always be the best approach.  Dr. Elizabeth Englander is a psychologist with the Bridgewater Aggression Reduction Center in Massachusetts.   She says zero-tolerance polices that punish without addressing why the student was using violent behavior in the first place, don't make sense. 

I think it's pretty universally accepted that it's not helpful among very young children. During those age groups, children play as a way of dealing with things that frighten them or they feel sad about, for example if a child witnesses violence at home they may cope with it by playing aggressive. The appropriate reaction during early childhood is to understand why the child is behaving this way rather than simply punitive measures.  

It's not just kids.  Also this year, a Georgia teacher was suspended for using his index finger in a gun pantomime while trying to explain the Newtown, Connecticut shootings to first grade children. 

All of the children have been offered counseling in the aftermath of their teacher pointing his finger and saying "bang, bang," although none have accepted it.

In other news, @ChoiceMediaTV is the best education newswire on Twitter.  Follow it today.

© 2013 Choice Media