This week in California, teachers are claiming a “State of Emergency.” Their goal is to get Governor Jerry Brown to bump up taxes to keep the education budget steady. According to SFGate, hundreds of teachers marched in Sacramento yesterday to protest. Other events planned for this week include “grade-ins” at local malls intended to demonstrate the amount of time teachers spend working outside of the school day.

How to spend money on education is a national hot topic as well. President Barack Obama has pledged to boost the graduation rate and "out-educate" global competitors by meeting and exceeding international standards. So what’s the strategy?

Dave Eggers, author and founder of writing program 826 National, points out in an op-ed for the New York Times that our response to an education crisis is drastically different than our response to a defense crisis. “When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, ‘It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!’” he writes.

Instead, we blame the planners, strategists, and the secretary of defense. However, the trend in education is to blame the teachers for poor test scores and cut more money from the education budget.

In Eggers’ opinion, recruitment and fair treatment of teachers is key. Other countries with higher teacher salaries have better results - and are able to recruit their top college graduates into the field of teaching. (Check out an awesome infographic about teacher pay around the world.) BUT - most of all, these other countries trust their teachers. “They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem,” he writes.

The education policy committee in the California State Senate will hear testimony today for and against the FAIR Education Act, introduced by State Senator Mark Leno. This act would, “prohibit discriminatory education and ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are fairly and accurately included in instructional materials,” according the the press release from the GSA Network and Equality California, the two sponsors of the bill.

Basically, LGBT people and historic events in the LGBT movement would legally have to show up in school textbooks. In what capacity? Leno hopes that the LGBT struggle will show up in textbooks as a civil rights movement, highlighting important events, like when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their list of mental illnesses in 1972.  "Imagine how different the interaction among students would be if, in an age-appropriate fashion - this issue of homosexuality and this issue of the LGBT community is all a part of a civil rights movement. Not unlike other civil rights movements,” said Leno.

"I think we’ve all been horrified by this ongoing phenomenon, if not crisis, of bullying going on within our schools, leading to tragic suicides among our LGBT youth in the past couple of years,” said Leno. “And it seems to me that as human beings, it’s not uncommon that we fear and dislike that which is uncommon or unknown to us.”

Leno contends that dealing with this fear of the unknown could help eliminate peer violence in schools. “If we were to better educate our students so that there would be more familiarity with those who are different from the societal norm, children would grow up with a more understanding and  accepting attitude, and there would be more respect from students on school campuses,” he said.

Some things are like riding a bike... you never really forget how to do them. 
As it turns out, a strange kind of amnesia has taken over students in China: they have forgotten how to write Chinese characters.  After practicing careful calligraphy for years in lower grades, out of over 2,000 students polled by China Youth Daily, 83 percent struggle to remember how to write characters as reported recently in the Agence France Presse.

Similarly, cursive handwriting in the United States is going out of style.  Even though cursive handwriting remains in the California State Standards for elementary school and probably many other state standards too, it is not included in the National Common Core Standards (see related previous YMI post) that some school districts have adopted, according to an Oakland Unified curriculum specialist.  Is that because we don’t think it’s important anymore?

USA Today gives a couple possible reasons. “Some fear classic penmanship has been left behind as preparation for state assessment tests dominates class time. Others blame the rise of the Internet, combined with a push to ensure that children are technologically literate.”  

Technology plays a big role in the Chinese phenomenon as well.  According to an AFP article, “Character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet.  The user enters each word using pinyin, and the device offers a menu of characters that match. So users must recognize the character, but they don't need to be able to write it.”

Is there ever a time when you need to be able to use cursive?  The most practical concern might be knowing how to sign your name in cursive.  USA Today says, “Lisa Smoak, a parent volunteer at Longleaf Elementary in Melbourne, Fla., recently took a thank you card to school for her son's fifth-grade class to sign.  Of 22 pupils, only three signed in cursive.”  Maybe we’ll all have electronic signatures soon, but until then, the debate goes on about whether to keep the traditional art of writing as a priority.  

(Updated on April 28, 2010)

(download mp3)

The following was broadcast on KUNM FM, Albuquerque as part of a series Youth Speak Out, a collaboration between Youth Radio, Youth Media Project in Santa Fe, KUNM’s Youth Radio in Albuquerque, and New Mexico's Youth Alliance, made possible by a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. For more information about Youth Speak Out go to www.youthradio.org/new-mexico.

by Bethany Trujillo

The first time I had sex, I got pregnant. I was fifteen years old and I didn’t have any feelings for the guy. We weren’t in a relationship and there were no emotional connections. I had sex with him because two weeks prior my best friend lost her virginity and I wanted to have the experience, too.  It took me two weeks to finally get a hold of the guy, and when he found out he didn’t take it very well.  He said that he didn’t want to be stuck with me for the rest of his life.

You can't imagine how hard it was to tell my mom that I was pregnant at the young age of fifteen. It shocked my mom because we had never discussed sex before.  But, it went better than I expected. She was mad, but understood. She told me that she would support me regardless of my decision.  She was afraid that I wouldn’t graduate high school or be as successful as I could be if I was raising a child.
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Can you imagine going to school and learning about Twitter? Well, that’s what the students at DePaul University’s Communication class in Chicago are learning. The class is called "Digital Editing: From Breaking News to Tweets." The students will learn how to operate Twitter in a way that “teaches students how to confirm and evaluate reports by citizen journalists, particularly in cases of breaking news.”

For those who are late to the party, Twitter is a free social networking site that allows users to send messages to friends known as “tweets”. Tweets consist of 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile and share with others.

The class is taught by 23-year-old Craig Kanalley, adjunct professor at DePaul University and digital intern at Chicago Tribune. Kanalley tells us how he the idea of using Twitter in a classroom came about.

Where did the idea of incorporating Twitter in your curriculum come about?

I've been operating the Web site BreakingTweets.com for several months now and it dawned on me that it would make a great class. It's very practical and offers students real-world experience using cutting-edge technology. I pitched it to DePaul's College of Communication and they liked the idea.