According to the study, no. British researchers looked at 17,000 adults, all born in the same week in 1958. Men who had attended single-sex schools as children were more likely to divorce or separate from a partner by their early 40s than those who went to coed institutions. And men educated in single-sex environments were more likely to suffer depression or "a sense of malaise." Girls, however, did not appear to feel these adverse effects. Mary Bousted of the UK's Association of Teachers and Lecturers responded thus:

All the research shows single-sex schools are good for girls but bad for boys – both in terms of academic performance and socialisation. Girls seem to learn what the nature of the beast is if they have been to single sex schools whereas boys taught on their own seem to find girls more puzzling. Boys learn better when they are with girls and they actually learn to get on better.

As Bousted's "nature of the beast" comment shows, it's easy to inject anecdotal evidence into the single-sex schooling debate, and such evidence can easily turn to gender stereotype. For my part, boys I've known who had close female friends growing up — in school or out — tend to be more feminist and generally more comfortable around women. But it's hard to assign causality here — boys who are naturally well-disposed towards girls probably tend to have more of them as friends. And while I can certainly buy that being socialized with girls from an early age helps boys with relationships later in life, I'm not sure that girls are naturally "puzzling" while boys are easy to figure out. I wonder if the kind of school students attended affected the results — some were educated privately, some publicly, and it's not clear if researchers controlled for this. I also wonder if girls reap benefits from co-ed schooling that were outside the scope of the study. Lucy Hodges, editor of the Independent's education supplement, thinks they do. She writes,

As someone who was educated in a single-sex boarding school I believe my schooling might have been improved if I had spent it in the company of boys as well as girls. It would certainly have provided some welcome distraction in lessons. Instead of reading Georgette Heyer all the way through Latin and maths, I could have been making eyes at a real-life hero a few yards away and even had some improving discussions with him about my algebra prep. As it was, I didn't really get to know a youth who wasn't in a book until I arrived at university at the tender age of 17-and-a-half.

The relationship-building implications of single-sex schooling for heterosexual girls aren't totally trivial, but it's kind of unfortunate that Hodges chooses to frame them in terms of their dubious educational benefit. She also says that her daughter "would have been better off, certainly at sixth-form, at a school with some boys – and a few more male teachers – to bring a bit of spice and interest to her life." The idea that girls need sexual excitement to perform well in school is kind of depressing — can't academic subjects add "spice and interest" to life?

I'm not convinced that the excitement of the opposite sex helps hetero kids learn math. But it does seem logical that, regardless of sexual orientation, children learn social lessons from opposite sex peers. Potential confounding variables aside, it is possible that boys learn more valuable lessons than girls, or at least different ones. They may learn that girls share their interests and goals, that they can be smart and funny and fast and cool, and — most importantly — that they are people worthy of attention and consideration. Girls probably learn the same things about boys, but they may also learn that some boys don't like it when they speak up, or that some teachers have different expectations of them because of their gender. These lessons may be damaging to girls, and single-sex education may shield them from this damage for a time. But if it's true that sex segregation hampers boys' ability to relate to girls and later to women, that's not good for either gender. Single-sex education has benefits for many people, but it's not a gender-relations panacea — if we want boys and girls to grow up free of prejudice, we may ultimately need to pay more attention to what we're teaching them than to whether we're teaching them together.

Why Single-Sex Schools Are Bad For Your Health (If You're A Boy) [Independent]
Lucy Hodges: The Perils Of Single-Sex Education [Independent]

Kami is the world's first HIV-positive Muppet. She was introduced back in 2002 to help educate kids about living with HIV/AIDS and promote acceptance of HIV-positive individuals (her name is derived from the Setswana word "Kamogelo," meaning "acceptance.") Kami, who lost her mother to AIDS, is quite knowledgable about the disease, and frequently speaks with the other Muppets about the things you can and cannot do with an HIV-positive person (sex is never mentioned - the focus is more on hugging and dealing with sadness than body-to-body transmission of the disease). The blog U Don't Like My Opinion describes her as a "healthy HIV Positive, affectionate 5 year old orphan who is a little shy but quickly joins when approached in a friendly way."

Despite Kami's positive message, some disapprove of including an HIV-positive character on a children's show. Yesterday, The Week ran a roundup of the ten most controversial moments in Sesame Street history, where Kami is listed alongside other such "scandals" as the furor over Cookie Monster's unhealthy diet and Oscar the Grouch's mood swings. According to The Week, "some parents protest that their children are too young to face the harsh realities of the virus." Juhie Bhatia for Global Voices notes that much of the controversy was located in the U.S. Although Kami has never appeared on American Sesame Street, conservatives were all up in arms before her launch in 2002, apparently riled up by the fear that she would start indoctrinate kids into the homosexual lifestyle. Kami's Wikipedia page quotes a letter from the Traditional Values Coalition:

The introduction of an HIV-infected Muppet on Sesame Street is problematic because HIV is spread primarily by homosexuals and bisexuals in the U.S. It is likely that an HIV-infected Muppet would be used to teach tolerance and acceptance of homosexuals to the preschool Sesame Street audience. In effect, this would be another propaganda tool to normalize homosexuality in our culture.

Some bloggers agree. Bhatia quotes a blogger who argues that a character like Kami is unnecessary in America, because children here "are not forced to deal with the issue of HIV/AIDS at that young of an age." Rosemarie Truglio, vice president of education and research for Sesame Workshop, responds to this type of criticism in an interview with USA Today,

"We get letters all the time," Truglio says. "My response is always this: Sesame Street is this wonderful, multicultural place where we celebrate differences as well as similarities. I want to make sure – and I've inherited this mission from our founders – that when kids watch this show, they can all see themselves."

Fortunately, Truglio's attitude seems to be the prevailing one. Kami has been named a UNICEF global Champion for Children. She has appeared alongside Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, and interviewed by Katie Couric. In 2006, she spoke with Bill Clinton about AIDS and acceptance (the video is available online here). Despite the haters, Kami has become a lasting piece of Sesame Street's history, and although we probably won't be seeing Kami in the U.S. anytime soon, she is an example of Sesame Street's willingness to weather controversy in favor of education. Tuglio explains, "we never talk down to children, and we're not afraid to explore sensitive topics."

Sesame Street's HIV-Positive Muppet Raises Awareness [Global Voices Online]
At 40, Sesame Street Is In A Constant State Of Renewal [USA Today]
Kami [Wikipedia]
Top 10 Sesame Street Controversies [The Week]
President Clinton And Muppet Kami Share HIV/AIDS Message [Unicef Youtube]

We all understand why dress codes exist: lack of distraction, safety, sometimes even to discourage conspicuous economic disparities. To show that school is serious business. Some schools ban gender-bending dress as a means of discouraging harrassment, which however suspect it may seem, at least is rooted in tragedy. (As the Times reminds us, "safety is a critical concern. In February 2008, Lawrence King, an eighth-grader from Oxnard, Calif., who occasionally wore high-heeled boots and makeup, was shot to death in class by another student.")

And then there's what happened at Morehouse last month. As Fox explains,

Recently Morehouse College, an all-male black private university in Atlanta, released its "Appropriate Attire Policy" that banned do-rags, caps, hoods and sunglasses in class and "decorative orthodontic appliances." But it also specified the following — "No wearing of clothing associated with women's garb (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at college-sponsored events."..."The image of a strong black man needs to be upheld," Cameron Thomas-Shah, student government co-chief of staff, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . "And if anyone sees this policy as something that is restrictive then maybe Morehouse is not the place for you."

Dicta like this - and, to an extent, the highly-publicized Ceara Sturgis Tuxedogate - are obviously somewhat arbitrary. As long as the clothing is neither dangerous nor out of bounds (ie, the same length and neckline rules would, one suppo, nor one the ACLU is disinclined to pursue. Should a boy dress like a drag queen for class? Well, neither should a girl - that does qualify as "distracting." An administration might argue that cross-dressing was, by its nature, distracting. I'd say, maybe for the first week. But then you get used to it. High school may be rigid, but young people are also flexible and, as we have read time and again, far more liberal-minded about issues of sexual identity than any prior generation. However insubordinate kids might be, they still ultimately take their cues from an administration - and can tell when something's arbitrary or unfair. Lawrence King, after all, was not shot because of the way he dressed, but because of the ignorance, fear and hatred of his attackers. (And, by the way, we're guessing Chinos wouldn't have guaranteed a blissful school existence.) It may be harder for a school to address this than the clothes - but surely it's also a crucial part of an education.

School Dress Codes Homophobic? [Fox]
Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School? [NY Times]

Related: "That's Just Who I Am. I Don't Dress Like A Girl. I Don't Even Own Any Girl Clothes."

Instead of spending the month saving, and giving out, candy and sweets, Jezebel, and our sister blogs in the Gawker Media Network (Deadspin, Gawker, io9, Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Lifehacker, Kotaku, and Jalopnik), will be raising money for education. You can check out the Gawker Media page here. Each blog will be picking 4 or 5 different projects that they want to highlight (although there are literally hundreds of important projects) and asking readers to please set aside a little of their hard earned cash for these kids.

We're doing it all through Donors Choose. Donors Choose is a website that links schools in need directly with charitable individuals like yourselves. It allows you to view the various projects and decide exactly where your money is going to go. Many of these schools lack funding for even the most basic things, including books, notebooks, pencils and paper. Some of them are looking for calculators or other techy gadgets. We have decided to focus on a few worthy projects that aim to promote self-confidence among young women through education. Our choices are:

Inspire Young Women In Science: Ms. C's classroom in NYC is looking for lab stools, so that their young girls can experience what it is like to be in an actual lab. The girls are currently learning science in an overcrowded classroom, and Ms. C hopes that through replicating the conditions of a science lab, her kids could get a better feel for what a career in science would be like. This high poverty school needs a total of $937.

Girls In Love With Books: Ms. W from Florida has started a book club for girls, but unfortunately, they don't have enough books. She's looking for funding to purchase three books for each girl. Her reading list includes awesome titles like Tuck Everlasting and Stargirl. They need a total of $486 to make this happen.

What Is Space Like From A Woman's Perspective?: Many girls are not encouraged to enter careers in science or math. And in inner-city Michigan, an amazing career seems even more out of reach. Ms. A would like to show her students that they can become astronauts, biologists, and pilots by providing them with books that tell the stories of real women who have done so. The total project cost is $546.

Interactive Notebooks For Female Algebra Students: This high-need school in North Carolina is looking for funding to help their female algebra students to pass a difficult end-of-course test to fulfill graduation requirements. Ms. A teaches a small group of girls year round and would like to provide them with colorful notebooks and pens to better organize their notes. She is asking for a total of $320.

Since this is a monthlong event, we're confident that our readers will rise to the occasion and help this batch of classrooms meet their goal. This is why we're asking for our readers to look through the projects on Donors Choose (they helpfully provide a search feature, if you want to narrow down your scope) and suggest any other worthy projects in the comments. We'll update you on the progress of all this as the month goes on.

The father of five-year-old twins (that's not them in the picture) whose mom is home-schooling them for kindergarten and perhaps beyond, O'Hehir writes, "Let's be honest: It's almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made." However, he says, "childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment." But this childless woman found his home-school manifesto pretty annoying — at least at first.

O'Hehir says he and his wife are just choosing their choice with regard to their kids Nini and Desmond, and that they don't hate public school or judge parents who send their kids there. But they're actually pretty snooty about the education system that they — and most adults today — had to endure. O'Hehir writes,

The real purpose of all this formal schooling is to get the kids out of the house and train them to stand in line and follow instructions while mommy and daddy get back to their ultra-important lives as economic production units.

And,

Ordinary schools tend to socialize children by way of enclosed, age-homogeneous pods, while home schooling tends to socialize children through a wide range of interactions with older kids, younger kids and adults, as well as peers.

And,

But we're also not exposing them to bullying, arbitrary systems of order and discipline, age-inappropriate standards of behavior, and the hegemony of corporatized kid culture.

And,

We're not ready to surrender our kids, and ourselves, to a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution whose primary goal, at least at this age, seems to be teaching kids how to function within a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution.

So basically formal schooling is a bully-filled discipline machine that will turn your kids into pod people just so you can keep on being an "economic production unit." But, you know, we're not judging you or anything. To his credit, O'Hehir does recognize that homeschooling isn't feasible for everyone, for economic and other reasons. And he's certainly not alone among parents in thinking that the way he (and his wife, who does most of the actual schooling) are raising their kids is the right one. But it's a little disingenuous to wonder why people don't respect your "personal decision" when you clearly don't respect the alternative.

As I read O'Hehir's article and his wife's blog, however, I noticed that something other than snootiness was turning me off. On her blog, O'Hehir's wife Leslie Kauffman describes doing some handwriting and reading practice with her kids — about an hour of dedicated "doing kindergarten" every day. The rest of their home-schooled life looks something like this:

We're learning about Hinduism at the moment; we spent hours reading tales of Shiva and Parvati, Rama and Sita, and especially Ganesh. We visited the Met twice to search for images of these deities in the South Asian wing; we paid a visit to Little India in Queens, where the kids admired saris and ate ladoos. The kids even assembled a puzzle map of Asia (which then became a playground first for their toy vehicles and then, somewhat mysteriously, for their Egyptian god and goddess figurines).

When I first read this, I was dismissive. How were kids going to learn about the shitty responsibilities of everyday life if everything they did was, well, fun? Then I thought about my own childhood. Although I did have a lot of fun as a kid, I can't say much of it was in school. I was very lucky in the particular public schools I got to go to (my elementary school, particularly for LA, was pretty awesome), but I still spent a lot of my time filling out repetitive worksheets, learning to sit still, and, yes, getting bullied. I tend to think of these as character-building experiences, lessons that have helped me become a responsible grownup, deal with difficult people, etc. But it's possible I could have learned these lessons another way, and, frankly, I'm jealous of kids who have the opportunity. Now I work (at home, no less) in a job that rewards creativity more than obedience, and it's quite possible that going to museums and building puzzle maps would have prepared me better for my current career. It's also possible that these activities might help kids grow into the kind of nonconformist adults who are capable of reforming a world that clearly has a lot of problems.

But home-schooling wasn't really an option for my family, and it would be nice to see home-schoolers come together a little more with the formal-schooling crowd. Are there ways public-school kids could get some of the benefits of home-schooling? Could home-schoolers help reform the public education system? Much as some might wish it, it seems unlikely that we'll ever live in a society where parents are the only teachers. But maybe home-schooling parents like O'Hehir can teach others something about putting play and exploration back in learning. In order to do this, though, a movement that can seem very isolationist would have to become more communal — and both sides would have to quit insulting each other.

Confessions Of A Home-Schooler [Salon]
"Doing Kindergarten" [DIY Kindergarten]

The middle school bracelet panic has been going on for some time now (I swear this story comes out ever year, with no definitive proof that kids are actually playing this game), and though administrators tell the New York Times that "it's turned out that a lot of the kids, especially the girls, wear them as fashion statements, and some were adamant they didn't have any connotation," they insist that some students were heard discussing the bracelets and the "snap" game that accompanies them, and so the school banned them as a means to keep the fad—and, presumably, the activities that accompany it—out of the school.

But taking bracelets away from students, even from those who are using them for some kind of weird sex game, does nothing to actually address the real fears administrators have. Instead of banning the bracelets, perhaps an open conversation about sexuality—the kind we apparently are not allowed to have in public schools—would serve them better.

I graduated high school in 1999; after Columbine happened, administrators banned all trenchcoats, and started keeping a close eye on any student who had the slightest trace of goth in their wardrobe. It was frustrating and humiliating for many of my classmates, who actually had to say things like, "It's just a cool coat, I don't want to blow up the school," in order to defend themselves.

The panic that strikes adults when stories of lurid or violent behavior break out amongst teens and tweens often causes them to do the easiest thing possible: remove all evidence of such things from the hallways. But no one benefits from hiding the problem, and kids aren't going to stop having sex or being psychopaths like Eric Harris simply because you take their stylistic choices away. The bracelets may be gone, but the issues still remain. The administrators may not be able to see it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

School Bans Bracelet Used In Sex Game [NYTimes]

Often enough the walkers are quite small: elementary-school aged, I'd say, maybe 9 or 10, walking alone down what everyone in my town assumes are fairly safe streets. Maybe it's due to the stories I've heard about kidnappings over the years, the ones that always start the same way: small town, nothing like that ever happens here, walking alone on his way to school, etc, but the sight of a child walking unsupervised makes me worry, and apparently I'm not alone.

In today's New York Times, Jan Hoffman explores the debate between parents who feel their children should be escorted back and forth to school and parents who feel their kids need to experience independence and freedom, even in the face of paranoia stoked by the evening news and the disapproval of fellow parents.

When I was in school, there were two types of students: the bus pass kids and the walkers. When the bell rang, the walkers were free to skip out the door and head directly home, while it was a half-hour ordeal to make sure the bus pass kids got on the right bus, knew their bus stop, and were accounted for. The walkers had the freedom; it was bus kids like me who were fretted over. But as Hoffman notes, walking to school has become a rarity these days, as busing and car pooling have become, in the eyes of many parents, anyway, a "safer" alternative. "In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school," Hoffman writes, "by 2001, only 13 percent still did."

The way you view the world changes as you get older: when I was a kid, I thought nothing of standing at the bus stop unattended for 30 minutes, waiting for the stupid bus to finally arrive. I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where kids left the house at 10am and weren't seen again until a chorus of "Dinnerrrrr!" from various mothers and fathers rang through the streets at 5. We were allowed to be independent, to have adventures, to explore, just as our parents had twenty or thirty years earlier. But the thought of my 6-year-old niece going anywhere by herself, even outside in the front yard to play without supervision, makes me incredibly nervous.

So how do we reconcile our own fears with our children's need to assert their own independence? Lenore Skenazy, who famously wrote about her decision to let her son ride the subway alone, tells Hoffman that "we don't do [children] a service by going to the worst-case scenario in your mind and acting accordingly," and perhaps that's true, but there has to be a way to ensure that your kids are safe without feeling like the world is out to get them at every turn.

For the record, my mother, who used to let my sisters and I run around the neighborhood for hours, now walks my niece to school herself, and I don't blame her. Of course, she's still quite young, and when she's older, she'll be able to go alone, but for now, I think we all feel safer knowing she has someone holding her hand.

So what say you commenters? Do you (or would you) let your children walk to school? And have you found a way to balance your fears with your child's need to be independent? Feel free to recount your experiences in the comments.

Why Can't She Walk To School? [New York Times]

Everything I type keeps coming out "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FOR THE FUCK OF SHIT FUCK I'M MOVING TO FUCKING CANADA!"

So please enjoy your morning dose of Rage while I get myself together:

Slightly better.

Now on to the actual story. Obama had planned to give a speech to schoolchildren, encouraging them to work hard and stay in school, similar to one George H. W. Bush did in 1991. Conservatives caught wind of this and decided to create a new rage-filled campaign about socialism and indoctrination. The Politico reports:

School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama's back-to-school address Tuesday – forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation's classrooms.

The White House says Obama's address is a sort of pep talk for the nation's schoolchildren. But conservative commentators have criticized Obama for trying to "indoctrinate" students to his liberal beliefs, and some parents call it an improper mix of politics and education.

Now, the speech is optional for schools. The speech will be broadcast during school hours and made available online to students who want to watch it. And I can understand the objection to having political figures in schools. But, as usual, an actual conservative response and the bullshit being peddled are completely different.

As an example, take fucknut Jim Greer, the Florida GOP Chairman, who compared Obama to the Pied Fucking Piper and referred to the speech as "liberal propaganda." Two minutes in to a segment on Hardball last night, Greer tried to explain his willful misinterpretation:

Time For School is a 12-year documentary project about seven children from different countries who are struggling to get a basic education. The first two installments, Time For School and Back To School (both of which are available online) aired in 2004 and 2006 introduced the children as they started school and then checked up on them two years later. The new film, Time For School 3, revisits the students, who are now teenagers, in two episodes airing last night and on September 9.

73 million children around the world don't attend school, and of these, two thirds of those children are female. Though more Afghan children are enrolled in school than ever before, one third of the country's children are still not in school and, again, most are girls. Shugufa is an exception because her father, who is an assistant doctor, believes in educating his daughters. When Shugufa was very young the family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan for four and a half years to escape Taliban rule. Though the Taliban is no longer technically in control, the group's attacks against women's education have grown worse in the past few years; last year, violent attacks closed down more than 600 schools in the country and Shugufa's school has been forced to tighten security.

Still, Shugufa dreams of becoming an engineer, a journalist, or a doctor. In the clip below, it's clear that Shugufa has a much different attitude toward education than many American children. "School sets you on the right path. Who doesn't love school?" she says.

Below, Shugufa's religion teacher tells her that Islam defends women's rights, which is certainly not the Taliban's interpretation. Her teacher is strict about the girls keeping their heads properly covered, but Shugufa says, "We feel comfortable wearing our scarves and we're grateful to Allah for making us Muslims."



Aside from the threat of Taliban attacks, what may ultimately put an end to Shugufa's education is the fact that girls are expected to do housework. There are 13 people in Shugufa's family and she and her sisters have to work for several hours in the morning before school, and do more chores when they return. The boys around them? The get to play. "I'm up to my neck in household chores and I have to finish all of them," says Shugufa, " My problem is that I don't have enough time to study."

Shugufa has already received more education than many Afghan girls — by age 16 three out of four have already dropped out of school. As American children are lamenting the end of summer vacation and returning to school now, one of the most striking themes in Time For School is actually how much we take education for granted.

The Time For School series is set to continue visiting the seven children through 2015, which is the date they should graduate and also the U.N.'s target date for achieving universal education. According to the U.N.'s website, the goal is to "ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling." While there are millions of children around the world desperate to learn like Shugufa, sadly after watching her story it's hard to imagine that many will be able to overcome the tremendous hurdles to their education by then.

Full Episode: Time For School [PBS]
Full Episode: Back To School [PBS]
Preview: Time For School 3 [PBS]
Universal Education [End Poverty 2015]

The objective is to engage students in workshop-like discussions by having the class choose a book to read, as opposed to a teacher assigning one to them. Supporters of the workshop format say that the open environment is more conducive to discussions, as students are more open to talking about books they choose on their own. Critics, however, claim that the students are missing out on more challenging materials, and that allowing them to essentially design their own curriculum allows them to breeze through the reading discussions without being challenged by more difficult texts. The trick, educators tell the Times, is to find a balance between the two.

"If what we're trying to get to is, everybody has read ‘Ethan Frome' and Henry James and Shakespeare, then the challenge for the teacher is how do you make that stuff accessible and interesting enough that kids will stick with it," Harvard Professor Catherine E. Snow tells the Times, "But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readers, then it seems to me that there's a lot to be said for the choice approach."

Lorrie McNeill, who is pioneering the choice-based program in her middle school classroom in Georgia, says that allowing her students to choose what they read ensures that they develop a love of reading, instead of viewing books as a chore or a task: "I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they're actually interacting with. Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird," I know that I have some kids that just don't get into it."

The best teachers I had in middle and high school were able to incorporate lighter fare and challenging classics into the curriculum, encouraging us to think critically about everything from nonsense like Louis Sachar's Sideways Stories to serious work like Toni Morrison's Beloved. I admire McNeil's approach, as she seems to understand that once you "assign" a book, you zap the reading pleasure right out of it (I've actually had to go back and read classics from high school simply for enjoyment purposes, as I read them solely to prepare for essay tests and class discussions when I was younger), and that allowing students to choose their own materials allows them to challenge themselves to perhaps take a more critical look at what some might consider "easier" reading. I don't think the classics should be tossed aside for the works of Stephanie Meyer, but I do think McNeil's approach is an interesting way of allowing students to develop of love of reading, classics or no. One hopes that that love of reading will push them toward more challenging fare, once the Twilights and Harry Potters of the world no longer hold their interest.

What say you, commenters? Should students have more of a say? Or are we being too easy on students by allowing them to potentially avoid classic literature? And which books would you choose, if you had the chance to design your own curriculum?

Reading Workshop Approach Lets Students Pick The Books [NYTimes]

In a well-researched and disturbing article, Steven Brill portrays the city's Rubber Rooms as Kafkaesque bureaucratic purgatories, where teachers are sent because of misconduct (like molestation) or incompetence and must wait out the long process of arbitration. Brill describes one as "a windowless room in a shabby office building" in Manhattan, where the occupants sleep, play board games, or argue over folding chairs. They wait there until an arbitrator hears and resolves their cases — an average of three years. In a 2007 Times article, Samuel A. Freedman made the rooms sound even more hellish. He described one thus:

The room in question was about 1,100 square feet and on blueprints submitted to the Fire Department was designed to hold 26 people. On this day, it contained upward of 75. It had no windows, no land phone, no Internet access, no wall decorations, not even a clock. Any personal belongings left overnight were removed by custodians.

A disabled teacher with a service dog was initially allowed to sit outside this room — she was later forced to move inside, and several teachers who are allergic to dogs were forced to move out. According to Brill, several teachers confined to rubber rooms compared themselves to detainees at Guantánamo. The conditions obviously aren't as severe, but the rubber rooms are a little like prison, with an important difference — teachers who are sent there still get paid, and accrued benefits and seniority. Brill notes that one senior teacher, Brandi Scheiner, will earn $300,000 for three years in a rubber room, plus an additional $6,000 a year for the rest of her life in pension benefits — all without once entering a classroom. And that's not counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars it can cost the city to settle a teacher misconduct or incompetent case via arbitration.

Brill paints the rubber rooms as a poor solution to a difficult problem — incompetent teachers are almost impossible to actually fire. The United Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in New York, was founded in 1960 in response to a variety of injustices including "meagre salaries, tyrannical principals, witch hunts for Communists, and gender discrimination against a mostly female workforce (at one point, there was a rule requiring any woman who got pregnant to take a two-year unpaid leave)." Now, however, the UFT, like many teachers' unions across the country, has grown into an incredibly powerful body that mandates lifetime teacher tenure and compensation based on seniority rather than performance. The result: even teachers like Patricia Adams (Brill has changed her name), who was found passed out drunk in her classroom, cannot be outright fired — Adams spent two years in a rubber room and in arbitration hearings before finally being reassigned to an office job, where she passed out again and was finally fired.

Less extreme cases of incompetence are obviously even harder to deal with. Teachers' unions across the country resist the use of test scores to measure teacher performance, but the ratings system currently in place are inadequate. Brill writes that in districts that rate teachers as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, 99% receive a satisfactory rating. And even when there are more choices, 94% still get one of the top two ratings.

So why are teachers, unlike almost any other workers, exempt from any sort of performance accountability? It's tempting to chalk it up to unions unthinkingly protecting their own, but that's far from the whole story. Teacher Brandi Scheiner offers a telling perspective. Before reform efforts by Mayor Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein, she says, "everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own. There was no need to push anyone out." Another teacher Brill talked to in a rubber room said, "we can tell if we're doing our jobs. We love these children."

But the two aren't synonymous. Many people Brill talked to got into teaching because of a love of children, and it is a profession that tends to draw people with high ideals. But loving children doesn't mean you can teach them math, and commitment to an ideal isn't the same as putting it into practice. Some teachers might say that teaching is different from all other professions, because teachers are motivated by passion rather than pursuit of the bottom line. But passion by no means guarantees the kind of honest, clear-eyed self-evaluation Scheiner talks about. If teachers truly love children, they should welcome such evaluation, even when it comes, as it sometimes must, from the outside. This doesn't necessarily mean rigidly tying teacher retention to test scores, but it does mean making sure that people who want to teach children actually can. And when they can't, districts should be able to fire them — not send them to to makeshift prisons for expensive, pointless years.

The Rubber Room [New Yorker]
Where Teachers Sit, Awaiting Their Fates [NYT]

[Image of Neeru Paharia| Photograph by Ben Stechschulte]

Jim Groom is ""instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it," and one of the featured innovators in "Who Needs Harvard?" Fast Company's exploration of the changing nature of higher education.

All the people and ideas discussed in the Anya Kamenetz's article converge on one idea: our model for higher education needs to change and adapt to continue to be relevant. This is a powerful message, especially now as the United States educational rankings are sliding (the article states we've slid to tenth most educated nation, down from number one) and the average cost of a college education is spiraling out of control.

But can moving to an open-source model of education work and still provide the type of structure and benefits of a traditional school setting? A few of the interview subjects decided to directly tackle that question:

In 2005, [Neeru Paharia, now a PhD student at Harvard Business School] started AcaWiki, a crowdsourced compilation of free summaries of academic papers. Now, she says, she wants to address "all the other things that a university does for you: It provides you a clear path from A to B, provides social infrastructure of teachers and other students, and accreditation so you actually get credit for what you do. So the question becomes, Is there a way of hacking something like this together?"

At a conference in Croatia last year, Paharia met Jan Philipp Schmidt, a German computer scientist working on open courseware in South Africa; together with a Canadian and an Australian, they started Peer2Peer University, which has become one of the most buzzed-about initiatives in open education. Would-be students can use the Web site to convene and schedule classes, meet online, and tutor one another; a volunteer facilitator for each course helps the process along. Peer2Peer got a $70,000 seed grant from the Hewlett Foundation to launch its first 10 pilot courses, in topics from behavioral economics to Wikipedia visualization — content areas that already have online audiences of self-motivated learners.

Other educators are decided to solve one of the problems that leads to the devaluation of college degrees in the workplace - difficulties measure competence, not just coursework:

If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University, is proudest of his college's innovation in the third, hardest-to-crack dimension of education: accreditation and assessment. WGU was formed in the late 1990s, when the governors of 19 western states decided to take advantage of the newfangled Internet and create an online university to expand access to students in rural communities across their region. Today, it's an all-online university with 12,000 students in all 50 states. It's a private not-for-profit, like Harvard; the only state money was an initial $100,000 stake from each founding state. WGU runs entirely on tuition: $2,890 for a six-month term.

"We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree."

WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. "We asked them, 'What is it the graduates you're hiring can't do that you wish they could?' We've never had a silence after that question." Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor's without taking a course.

I have to admit, all this discussion appeals to me. As a someone who read The Teenage Liberation Handbook at a formative age, adopted some of the key principles of the unschooling movement, and subsequently dropped out of college when I couldn't reconcile the cost with the benefit, I can really get behind a lot of these initiatives, particularly for those of us with a strong focus or who, for reasons of temperament or ability, cannot gel with the current system of education.

In addition, I think that looking at educational alternatives would help to reset the value of a college degree. I had an argument with a former boss once, over the required schooling needed to do the job I was leaving. In agreeing to help her write the job description, I noticed she had slipped in a "college degree required" line.

When I asked why, pointing out that I had done the job well without a degree (because really, the job only required reading comprehension and basic communication skills) she said "well, that's just to keep the riff-raff out."

Excuse me?

"By your standards, I'm uneducated," I pointed out.

She waved off my concerns, but I - having fought with the employment market for over a decade at that point - knew that the lack of a degree resulted in an instant disqualification for many jobs. And many of those jobs were compensating at under $12 an hour, which strikes me a bit unreasonable. It's one thing to require a degree for an entry-level, stepping stone job, but for a job you acknowledge is dead end? Where is the logic in that decision? It just cheapens the overall value of earning a degree.

However, the price of going without a college degree is a high one to pay, and life is much much harder. However, with many college-qualified students choosing to opt-out due to costs and other factors, perhaps it is time to examine alternate methods of education.

Kamenetz agrees, noting:

Paharia's idea of "hacking" education — putting something together on the fly — is important. All of these projects are still very much works in progress. Not even the most starry-eyed geeks are claiming that an LCD monitor can and should replace the richest, most fully textured college experience out there (at least not yet). But it could certainly represent an upgrade in opportunity for those who can't afford college, or for the half of American college students who attend community colleges, or even the 80% who attend nonselective universities.

Ultimately what interests Paharia is proving the model, demonstrating that there's a way to provide education cheaply or even for free to all who are qualified. "I ride the Boston T around and I see these ads for schools, and it bothers me that so much hope is rested on having an education, and yet at the end of the day you end up with $100,000 in debt. What are you paying for? And is this the best way of setting up the system?"

Peer2Peer is not the only attempt to bridge the gap between free material and cheap education. The online University of the People, founded by Shai Reshef, who made his fortune in for-profit education, signed up its first class this fall — 300 students from nearly 100 countries. While it has yet to get accreditation, the not-for-profit plans to offer bachelor's degrees in business and computer science using open courseware and volunteer faculty; fees would add up to about $4,000 for a full four-year degree.

Perhaps it is time to start restructuring our ideas of what constitutes an education. In the process of explaining why our educational model functions the way it does, Kamenetz explains:

The university as we know it was born around AD 1100, when communities formed in Bologna, Italy; Oxford, England; and Paris around a scarce, precious information technology: the handwritten book. Illuminated manuscripts of the period show a professor at a podium lecturing from a revered volume while rows of students sit with paper and quill — the same basic format that most classes take 1,000 years later.

Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions.

We do benefit from a glut of information, and only lack a way to effectively organize and quantify learning outside of a university system. But even if these new online systems give rise to less expensive options for college, will our existing digital divide continue to perpetuate the same set of problems?

Who Needs Harvard? How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education [Fast Company]
Cost of higher education gets more pricey [USA Today]
The Teenage Liberation Handbook [Amazon]
Unschooling [Wikipedia]
Misperceptions and Unexpected Barriers Deter Some of The Nation's Brightest Students From Attending College [IHEP]
Digital Divide [Wikipedia]

(Image of Neeru Paharia| Photograph by Ben Stechschulte)

Along with four others, Amanda-who has a BA from Cornell, a master's in education from the University of Michigan, and a law degree from Wayne State University-is working on opening the Boggs Educational Center, which the founders hope will be open by the 2011-2012 school year. I spoke with Amanda by phone while she was on her way back to Detroit from a camping trip in the Pacific Northwest with her son about the challenges of teaching in the inner city, how education can be fixed, and urban gardening.

[Doree will be interviewing interesting women every week for us. If you have someone you'd like to suggest, email her.]

How'd you get involved with the Boggs Educational Center?
A friend named Nate Walker. This is sort of his pet project that he's been wanting to do for a long time. So he brought four of us in on it. The way we all came to know about it for the most part was through the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, it's basically called the Boggs Center. It was founded in the name of Grace Lee Boggs and Jimmy Boggs, who are Detroit activists. Jimmy is no longer with us but Grace Lee is 94 years old and she is the most amazing person. She's worked with us a lot. And we've had a lot of conversations on our educational philosophies. The five of us decided to get together and put them into action, so the school's named after her, just to keep her legacy around. She's been an inspiration to the five of us.

You've been teaching since 1999.
I came back from studying abroad in East Africa, in Kenya and Zanzibar. I hadn't gone to college thinking I was going to become a teacher-they don't even have a teacher education program where I went. But I had a great professor who taught a class called the Sociology of the African-American Experience and it dealt mostly with issues of education in urban areas. So when I came back from Africa, I ended up living in Detroit and I decided to try and find a job in the schools, for an uncertified something or other. And I ended up as an emergency sub without a teaching certification, in a Catholic school. And it was a really amazing, wonderful experience. So I went back to school and got certified and got my master's degree and became a full-fledged teacher.

Are you from the Detroit area?
I'm from the suburbs of Detroit.

What were you teaching when you were an emergency sub?
I taught all subjects to third graders.

You said it was an amazing experience-what was particularly compelling about it?
There were cultural differences that I was really unaware of. And working with kids who are so open and honest and innocent, they made those differences really apparent to me. I learned a lot about the students I was working with. I learned a lot about another culture within my own community. We had so much fun together. We learned so much on both sides and so I really wanted to keep working with students.

What did you teach after you got your certification?
After I got certified I went into Detroit Public Schools and I taught fifth grade for three years. During that time I was laid off once and transferred twice. I loved my school in Detroit Public Schools, I loved my principal, I loved the people I worked with and the students there, but I actually got pregnant in my third year and it became difficult to get two weeks' notice of not having a job so I did go work at a charter school in Detroit.

How many years were you there?
I'm still at the charter school. This will be my fifth year.

What are some of the challenges of being a single mom?
Well, I'm single and I'm a mother. He spends a couple nights a week with his dad. His dad lives right near by us. He stays with my parents once in awhile, once a week even. It can be challenging financially a little bit. As far as the upbringing, we're definitely trying to create a village mentality for him. We're co-parenting, we're a pretty good team. I'm still friends with my ex-he's actually one of the five of us starting the school, Alfred [DeFreece].

You guys aren't sure exactly what kind of school it's going to be. It could be a charter school, a regular public school, or a private school. Can you talk a little bit about what the thought processes are for all those different options?
I would think most likely it's going to be a charter school because it's just sort of the most practical method for us to open a school in an efficient manner. Making it an independent school would be difficult for our population because we're low socioeconomically. And being just a regular old public school through a district would be major-it probably just wouldn't work out. Most likely we do want to be a charter but the reason it's vague on the website is we really are just trying to focus on our principles and our mission, and start formulating everything on top of that. We want to come in with a really solid base on what we wanted the school to be and focus on, and then build from that. We're now just sort of starting to build the logistics into the mission and the vision.

What will the selection process be?
For a charter school in Michigan it has to be completely random. We have to go by a general lottery. We can't be selective. We'll start with a few, maybe two to three, kindergarten classes with a small set size undetermined as yet, and add a new kindergarten cohort each year.

What are some of the issues of being a white teacher in a majority black school?
For the most part it's really a learning experience on both sides, I think. There have been things that come up where one side, whether it's a parent or me, feels like there's cultural insensitivity coming from the other side. In my experience we can approach each other and talk about these things. There have been some more slightly accusatory types of things from time to time but they're usually worked out with some discussion. We have a lot to learn from each other. I think the real pitfall is white teachers going into schools with mostly black students and acting like they really understand the black students' experience and try to be down with them. I think that's a pitfall. The students see through that. I don't think it creates a trusting environment.

Can you sum up how this school is going to be different from other schools, or other schools you've taught at?
I've had really great experiences at the schools I've taught at, so I don't think it's going to be totally different. All of us are bringing in experiences from where we come from. I think within big districts the focus has moved from-there are obsolete systems. There were systems that were preparing kids for factory jobs, or jobs period, and there aren't jobs to be prepared for. So we're trying to move toward the question of what does it mean to be a human being and an active member of society and not to minimize the importance of jobs and survival, because that will certainly be a goal, but our focus we want to be on the question, and it's a Grace Lee Boggs question, of what does it mean to be a human being. We formulated four guiding principles based on that question. One, creativity. Two, multiple literacy.

What does that mean?
Not just reading and writing but creative expression, verbal expression, expression through the arts, anything you can think of. Ways of understanding your environment and expressing your opinions. Third, community involvement, which is especially important to me, and fourth, critical thinking skills.

Can you go into a little bit of what you're envisioning for the community involvement portion?
We definitely plan on having a strong urban gardening, or even urban farming, component. One of the five of us, Frank Donner, is a big urban farmer and we want to work on teaching kids about sustainable living. How can we produce for ourselves, put our resources back into our community, not be in isolation from the community but work within it. So urban gardens would be one way to do that. We're just starting with the kindergarten and adding a grade every year. So with the kids, what we hope to be able to do is identify problems or at least needs within the community, and use those as lessons for problem-solving but building in academic skills or meet needs of the community.

I know that's kind of a hot topic right now, getting kids in urban areas to learn about how to eat better and making good food choices. Are you at the stage where you're talking about school lunches or other kinds of ways to encourage kids to eat healthily and make good food choices?
We're not there yet but that's definitely on the horizon. A friend of ours, Greg Willerer, has created a little business with his students where they grow their own food-they grew tomatoes and peppers and learned how to make it into Tabasco sauce, sold it at the Eastern Market in Detroit, put the money back into their business, they were attempting to sell their produce to the schools for lunches-that was going to be the next phase. So that is definitely something we'd like to consider, but we haven't formulated that yet.

How are you going to start the critical thinking component at the kindergarten level?
We're just getting started at formulating our curriculum. We're going on a retreat this weekend together to sort of start. We plan to have our curriculum based on higher order thinking skills. The schools have become so test-oriented that there's a lot of delivery of material and information and it's not the schools' fault so much, it's mandated. But we're going to figure out how we're going to work in the testing system that we have to participate in but encourage higher order thinking and critical thinking where students can not just regurgitate, but create their own questions and address them with the skills we want them to build while they're with us.

What are some of the things that could be done on the federal level to make a difference in urban education?
No Child Left Behind makes things extremely difficult with AYP-Adequate Yearly Progress. A major component of No Child Left Behind is that-and I don't claim to be an expert on No Child Left Behind-every school has to make Adequate Yearly Progress, and that's the big buzz term. So whatever our state testing scores are, each school has to make a certain percentage improvement in every subject based on-I don't even know, it's sheer madness. If you don't make it you go onto a level 2 where you're being observed, and if you don't make it that year you go into a level 3, and there are all these levels. And you get to a point where your school is completely reconstituted and all the teachers are like, oh... It's very stressful. It's stressful for the kids. I think it discourages the love of learning. It's our job to make them understand it's important to us because it's important to our school staying alive but it really doesn't affect them personally, and it's really hard to get them to understand that we really just need them to do their best. It takes two weeks of instructional time to administer the test, time when we could be doing other stuff. It's just a major hindrance on teachers and it takes away so many opportunities in our classrooms, where we have to spend so much time preparing for this stuff. That's a really big thing. Then as far as I understand, No Child Left Behind is underfunded. So whatever they're mandating for the states to do, they're not paying for what they're supposed to be. It's a major drain on resources and time and students' energy, and it does teach useful information but it does not in any way encourage critical thinking.

What are some of the common misconceptions about day to day life in an urban school?
I don't know if they're misconceptions because I've only worked in the schools that I've worked in. But I think people see fights, teachers doing nothing, administrators doing nothing, people just enjoying their jobs because their unions have them put in place solidly-and in the schools I've been in it's certainly not true. In the Detroit Public Schools, in the Catholic school, in the charter school I'm in now I am constantly impressed every day by the people around me, how hard everyone works. Sometimes people like to blame the parents-it is what it is. We all show up every day, kids, parents, administrators, and just work really really hard.

What's on your wish list for urban education, if someone could wave their magic wand?
That's what we're trying to do, wave our magic wand and make a school. Definitely having a smaller class size is beautiful. At this school I work at right now our class size is 16. And that's the limit. So everything is very personalized for the students. We become very close with their families as well. In elementary school we have them for at least two years, so we get to know each student very well and can address their needs and their strengths. More money is always good for some creative positions, especially working with struggling students-there's always a shortage for those students. We want our school to be intergenerational, where we have the community involved, from the grandparents down to the children, with everyone bringing what they love into the place of learning. Just schools taking a whole different approach to learning-not necessarily breaking the day up into little compartmentalized classes but really being able to do organic genuine projects that integrate all the skills that we want our students to come out with.

You sort of alluded to this earlier when you said that a lot of the urban schools in Detroit were kind of created to prepare students for jobs that no longer exist. Can you talk about some of the challenges that are unique to Detroit?
I mean obviously we have major issues with the auto industry. Everybody has either lost a job in their family or knows someone who knows someone close to them who has lost a job. It's frustrating and it's just painful to sort of put up the front that if you work hard and do your best you'll come out with what you want and you'll meet your goals, because that's not a given anymore. You can work as hard as you want and there just aren't any jobs. So that's difficult. But having said that, besides the challenges in Detroit there are just so many unique opportunities in Detroit for the same reason. We have an opportunity to do this because the schools are struggling so much that we have the opportunity to provide an alternative. Another example is there are so many burned out lots and destroyed properties that urban gardening could be this major movement. I can't imagine there's another city where you have, in the middle of the city, one house on the block. It's not really a pretty sight but a lot of people have been taking over these city-owned lots and using them for sustainable farming.

When did you get a law degree?
I did the evening program at Wayne State University while I was teaching. I was in Detroit Public Schools at the time and I kept getting laid off, and I was just thinking, you know, I won't teach anywhere but the city, so if the city can't keep me I need to start thinking about something else. The charter schools weren't super popular at that point. I just figured it could only open doors, it wasn't going to hurt anything. I decided just to try it and I really fell in love with the law, so I decided to just stick with it.

How does that kind of inform your teaching?
It's funny because it definitely informs how I teach problem solving and analysis of literacy, just because studying law is digging into things in a different way than we're taught in school. Also I like to work with my students on advocating-so just as a classroom activity, we'll work on taking a side and advocating for one side or the other, or picking an actual issue in the world and advocating for it. And just to provide an example for my students because they think it's really interesting. Some of them have come to class with me before. They just think being a lawyer's really cool.

Is there anything else you want to add about either the school or about yourself?
One thing is that part of the impetus for the school is that three out of the five of us have kids and we all live in Detroit, so we're all trying to create the opportunity that we want for our own kids.

Related: Boggs Educational Center [Official Site]

Azfar is a midwife, teacher and public servant dedicated to women's health issues. With the help of American-based charity Jhpiego (full disclosure: I worked with their CEO Leslie Mancuso for a conference in a prior job), she's attempting to increase the numbers of and training for midwives in Afghanistan to combat a serious maternal mortality problem. Writes Denise Grady in the New York Times:

Afghanistan has the world's second-highest death rate in women during pregnancy and childbirth (only Sierra Leone's is worse). For every 100,000 births, 1,600 mothers die; in wealthy countries the rates range from 1 to 12. In one remote northeastern province, Badakhshan, 6,507 mothers die for every 100,000 births, according to a 2005 report in the medical journal Lancet. In all, 26,000 Afghan women a year die while pregnant or giving birth.

The main causes of these deaths are hemorrhage and obstructed labor, which can be fatal if a woman cannot obtain a Caesarean section. Even if the mother survives, obstructed labor without a Caesarean usually kills the baby. Most of the maternal deaths - 78 percent, according to the Lancet report - could be prevented.

Azfar does see some reason for optimism.

She ran through statistics showing notable increases recently in the country's number of midwives, their education and the percentage of women who give birth with the help of a "skilled attendant," usually a midwife. The United States, the World Bank, the European Commission, Unicef, the Hopkins group (known as Jhpiego) and other donors have all helped Afghanistan's Ministry of Public Health to make improvements.

But there is a long way to go. Most women in Afghanistan, as many as 80 percent, still give birth without skilled help, and only a third receive any medical care at all during pregnancy.

Azfar, working tirelessly despite 5 children of her own, has been using her own training and the money she raises to help improve the quality of training and the number of Afghan midwives.

Joya came to her political activism from another profession serving women: she was an underground school teacher during the Taliban years. Johann Hari writes in The Independent:

She soon discovered that she loved to teach – and, when she turned 16, a charity called the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities (OPAWC) made a bold suggestion: go to Afghanistan, and set up a secret school for girls, under the noses of the Taliban tyranny.

So she gathered her few clothes and books and was smuggled across the border – and "the best days of my life" began. She loathed being forced to wear a burka, being harassed on the streets by the omnipresent "vice and virtue" police, and being under constant threat of being discovered and executed. But she says it was worth it for the little girls. "Every time a new girl joined the class, it was a triumph," she says, beaming. "There is no better feeling."

Teaching — and avoiding the Taliban — gave her the courage to take on the directorship of the charity and then to open a women's clinic, just before September 11th.

But after the Taliban fell, she saw life getting harder for herself and the women she served, as the warlords that ruled Afghanistan in between the Soviet withdrawal and the ride of the Taliban came back to power right under the Americans' noses.

As an example, she names the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. He set up his own "vice and virtue" squads which terrorised women and smashed up video and music cassettes. He had his own "private militias, private jails". The constitution of Afghanistan is irrelevant in these private fiefdoms.

Joya discovered just what this meant when she started to set up the clinic – and a local warlord announced that it would not be allowed, since she was a woman, and a critic of fundamentalism. She did it anyway, and decided to fight this fundamentalist by running in the election for the Loya jirga ("meeting of the elders") to draw up the new Afghan constitution. There was a great swelling of support for this girl who wanted to build a clinic – and she was elected.

Naturally, her new status as a woman in the Parliament meant little to the warlords in it, many of whom were (and are) notorious abusers of women and human rights. Joya couldn't stay silent.

When her turn came, she stood, looked around at the blood-soaked warlords on every side, and began to speak. "Why are we allowing criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now... It is they who turned our country into the centre of national and international wars. They are the most anti-women elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again... They should instead be prosecuted in the national and international courts."

These warlords – who brag about being hard men – could not cope with a slender young woman speaking the truth. They began to shriek and howl, calling her a "prostitute" and "infidel", and throwing bottles at her. One man tried to punch her in the face. Her microphone was cut off and the jirga descended into a riot.

Joya had to be placed under near-constant protection, and American and NATO forces explicitly told her to stop antagonizing their warlord allies.

But the US and Nato occupiers instructed Joya that she must show "politeness and respect" for the other delegates. When Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, said this, she replied: "If these criminals raped your mother or your daughter or your grandmother, or killed seven of your sons, let alone destroyed all the moral and material treasure of your country, what words would you use against such criminals that will be inside the framework of politeness and respect?"

Khalilzad was unmoved, and the constitutional convention went forward. On the strength of her speech and the backlash it engendered from men, Joya was elected to Parliament and the death threats only mounted.

She started her maiden speech by saying: "My condolences to the people of Afghanistan..."

Before she could continue, the warlords began to shout that they would rape and kill her. One warlord, Abdul Sayyaf, yelled a threat at her. Joya looked him straight in the eye and said: "We are not in [the area he rules by force] here, so control yourself."

The shouting didn't quiet Joya, and the men got angrier and angrier, eventually (and illegally) stripping her of her Parliamentary seat for questioning the amnesty-in-perpetuity they elected to provide themselves with for war crimes. This, notably, is the same Parliament — and President — that was more than willing to legalize marital rape for electoral success.

These days, she spends her hours moving in between safe houses while criticizing the government. She was married in secret two years ago to a man who supports her work, but they remain too concerned for his safety to live together. She expects that, sooner or later, the fundamentalists gunning for her will succeed.

Where does this courage come from? She acts as if the answer is obvious – anyone would do it, she claims. But they don't. Perhaps it comes from her belief that the struggle is long and our individual lives are short, so we can only advance our chosen cause by inches, knowing others will pick up our baton. "When I die, others will come. I am sure of that," she says.

She has written a book, to make sure something of her struggle to bring education to girls, health care to women and democracy to her country are remembered after her death. And, perhaps it even won't.

In War and Isolation, a Fighter for Afghan Women [New York Times]
Malalai Joya: The Woman Who Will Not Be Silenced [The Independent]

Related: Jhpiego [Johns Hopkins]
Defense Committee for Malalai Joya [Official Site]

Earlier: U.S.-Backed Afghan Government Passes Pro-Rape Law To Win Election

[Hanover, July 24. Image via Getty]

Students play the roles of prostitutes at a protest rally in the northern German city of Hanover on July 24, 2009. The students were drawing attention to the fact that many must work as prostitutes to fund their studies. AFP PHOTO DDP / NIGEL TREBLIN GERMANY OUT (Photo credit should read NIGEL TREBLIN/AFP/Getty Images)

McNeal allegedly swiped the passwords of three of her co-workers to change her daughter's test scores and grades, in addition to lowering the scores and grades of her daughter's classmates. According to the Associated Press, "McNeal is accused of altering nearly 200 scores and grades covering four school years," which gives me a title for the Lifetime adaptation: "Mother, May I Ruin Other Children's Academic Careers In Order To Make Sure My Kid Gets An A? The Caroline McNeal Story."

McNeal was busted when her daughter, Brittany, had conflicting SAT scores in different databases: the official test results, distributed by the College Board, showed that Brittany had scored a 1370. The school's records, however, displayed a result of 1730. It was then discovered that McNeal had entered the score before the official records had even arrived at the school. Busted!

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, McNeal has since been charged with "charged with 29 counts of unlawful use of a computer and 29 counts of tampering with public records, all third-degree felonies." Along with the SAT scores, McNeal raised her daughter's grades by several points in different classes, and had the nerve to bump her competitors down a few points, going so far as to reduce the grades of two girls who were ranked higher than Brittany.

It is easy to be mad at Ms. McNeal: she's a cheat, and what she did was terrible, especially because her actions affected not only her daughter, but other students who worked hard to earn the grades that she attempted to take from them. But perhaps this case speaks to the weird competitiveness of high school, the push for that ever-important class rank and the scholarships it may bring. Unfortunately, Ms. McNeal took the selfish, easy way out, and tried to stomp on other people's futures to ensure that her daughter's would be secure. Brittany's grades were good to begin with: in some cases, McNeal simply bumped her from a 94 to a 95. Sadly, it seems that no matter what her daughter accomplished, McNeal didn't think it was enough, and in trying to push other people out of the way in order to get her daughter ahead, all she ended up doing was making both of them look pretty terrible.

Brittany may have walked out of high school with As on her report card, but her mother just received a big ol' F in ethics, and it's going to come with a price.

Secretary Charged With Changing Daughter's Grades [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
Mom Charged With Changing Daughter's Grades [MSNBC]

[Hannover, Germany; June 17. Image via Getty]

A woman holding a placard saying 'Free education? - Yes we can!' protests during the national day of the so-called education strike during which demonstrations all over Germany were organised to ask for better learning conditions and more means for the German education system, on June 17, 2009 in Hannover, northern Germany. AFP PHOTO DDP /NIGEL TREBLIN GERMANY OUT (Photo credit should read NIGEL TREBLIN/AFP/Getty Images)