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Health

How ‘Slut Shaming’ Has Been Written Into School Dress Codes Across The Country

By Annie-Rose Strasser and Tara Culp-Ressler on May 6, 2013 at 3:00 pm

Capistrano Valley High's school dance dress code.

Last month, a New Jersey middle school banned girls from wearing strapless dresses to prom. Administrators claimed that the dresses were “distracting” — though they refused to specify exactly how or why. Parents reacted strongly to the rule; some supported the dress code while others deemed it “slut-shaming.” On Friday, the school compromised by allowing girls to wear single-strap or see-through-strap dresses.

This is no isolated incident in the United States. Across the country, young girls are being told what not to wear because it might be a “distraction” for boys, or because adults decide it makes them look “inappropriate.” At its core, every incident has a common thread: Putting the onus on young women to prevent from being ogled or objectified, instead of teaching those responsible to learn to respect a woman’s body. Here are five other recent examples:

1. A middle school in California banned tight pants. At the beginning of last month, a middle school in Northern California began telling girls to avoid wearing pants that are “too tight” because it “distracts the boys.” At a mandatory assembly for just the female students, the middle school girls were told that they’re no longer allowed to wear leggings or yoga pants. “We didn’t think it was fair how we have all these restrictions on our clothing while boys didn’t have to sit through [the assembly] at all,” one student told local press. Some parents also complained, leading the school’s assistant principal to record a voicemail explaining the new policy. “The guiding principle in all dress codes is that the manner in which students dress does not become a distraction in the learning environment,” the message said.

2. A high school principal in Minnesota emailed parents to ask them to cover up their daughters. A principal in Minnetonka, MN recently wrote an email telling parents to stop letting their daughters wear leggings or yoga pants to school. He says the tight-fitting pants are fine with longer shirts but, when worn with a shorter top, a girl’s “backside” can be “too closely defined.” The big risk of having a defined backside, he thinks, is that it can “be highly distracting for other students.”

3. Two girls in Ohio were turned away from their prom for being “improperly dressed.” Laneisha Williams and Nyasia Mitchell were barred from prom this spring for wearing dresses that administrators considered “too revealing.” The girls say that they didn’t believe they were violating a dress code that said dresses couldn’t be too short or show too much cleavage. But one administrator told local news that the high school girls were only allowed to wear dresses that had “no curvature of their breasts showing.”

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Health

New York City Elementary School Cafeteria Goes Completely Vegetarian

By Tara Culp-Ressler on May 2, 2013 at 4:10 pm

(Credit: MFA Blog)

A New York City elementary school became the first public school in the nation to go completely vegetarian when it stopped serving meat in its cafeteria this year.

Flushing’s P.S. 244 consists of about 400 students between kindergarten and third grade. And the staff say that the school lunches — which include options like black bean quesadillas, brown rice, falafel, roasted red potatoes, and tofu — are a hit among those young kids, some of whom have started requesting similar foods at home:

“It’s been a really great response from the kids, but they also understand it’s about what is the healthiest option for them,” principal Bob Groff told ABCNews.com. “Because we teach them throughout our curriculum to make healthy choices, they understand what is happening and believe in what we’re doing too.”

When the school opened in 2008, they started serving vegetarian meals three days a week. The campus became a vegetarian test kitchen for the city, Groff said. [...]

The recipes were a hit, Groff said, prompting the school to expand its meat-free meals to four days a week and then adopting a 100 percent vegetarian kitchen in January.

“The big thing I would like people to know is, this isn’t just about a vegetarian menu,” Groff said. “It’s about living a healthy lifestyle and educating students on what options are out there.”

When P.S. 224 first opened, school officials noticed many students bringing their own vegetarian lunches from home, inspiring administrators to experiment with some meat-free menus. Now that the cafeteria is totally vegetarian, students are of course still welcome to pack lunches that include meat. The cafeteria food adheres to the USDA’s standards for school lunches, so students receive the recommended levels of nutrients and protein.

School cafeterias have become critical battlegrounds in the fight to address childhood obesity, which has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Encouraging healthy eating habits among younger children has been a particular area of interest for First Lady Michelle Obama and her ongoing “Let’s Move” campaign. But public health policies in this space have been met with significant resistance, both from powerful food corporations and from conservative critics of government overreach. Significantly, however, the cities with the most aggressive nutrition policies are the same ones that have seen the biggest drops in their childhood obesity rates.

Vegetarian options tend to be healthier in part because of the health risks posed by the U.S. meat industry. Over half of the meat sold in this country contains bacteria that can’t be treated with antibiotics. Chicken and ground beef are the two most dangerous types of meat, since they’re most likely to send Americans to the hospital with a foodborne illness.

Economy

Republican Claims People ‘Want To See More Sequestration, Not Less’

By Bryce Covert on May 1, 2013 at 2:30 pm

(Credit: National Journal)

While Congress scrambled to undo sequestration cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration last week after receiving complaints from frustrated travelers, one Republican is shrugging off the impact of the across-the-board cuts in his state:

Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) said this week that most people that he’s spoken with in his district support the sequester and want to see more of these forced, across-the-board cuts to federal spending.

“The people that I’ve talked to seem to be doing well. In fact, when I got out in restaurants here in town, people come up to me. They want to see more sequestration, not less,” he said, according to KOLR 10 television.

Long also downplayed the effects of the sequester and said people he’s met in Missouri are not feeling the pain of the cuts.

“I think that’s different than it could be in some parts of the country, but we haven’t seen any measurable effect here at all,” he said.

But Missouri isn’t immune to the impact of the cuts. A Head Start facility in St. Charles closed its doors and the program will reduce the number of children by 65 while laying off 18 staff members in other locations. Another in Ironton will drop three weeks of programming. The Youth Conservation Corps program for inner city children at Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield will be shut down. Cuts to defense spending will hurt the state, which is home to two large installations, Fort Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base. Whiteman officials have already cut flight training time by 10 percent, eliminated non-essential travel, and frozen civilian hiring.

The pain could pick up speed as the year continues. The state’s Head Start program is likely to drop 1,200 children in total, and its education system overall will lose $11.9 million in funding, putting 160 education jobs at risk, serving 17,000 fewer students, and funding 60 fewer schools. Up to 8,000 civilian defense employees could be furloughed, resulting in the loss of $40 million in wages. A variety of other programs will lose significant money, including meals for seniors, air and water protection, domestic violence services, job search assistance programs, and law enforcement and public safety.

If national polls are any indication, the citizens of his state may not agree with his assessment. A new poll finds that just one in ten Americans said sequestration cuts will help the economy, while nearly half felt that they will hurt. These sentiments held true for Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.

Economy

Tennessee Lawmaker Drops Bill To Cut Welfare For Kids With Poor Grades After Calling Child A ‘Prop’

By Aviva Shen on Apr 11, 2013 at 5:45 pm

On Thursday, State Rep. Stacey Campfield (R-TN) withdrew his widely criticized bill to reduce welfare assistance for needy families if their children did not perform well in school. The state Senate would have voted on the measure this afternoon, but Campfield pulled the bill after his Republican colleagues refused to support it. Many children’s advocacy groups, lawmakers, and clergy have expressed concern over the plan to cut Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) benefits by 30 percent for students who did poorly in school.

As Campfield walked to the Senate chambers, he was presented with a petition of more than 2500 signatures collected by Clergy for Justice to protest the bill. The deliverer of the petition was an 8-year-old girl, Aamira Fetuga, whose mother, Rasheedat Fetuga, is the founder of a local child advocacy group.

As Aamira prepared to explain to Campfield why she was worried about his bill, Campfield dismissed her as a “prop” and hurried away, repeating over and over again, “Using children as props is shameful” as Aamira and her mother tried to talk to him.

Watch it [courtesy of Eric Patton and Clergy For Justice]:

Aamira eventually told Campfield, “I don’t like the way you take the benefits from people…I’m worried about the light bills getting cut off.” Later in the video, one of Campfield’s constituents tried to talk to him about his disapproval for the bill, only to be dismissed as a “union thug” by the state senator.

Campfield’s plan sparked outrage from a wide range of advocates and politicians who decried the burden it placed on already disadvantaged children. Campfield suggested it would be simple enough for parents to restore their benefits by attending 2 parent-teacher conferences or hiring a tutor, failing to appreciate the time and money constraints on these already strained families.

During the session, many of Campfield’s fellow Republicans stood up one by one to call the measure “troublesome” and express concern about the “unintended consequences” that could put children in danger. State Senator Doug Overbey (R) had a change of heart after hearing from teachers and the state’s Commission On Children And Youth:

I voted for the bill in the General Welfare committee because I thought it was a step in addressing a problem. Since that time, other information has come to my attention. First of all, there’s been comments about how folks in our educational system feel about it. Just this morning I got an email from a teacher in my district that said, ‘Teachers have expressed interest in some form of parent accountability but I can assure you this is not what they had in mind.’ Secondly, I found on my desk a letter from the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth…a 2 1/4 page analysis of this legislation and ultimately urges voting against it.

Once it became clear he could not get enough votes to pass the measure, Campfield asked that his bill go to a summer study committtee before the vote.

Justice

School Segregation Leads To More Violent Crime, Study Finds

By Aviva Shen on Apr 9, 2013 at 1:30 pm

In the past decade, resegregation through so-called “white flight” and relaxed integration enforcement is leading to greater inequality from an earlier age. Modern inner-city schools are often underfunded, while dropout rates are high and violence is common. Police officers routinely intervene to discipline students for minor infractions, exposing minority kids early to the criminal justice system. Greater allocation of resources may not be enough to halt the cycle of racially-skewed poverty and crime as long as racial and class segregation continues, according to an analysis by Columbia Business School professor Ray Fisman.

Over 50 years since the Supreme Court desegregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, integration has helped keep black students from dropping out, while improving their earnings, health and decreasing incarceration rates. But resegregation of schools since 2001, when poor black students stopped getting bused to integrated schools, is fast undoing the progress made since the civil rights era.

Fisman highlights a recent study of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, a civil rights battleground used in a 1971 Supreme Court decision to allow busing of minority students into white schools. Before 2001, school populations were racially mixed through the inclusion of some minority neighborhoods not immediately around the school. After busing was halted, the district redrew its school boundaries to re-sort students into mostly black and mostly white schools. The study found that even with increased funding to minority schools, young black students placed in resegregated schools were suddenly tangling with law enforcement more frequently:

Despite cushioning minority students from academic decline, the resegregation of Charlotte schools nonetheless led to a jump in arrests and incarcerations of minority students—particularly among poor black males, who are most at risk for crime. According to the authors’ calculations, a poor black male was 15 percent more likely to get arrested if assigned to a school that had 60 percent minority students rather than 40 percent minority.

The study’s findings suggest that clustering those already most vulnerable to turning to crime—poor black males—in certain schools may lead to their acting as negative influences on one another. These findings also underscore the fact that desegregation isn’t the zero-sum game that it’s often portrayed to be, with benefits to black students coming at the expense of whites. White students didn’t commit fewer crimes with the end of busing, while black students committed significantly more.

Court-ordered integration led to more equitable resources and spending per student regardless of race, allowing poor minority students to access, to an extent, the same kinds of opportunities as white children. In the Charlotte study, increased resources for resegregated minority schools kept the dropout rate level. But active integration policies are necessary to help students change their socioeconomic fates. The study links the racial crime gap directly to segregation, concluding, “Policies that allocate additional resources to segregated schools can improve classroom instruction and course offerings, but only deliberately integrative student assignment policies can change the racial or socioeconomic backgrounds of students who walk in the doors of the school.”

Education

Tennessee May Deliberately Exclude Muslim Schools From New Voucher Program

By Adam Peck on Apr 3, 2013 at 11:45 am

Tennessee State Senator Bill Ketron (R)

Several conservative lawmakers in Tennessee are throwing the brakes on a fast-moving bill that would divert money away from public schools and towards vouchers for students to attend private or parochial schools. Republicans are taking a second look at the bill after the possibility arose that some Islamic schools could apply for the same funding made available to other religious schools.

The bill is a top priority for Republican Governor Bill Haslam, but several anti-religion lawmakers in the state senate, led by Sen. Bill Ketron who sponsored several anti-Islam bills in the last few years, are hoping to strip away the ability for any school that caters to Muslim children and their families to receive public dollars:

“This is an issue we must address,” state Sen. Jim Tracy (R-Shelbyville) said. “I don’t know whether we can simply amend the bill in such a way that will fix the issue at this point.”

State Sen. Bill Ketron (R-Murfreesboro) and Tracy each expressed their concerns Friday over Senate Bill 0196, commonly called the “School Voucher Bill” and sponsored by fellow Sen. Mark Norris (R-Collierville), which would give parents of children attending failing public schools a voucher with which to enroll in a private school.

Ketron has cultivated a reputation as the state’s chief Islamophobe, proposing a bill in 2011 that could have introduced punishments of up to 15 years in jail for any Muslim who observed the holy month of Ramadan or prayed five times a day towards Mecca, a religious requirement for observant Muslims.

Tennessee is not the first state to try and carve out exemptions to education funding that target only Muslims. Last year, Louisiana Republicans threatened to hold up an education bill backed by Governor Bobby Jindal (R) for similar reasons: a single private Islamic school had applied for a handful of vouchers that Republicans intended to make available only to nondenominational and Judeo-Christian schools. That bill ultimately passed and was signed into law but only after the school — the Islamic School of Greater New Orleans — withdrew its application for vouchers.

Update

Late Wednesday afternoon, Tennessee State Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R) announced that he was pulling Gov. Haslam’s vouchers bill from the floor. Several Republicans in the senate had been pushing Haslam to support an expansion of the vouchers program to include eligibility for thousands more students in the state, and not just those from low-income school districts. Outside groups had poured thousands of dollars into ads supporting the expansion, but Haslam remained opposed to raising the $43,000 income cutoff for a family of four to $75,000. “In other words, it was more about … politics than education,” Norris told the Associated Press.

Security

Pentagon Reinstates Tuition Assistance Program For U.S. Troops

By Ben Armbruster on Mar 28, 2013 at 10:06 am

The Department of Defense is reinstating a popular tuition assistance program that was eliminated in the sequestration budget cutting process.

USA Today reported earlier this month that hundreds of thousands of troops would lose tuition assistance for classes this year because of the mandatory, across the board, military spending cuts that took effect on March 1. As USA Today noted, the program “covers tuition costs for attending college classes during off hours or even online while on combat deployments.”

But facing backlash and protests from servicemembers, Congress included a measure in its plan to fund the government through September that compels military officials to reinstate the program.

“We will comply with the recently enacted legislation to provide tuition assistance to all service members across all the services,” Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said on Wednesday.

“Based on the legislation that just passed, tuition assistance is to be reinstated across the services,” said DOD spokesperson Mark Wright, in a statement Wednesday as reported by Foreign Policy. “DOD agrees with Congress that the tuition assistance program is very important, both to the department and our service members. Each service is responsible for funding and administering its tuition assistance program in accordance with the DOD tuition assistance policy. We are working with the services to develop a plan to comply with any legislation.”

Climate Progress

Utah Schoolchildren Asked To Celebrate Fossil Fuels And Mining On Earth Day

By Ryan Koronowski on Mar 20, 2013 at 4:37 pm

Earth Day is April 22, and today is the last day children in Utah can send in their submissions for the state-sponsored Earth Day poster contest lauding fossil fuel production.

This year’s theme is “Where Would WE Be Without Oil, Gas & Mining?”

Last year’s theme was “How Do YOU Use Oil, Gas, and Mining?”

The contest is literally made possible by fossil fuel interests. This year’s sponsors include the Salt Lake Petroleum Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining. Last year’s sponsor list was longer, including Arch Coal, Anadarko Petroleum, and Rio Tinto/Kennecott Utah Copper.

Any child in Utah between Kindergarten and sixth grade is eligible. The contest’s primary objective is “to improve students’ and the public’s awareness of the important role that oil, gas, and mining play in our everyday lives.” Last year’s contest winners made posters that detailed how dependent we have become on fossil fuels. To their credit, the grand prize winner detailed both ways we use products created by fossil fuels and ways we can reduce our consumption.

The children were not asked to make posters about the climate impacts caused by those same fossil fuels: drought, wildfires, and warmer winters.

Some parents are not happy, as this letter to the editor by Colby Poulson makes clear:

Why is the state backing an “Earth Day” contest that celebrates fossil fuels, while completely ignoring the adverse effects that their use and extraction can too often have on our air quality, water quality, public lands and the other organisms we share the world with? Shouldn’t Earth Day be about championing things that can help reverse the negative impact of our dependence on fossil fuels?

Frankly, I’m disgusted that the state is backing propaganda like this in our schools.

Why allow a contest like this to run two years in a row? The state could be taking its cues from its Congressional delegation, one of whom runs the House Science subcommittee and denies the reality of human-caused climate change. Or its state legislature, which in 2010 adopted a resolution doubting the reality of climate change.

Perhaps they missed the Salt Lake Tribune‘s editorial, “A killing climate: Global warming unchecked,” or those Utah scientists who reported:

Based on extensive scientific research, there is very high confidence that human-generated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations are responsible for most of the global warming observed during the past 50 years. It is very unlikely that natural climate variations alone, such as changes in the brightness of the sun or carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes, have produced this recent warming. …

Utah is projected to warm more than the average for the entire globe and the expected consequences of this warming are fewer frost days, longer growing seasons, and more heat waves.

Appropriately, the winners of the Earth Day poster contest will be notified on April Fool’s Day.

Alyssa

Chicago Public Schools Take Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ Out Of Seventh-Grade Classrooms

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 18, 2013 at 2:48 pm

Over the past couple of days, a kerfuffle’s been unfolding in the Chicago Public Schools after the administration announced that Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir Persepolis would be removed from seventh-grade classrooms, due to concerns about the language and content, apparently in particular, the book’s portrayal of torture during the Iranian Revolution. It’s not clear to me that a specific parent complaint prompted the book’s being pulled from the curriculum, but it’s still a disappointing decision, given how wonderfully attuned Persepolis is to the inner lives of children and teenagers, particularly teenage girls. And as the decision’s become a political football between the school administration and the Chicago Teacher’s Union, it’s also become a test case in how to handle changes to curriculum poorly, in a way that shows a lack of respect both for students and for strong material itself.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public School system wrote in a letter to principals in her system that: “We have determined Persepolis may be appropriate for junior and senior students and those in Advance Placement classes. Due to the powerful images of torture in the book, I have asked our Office of Teaching & Learning to develop professional development guidelines, so that teachers can be trained to present this strong, but important content. We are also considering whether the book should be included, after appropriate teacher training, in the curriculum of eighth through tenth grades. Once this curricular determination has been made, we will notify you.” It’s unclear why the school system couldn’t have made this determination over the summer, rather than in the middle of the year, so that the decision would be consistent over a year of students in the system.

I don’t necessarily think it’s the worst thing in the world to determine that a work can be more fully absorbed by students who are both older, and who have been better-prepared for certain material by other parts of the curriculum, whether it’s history, geography, or other literature. But that determination should be made based on those concerns, and announced in a way that is reflective of a concern about the overall efficacy of curriculum design. Pulling the book from the rotation mid-year can’t help but look like the decision is in response to a parent complaint, rather than a genuine reassessment of how best to present a work that the school system continues to think is important and is committed to presenting in a way that will be to the book’s best advantage as well as to its students’. This seems like it would have been particularly important given that, as the Chicago Teacher’s Union points out, many elementary schools in the system don’t have libraries, so removing Persepolis from the classroom is effectively removing student access to the book, at least in a school setting.

It’s also easy in cases like these to appear that you’re showing a lack of respect for what students can handle. The portrayals of torture in Persepolis aren’t exceptionally graphic. They are, like everything else in the book, in black and white, in fairly simple outlines. Gashes from a beating don’t suppurate—they stand out in sharp relief. The way the pain of them is communicated is through the main character’s reaction. The experience of reading Persepolis as a child or teenager is the experience of seeing the impact of torture on someone very like yourself, who likes punk music, and gets angry at God, and alternately adores and fights with her parents. It’s a book that trusts teenagers to handle the idea of torture and the concept of war because its author had to handle those things not just in practice, but in reality, when her relatives were tortured and her friends’ older siblings were sent off to die in war with keys to paradise around their necks. Believing that children shouldn’t experience those things for real shouldn’t be the same thing as believing that they can’t being trusted to experience the sadness, fear, and anger that will help them navigate the world as moral adults. A school system that’s afraid of its ability to handle introducing students to these kind of emotions or ideas is one that doesn’t seem to trust its teachers or itself very much.

Education

American School Construction Is Underfunded By A Half Trillion, Report Says

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Mar 12, 2013 at 12:30 pm

The elevator in the library has been unusable for 14 months at Trenton Central High School in Trenton, N.J.

It has long been known that America’s schools are in disrepair, but a report released Tuesday outlined exactly how bad the trouble is — and the staggering amounts needed to fix it.

According to a Center for Green Schools investigation, schools needed an additional $271 billion in funding between 1995 and 2008 in order to stay up-to-date. They didn’t get that funding, which doesn’t even include the amount that should have been spent on buying new schools property.

What is worse, the AP reports, is that “[t]o update and modernize the buildings, the figure doubles, to $542 billion over the next decade”:

[Former President Bill] Clinton and the Center for Green Schools urged a Government Accountability Office assessment on what it would take to get school buildings up to date to help students learn, keep teachers healthy and put workers back on the jobs. The last such report, issued in 1995 during the Clinton administration, estimated it would take $112 billion to bring the schools into good repair and did not include the need for new buildings to accommodate the growing number of students.

The Center for Green Schools’ researchers reviewed spending and estimates schools spent $211 billion on upkeep between 1995 and 2008. During that same time, schools should have spent some $482 billion, the group calculated based on a formula included in the most recent GAO study.

The estimates for school repairs might have been much lower, had Congress worked to pass the American Jobs Act. That plan, put forth by President Obama in 2011, would have allocated $30 billion in funding to modernize at least 35,000 schools. At the time, Republicans lampooned the costs as too high. In context of the overall funding needs of schools, though, it seems like just a drop in the bucket.

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