Students Are Not Rats

“I prefer to die than to live like a rat,” said Charlie Hebdo’s top editor Stéphane Charbonnier, in regard to life without free speech.   

            In America, free speech is a defining feature of our political conscience.  

A poll of high school students and teachers by the John S and James L Knight Foundation found that while 24 percent of students thought the first amendment was overreaching, “65 percent of the students who see digital news on a daily basis agreed strongly that people should be able to express unpopular opinions,” according to an article on The Guardian.

            Yet the free speech of American high school students is constantly up for debate. When will we find the line that separates freedom of expression from communication with intent to incite violence? 

            This question was raised once again on May 5^th, 2010 when a group of high school students wore t-shirts displaying the American flag to school on Cinco de Mayo.

            The principal required the students to either turn their shirt inside out or go home. The students proceeded to go home, and their parents filed a lawsuit against the school for violating the right to free speech.

            After San Francisco Federal judges ruled in favor of the school principal, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, according to The Los Angeles Times.     

So far the Supreme Court has ruled that students have the right to wear black armbands in protest of a war (Tinker v. Des Moines) and that students, in order to communicate a political message, may use particular offensive words (Cohen v. California).

However, if the any of the above actions could cause harm to others, the right is taken away (Schneck v. United States).

            Yesterday, the Supreme Court refused to take the case. By their refusal the court is supporting, by omission, the San Francisco court’s decision that the principal had legal justification to restrict the student’s free speech right because “The Live Oaks High School south of San Jose had seen at least 30 fights between white and Mexican American students,” according to The Los Angeles Times.

            This is just one scenario among many; sometimes the courts make the right decision, and sometimes they don’t.

            It’s up to us to make our voices heard in support or in protest. Join the conversation at The Los Angeles Times or sign-up for the ACLU newsletter to get involved.

Is Consensus Building Overrated?

           Today as world governments clashing violently and peacefully, internally and externally, three countries highlight the internal struggle: Great Britain, France, and United States.

The relationship between the current U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama appears to be permanently fried. The battle lines were drawn months, perhaps even years, ago, but the political battle turned particularly ugly this week.

47 Republicans openly told Iranian leaders that any treaty made with the current administration could be challenged by the next U.S. president and by Congress.

        Obama and other Democrats “accused Republicans of undermining the president’s authority to carry out foreign policy,” according to The Hill.

“…They [Republicans] have decided that as long as he [Obama] holds the office of the presidency, it’s no longer necessary to respect the office itself,” wrote Paul Waldman on the Plum Line, a Washington Post blog.

Consensus building seems completely impossible at this point.

In France, the rift between President François Hollande and the Socialist Party has widened drastically with the introduction of new economic policy called Macron Law.  

“Opposition from the president’s own party was so fierce that Mr. Hollande invoked special constitutional powers to bypass the National Assembly, the first use of that maneuver in nearly a decade,” wrote the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron, a French Economy Minister and the designer of Macron Law, is calling for the French and German governments to, essentially, collaborate and produce similar economic policies, according to the Wall Street Journal. If Mr. Hollande continues down the path that Mr. Macron suggests, can the president hope to reconcile the Socialist Party to the new economic scene?

The recent failed no-confidence vote should not exactly reassure Mr. Hollande, as “it underscored the divisions laid bare by the French President’s decision to shed the consensus-building style that swept him into office,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s a different story on the other side of the channel as Britain gears up for a parliamentary vote in May.

As the minority parties grow in popularity, polls show support for the Green party rose from 1% to 8%, the parties demonstrate a willingness to work together that is unseen in the aforementioned administrations.

“We [the Green, UK Independence, Separatists Scottish National and Liberal-Democrat parties] prefer a so-called confidence and supply arrangement, whereby we would give support to whoever was on number ten on certain big issues, including the budget, in return for getting some of our key priorities brought in and for being able to vote freely on a whole range of other issues,” Rupert Read, a Green party candidate, told The Economist.

Ask yourselves, as I hope the U.S. and French governments have asked themselves, how dangerous is it to present a fractured government to the world? Is their position really so important that it cannot be partially sacrificed for the sake of a united front?

College Acceptance Begins in Preschool?

Kindergarten College Application work sheet from ms.preppy.blogspot.com

Every child’s life, from K-12, is about getting into college; the way to do that is test, test, test. Right?

That is true according to school boards and teachers across the country.

 “We need to ask them, ‘How will you get there?’ Even if I am teaching preschool, the word ‘college’ has to be in there,” Kelli Rigo, a teacher at Johnsonville Elementary School in North Carolina, told the New York Times.

Ms. Rigo has her 1^st grade students create their own college applications, which are then displayed in the classroom.

Steven Gilhuley, a principal at Howard T. Herber Middle School in Malverne, wants his students to not be nervous about the SAT, according to the New York Times. That means starting the SAT conversation at age 6 or 7. Elementary and middle school children in Malverne, N.Y., learn SAT vocabulary in the morning and keep a vocabulary notebook.

Not everyone agrees with the heightened emphasis on college preparation. Middle and high school students and parents, even a few educators, are protesting the new PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career) test.

“There was ‘no doubt’ children were being tested too much,” Salvatore Goncalves, superintendent of the Bloomfield School District, N.J., told the New YorkTimes.

Hundreds of high school students in New Mexico agreed with Mr. Goncalves; students held protests against the newly implemented PARCC exam on Monday, according to the Albuquerque Journal. Students held signs with slogans such as “I am more than a test score,” “Say no to PARCC,” and “Why take a test everyone is going to fail?”

If your child is enrolled in a public school, or you are that child, it’s up to you to take a stand. Do twelve years  need to be devoted to getting into college? Or is that putting too much unnecessary stress on elementary kids?