History > 2007 > USA > Education (II)

Boy to Stand Trial for Killing Principal

July 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:24 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BARABOO, Wis. -- Nearly a year after a 16-year-old shot and killed his principal, jurors will be asked to decide if he was a bullied, immature child or a murderer bent on revenge.

Eric Hainstock is charged with first-degree murder and is being tried as an adult in the shooting death of Weston Schools Principal John Klang. If convicted, he could face life in prison. Hainstock's trial was to begin Thursday.

According to a criminal complaint, Hainstock told detectives he took guns to Weston the morning of Sept. 29 because he was upset that Klang and other school officials had done nothing to stop fellow students from teasing him. He told investigators he wanted to make people listen to him.

But Klang rushed him in a school hallway and tackled him. Hainstock told detectives he shot the principal three times during the struggle. A wounded Klang managed to take the gun from Hainstock.

Sauk County District Attorney Pat Barrett has portrayed Hainstock as a selfish liar who reacts violently whenever adults tell him what to do. He is expected to introduce evidence at the trial that in the two weeks leading up to the shooting, Hainstock threw a stapler at a teacher and a book at a student, saying ''I am going to laugh when everyone in this school gets hurt.''

Hainstock's attorneys, public defenders Rhoda Ricciardi and Jon Helland, have said Hainstock was bullied and that teachers looked the other way.

    Boy to Stand Trial for Killing Principal, NYT, 26.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-School-Shooting.html

Ill. Student Accused of Terrorist Threat

July 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:25 a.m. ET
The New York Times

EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. (AP) -- A Southern Illinois University student was arrested after authorities say he threatened a ''murderous rampage'' similar to the Virginia Tech shootings that left 32 people and the gunman dead.

A gun dealer had alerted federal authorities about the man, saying he had seemed overly anxious to get a shipment of semiautomatic weapons, according to an affidavit filed in court by a police detective.

Olutosin Oduwole was charged Tuesday with attempting to make a terrorist threat, a felony. He remained jailed Wednesday in lieu of $1 million bail.

According to the affidavit, the 22-year-old student wrote a note demanding that money be deposited to a PayPal account, threatening that ''if this account doesn't reach $50,000 in the next 7 days then a murderous rampage similar to the VT shooting will occur at another highly populated university. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!''

Authorities found the note Friday in Oduwole's car on campus, said university spokesman Greg Conroy. Police also said they found a loaded gun in Oduwole's dorm room.

The detective said in the affidavit that Oduwole, of Maplewood, N.J., had recently bought three .38-caliber semiautomatic guns online but had not yet received them, and also had ordered a .45-caliber semiautomatic gun similar to an Uzi.

A gun dealer alerted the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives because Oduwole ''appeared very anxious to get these firearms and seemed very impatient,'' the affidavit said.

It wasn't immediately clear if Oduwole had an attorney who could speak for him. Conroy said Oduwole was taking summer courses this year.

The Madison County state's attorney did not immediate respond to a message seeking comment.

Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville is about 20 miles northeast of St. Louis and has an enrollment of about 13,500 students.

    Ill. Student Accused of Terrorist Threat, NYT, 25.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Student-Threat-Charges.html

2 N.Y. Teens Charged With School Plot

July 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:42 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- One is a 15-year-old who was recently suspended from his suburban high school for making violent threats, according to police. The other is an awkward 17-year-old hungry for attention, acquaintances say.

Together, they envisioned a bloody assault on students and staffers at a Long Island high school, chillingly planning it for the ninth anniversary of the deadly Columbine High School rampage, Suffolk County police said.

''I will start a chain of terrorism in the world,'' the 15-year-old wrote in one of several alarming journal entries, according to police. ''This will go down in history. Take out everyone there. Perfecto.''

The two students were arrested Friday in the alleged plot at Connetquot High School in Bohemia, about 50 miles east of New York City. Both were charged with misdemeanor conspiracy, punishable by up to a year in jail.

Local students and parents shuddered at the description of the plot, which police said was fleshed out in a videotape that identified several potential victims by name.

''They're not really afraid to do anything,'' said Joseph Welischar, a Connetquot student who said he knew the suspects. ''So, yeah, it's kind of scary.''

It was more than scary to Dawn Wiegard, a mother of two Connetquot students.

''It's devastating,'' she said.

The 15-year-old, a Connetquot student whom authorities identified as the driving force behind the plan, did not enter a plea when he appeared in juvenile court Friday. A judge ordered two weeks of medical evaluation at the Sagamore Children's Hospital, according to Newsday. The teen's mother and stepfather were in the courtroom but would not comment.

A former friend who said she believed she was one of the 15-year-old's targets told Newsday the suspect was an emotionally troubled boy riveted by violence, and particularly by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, in which two gunmen killed 12 fellow students, a teacher and themselves.

''I do remember him being fascinated about blowing up things,'' said Briana Valentino, 15, who said she and the suspect had been close friends before he suddenly became hostile to her a month ago. ''I remember him showing me videos of crazy shootings online.''

The other suspect, 17-year-old Michael McDonough, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Friday. His Legal Aid Society lawyer, Robert Flick, said his client was ''barely'' culpable, according to news reports.

McDonough's father told the court that his son, who attended Sachem North High School, was receiving mental health counseling.

McDonough's bail was set at $25,000 cash or $50,000 bond. He was still being held Saturday, according to jail records.

A shy teen who wanted to be noticed, McDonough needled fellow students, teens who know him said.

''He's always doing stuff in class to get people to look at him,'' Welischar said. ''He makes fun of everyone just to get people (annoyed). He doesn't really like being around people.''

The two suspects were co-workers at a McDonald's. Police said they targeted scores of students in an attack they planned for April 20, 2008 -- the anniversary of the Columbine shootings.

On July 6, school authorities obtained the 15-year-old's handwritten journal, which contained ''numerous terrorist threats and plans to attack the school,'' police said. The journal was turned over to the school after the teen apparently dropped it in the McDonald's parking lot, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said.

''He felt that everyone was against him,'' Dormer said of the younger teen, whose name was withheld due to his age. ''He was upset at life in general and the world in general.''

Authorities also recovered videotapes made by the 15-year-old -- videos Dormer described as ''akin to the tapes that we all saw from Columbine.''

A search warrant was issued for the 15-year-old's computer. Dormer said the teen tried several times to buy five pounds of explosive black powder and an Uzi. The police commissioner said authorities were investigating to see whether any weapons might have been acquired online.

More than 2,000 students attend Connetquot, which is in a working-class community on the eastern end of Long Island.

Associated Press writer Amy Westfeldt contributed to this report.

    2 N.Y. Teens Charged With School Plot, NYT, 14.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Teen-Bomb-Threat.html

Editorial

Resegregation Now

June 29, 2007
The New York Times
 

The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality.

Since 1954, the Supreme Court has been the nation’s driving force for integration. Its orders required segregated buses and public buildings, parks and playgrounds to open up to all Americans. It wasn’t always easy: governors, senators and angry mobs talked of massive resistance. But the court never wavered, and in many of the most important cases it spoke unanimously.

Yesterday, the court’s radical new majority turned its back on that proud tradition in a 5-4 ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. It has been some time since the court, which has grown more conservative by the year, did much to compel local governments to promote racial integration. But now it is moving in reverse, broadly ordering the public schools to become more segregated.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who provided the majority’s fifth vote, reined in the ruling somewhat by signing only part of the majority opinion and writing separately to underscore that some limited programs that take race into account are still acceptable. But it is unclear how much room his analysis will leave, in practice, for school districts to promote integration. His unwillingness to uphold Seattle’s and Louisville’s relatively modest plans is certainly a discouraging sign.

In an eloquent dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer explained just how sharp a break the decision is with history. The Supreme Court has often ordered schools to use race-conscious remedies, and it has unanimously held that deciding to make assignments based on race “to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society” is “within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities.”

Chief Justice Roberts, who assured the Senate at his confirmation hearings that he respected precedent, and Brown in particular, eagerly set these precedents aside. The right wing of the court also tossed aside two other principles they claim to hold dear. Their campaign for “federalism,” or scaling back federal power so states and localities have more authority, argued for upholding the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., programs. So did their supposed opposition to “judicial activism.” This decision is the height of activism: federal judges relying on the Constitution to tell elected local officials what to do.

The nation is getting more diverse, but by many measures public schools are becoming more segregated. More than one in six black children now attend schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority. This resegregation is likely to get appreciably worse as a result of the court’s ruling.

There should be no mistaking just how radical this decision is. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said it was his “firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” He also noted the “cruel irony” of the court relying on Brown v. Board of Education while robbing that landmark ruling of much of its force and spirit. The citizens of Louisville and Seattle, and the rest of the nation, can ponder the majority’s kind words about Brown as they get to work today making their schools, and their cities, more segregated.

    Resegregation Now, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29fri1.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education

June 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JUAN WILLIAMS

Washington

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there’s no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers’ unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students.

It was an idealistic Supreme Court that in 1954 approved of Brown as a race-conscious policy needed to repair the damage of school segregation and protect every child’s 14th-Amendment right to equal treatment under law. In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a unanimous court still embracing Brown, said local school officials could make racial integration a priority even if it did not improve educational outcomes because it helped “to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society.”

But today a high court with a conservative majority concludes that any policy based on race — no matter how well intentioned — is a violation of every child’s 14th-Amendment right to be treated as an individual without regard to race. We’ve come full circle.

In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.

And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children — black, white, brown and every other hue — in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.

Dealing with racism and the bitter fruit of slavery and “separate but equal” legal segregation was at the heart of the court’s brave decision 53 years ago. With Brown officially relegated to the past, the challenge for brave leaders now is to deliver on the promise of a good education for every child.

Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, is the author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.”

    Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29williams.html

Justices Limit the Use of Race in Integration Programs

June 29, 2007
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, June 28 — With competing blocs of justices claiming the mantle of Brown v. Board of Education, a bitterly divided Supreme Court declared Thursday that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race.

Voting 5 to 4, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky., that sought to maintain school-by-school diversity by limiting transfers on the basis of race or using race as a “tiebreaker” for admission to particular schools.

Both programs had been upheld by lower federal courts and were similar to plans in place in hundreds of school districts around the country. Chief Justice Roberts said such programs were “directed only to racial balance, pure and simple,” a goal he said was forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he said. His side of the debate, the chief justice said, was “more faithful to the heritage of Brown,” the landmark 1954 decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional. “When it comes to using race to assign children to schools, history will be heard,” he said. [News analysis, Page A24; excerpts, Page A25.]

The decision came on the final day of the court’s 2006-7 term, which showed an energized conservative majority in control across many areas of the court’s jurisprudence.

Chief Justice Roberts’s control was not quite complete, however. While Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined his opinion on the schools case in full, the fifth member of the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, did not. Justice Kennedy agreed that the two programs were unconstitutional. But he was highly critical of what he described as the chief justice’s “all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account.”

In a separate opinion that could shape the practical implications of the decision and provide school districts with guidelines for how to create systems that can pass muster with the court, Justice Kennedy said achieving racial diversity, “avoiding racial isolation” and addressing “the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling” were “compelling interests” that a school district could constitutionally pursue as long as it did so through programs that were sufficiently “narrowly tailored.”

The four justices were “too dismissive” of the validity of these goals, Justice Kennedy said, adding that it was “profoundly mistaken” to read the Constitution as requiring “that state and local school authorities must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools.”

As a matter of constitutional doctrine and practical impact, Justice Kennedy’s opinion thus placed a significant limitation on the full reach of the other four justices’ embrace of a “colorblind Constitution” under which all racially conscious government action, no matter how benign or invidious its goal, is equally suspect.

How important a limitation Justice Kennedy’s opinion proves to be may become clear only with time, as school districts devise and defend plans that appear to meet his test.

Among the measures that Justice Kennedy said would be acceptable were the drawing of school attendance zones, “strategic site selection of new schools,” and directing resources to special programs. These would be permissible even if adopted with a consciousness of racial demographics, Justice Kennedy said, because in avoiding the labeling and sorting of individual children by race they would satisfy the “narrow tailoring” required to meet the equal protection demands of the 14th Amendment.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote the principal dissenting opinion, was dismissive of Justice Kennedy’s proposed alternatives and asserted that the court was taking a sharp and seriously mistaken turn.

Speaking from the bench for more than 20 minutes, Justice Breyer made his points to a courtroom audience that had never seen the coolly analytical justice express himself with such emotion. His most pointed words, in fact, appeared nowhere in his 77-page opinion.

“It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” Justice Breyer said.

In his written opinion, Justice Breyer said the decision was a “radical” step away from settled law and would strip local communities of the tools they need, and have used for many years, to prevent resegregation of their public schools. Predicting that the ruling would “substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation,” he said, “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.”

Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg signed Justice Breyer’s opinion. Justice Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion of his own, as pointed as it was brief.

He said the chief justice’s invocation of Brown v. Board of Education was “a cruel irony” when the opinion in fact “rewrites the history of one of this court’s most important decisions” by ignoring the context in which it was issued and the Supreme Court’s subsequent understanding of it to permit voluntary programs of the sort that were now invalidated.

“It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision,” Justice Stevens said. He did not mention, nor did he need to, that one of the justices then was William H. Rehnquist, later the chief justice, for whom Chief Justice Roberts once worked as a law clerk.

Justice Clarence Thomas was equally pointed and equally personal in an opinion concurring with the majority.

“If our history has taught us anything,” Justice Thomas said, “it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.” He added in a footnote, “Justice Breyer’s good intentions, which I do not doubt, have the shelf life of Justice Breyer’s tenure.”

The justices had been wrestling for over a year with the two cases. It was in January 2006 that parents who objected to the Louisville and Seattle programs filed their Supreme Court appeals from the lower court decisions that had upheld the programs.

The Louisville case was Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, No. 05-915, filed by the mother of a student who was denied a transfer to his chosen kindergarten class because the school he wanted to leave needed to keep its white students to stay within the program’s racial guidelines.

The Seattle case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, No. 05-908, was filed by a group of parents who had formed a nonprofit corporation to fight the city’s high school assignment plan.

Because a single Supreme Court opinion resolved both cases, the decision carries only the name of the Seattle case, which had the lower docket number.

The appeals provoked a long internal struggle over how the court should respond. Months earlier, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was still on the court, the justices had denied review in an appeal challenging a similar program in Massachusetts. With no disagreement among the federal appellate circuits on the validity of such programs, the new appeals did not meet the criterion the court ordinarily uses to decide which cases to hear. It was June of last year before the court, reconfigured by the additions of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, announced, over the unrecorded but vigorous objection of the liberal justices, that it would hear both appeals.

By the time the court ruled on Thursday, there was little suspense over what the outcome would be. Not only the act of accepting the appeals, but also the tenor of the argument on Dec. 4, gave clear indications that the justices were on course to strike down both plans.

The cases were by far the oldest on the docket by the time they were decided; the other decisions the court announced on Thursday were in cases that were argued in March and April. What consumed the court during the seven months the cases were under consideration, it appears likely, was an effort by each side to edge Justice Kennedy closer to its point of view.

While it is hardly uncommon to find Justice Kennedy in the middle of the court, his position there this time carried a special resonance. He holds the seat once occupied by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. who, 29 years ago to the day, announced his separate opinion in the Bakke case. That solitary opinion, rejecting quotas but accepting diversity as a rationale for affirmative action in university admissions, defined the law for the next 25 years, until the decision was refined and to some degree strengthened in the University of Michigan Law School decision.

Justice Kennedy was a dissenter from that 2003 decision. But, surprisingly, he cited it on Thursday, invoking it to rebut the argument that the Constitution must be always be, regardless of context or circumstance, colorblind.

    Justices Limit the Use of Race in Integration Programs, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29scotus.html?hp

News Analysis

The Same Words, but Differing Views

June 29, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

The five opinions that made up yesterday’s decision limiting the use of race in assigning students to public schools referred to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 school desegregation case, some 90 times. The justices went so far as to quote from the original briefs in the case and from the oral argument in 1952.

All of the justices on both sides of yesterday’s 5-to-4 decision claimed to be, in Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s phrase, “faithful to the heritage of Brown.”

But lawyers who represented the black schoolchildren in the Brown case said yesterday that several justices in the majority had misinterpreted the positions they had taken in the litigation and had misunderstood the true meaning of Brown.

And as those reactions make clear, yesterday’s decision has reignited a societal debate about the role of race in education that will almost certainly prompt divisive lawsuits around the country. Indeed, the decision has invited a fundamental reassessment of Brown itself, perhaps the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century.

“There is a historic clash between two dramatically different visions not only of Brown,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, “but also the meaning of the Constitution.”

The four conservatives on the court said Brown and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause required the government to be colorblind in making decisions about placing students in public schools in all circumstances. The four liberals said Brown meant to allow school districts to take account of race to achieve integration.

In the middle was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose concurring opinion, at once idiosyncratic, enigmatic and decisive, was perhaps the least engaged with Brown, saying little more than that the case “should teach us that the problem before us defies” an “easy solution.” Justice Kennedy’s concurrence, which split the court 4-1-4 on a crucial point, sharply limited the role race could play in school assignments but did not forbid school districts from taking account of race entirely.

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a law professor at Harvard and an authority on Brown and its aftermath, applauded that concurrence. “The hidden story in the decision today is that Justice Kennedy refused to follow the lead of the other four justices in eviscerating the legacy of Brown,” Professor Ogletree said.

Writing for the other four justices in the majority, Chief Justice Roberts took a harder line. In an unusual effort to cement his interpretation of Brown, he quoted from the transcript of the 1952 argument in the case.

“We have one fundamental contention,” a lawyer for the schoolchildren, Robert L. Carter, had told the court more than a half-century ago. “No state has any authority under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”

Chief Justice Roberts added yesterday, “There is no ambiguity in that statement.”

But the man who made that statement, now a 90-year-old senior federal judge in Manhattan, disputed the chief justice’s characterization in an interview yesterday.

“All that race was used for at that point in time was to deny equal opportunity to black people,” Judge Carter said of the 1950s. “It’s to stand that argument on its head to use race the way they use is now.”

Jack Greenberg, who worked on the Brown case for the plaintiffs and is now a law professor at Columbia, called the chief justice’s interpretation “preposterous.”

“The plaintiffs in Brown were concerned with the marginalization and subjugation of black people,” Professor Greenberg said. “They said you can’t consider race, but that’s how race was being used.”

William T. Coleman Jr., another lawyer who worked on Brown, said, “The majority opinion is 100 percent wrong.”

“It’s dirty pool,” said Mr. Coleman, a Washington lawyer who served as secretary of transportation in the Ford administration, “to say that the people Brown was supposed to protect are the people it’s now not going to protect.”

But Roger Clegg, the president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a research group in the Washington area that supports colorblind government policies, disagreed, saying the majority honored history in yesterday’s decision.

“There is no question but that the principle of Brown is that a child’s skin color should not determine what school he or she should be assigned to,” Mr. Clegg said.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Brown not only supported but also required yesterday’s decision striking down student assignment plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., meant to ensure racially balanced schools.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in dissent, said Chief Justice Roberts’s discussion of Brown “rewrites the history of one of this court’s most important decisions.” Justice Stephen G. Breyer, also dissenting, said the opinion “undermines Brown’s promise of integrated primary and secondary education” and “threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation.”

Professor Greenberg said he was also wary of the reaction to yesterday’s decision. “Following Brown, there was massive resistance” that lasted some 15 years, he said. “This is essentially the rebirth of massive resistance in more acceptable form.”

Mr. Clegg, by contrast, said the decision’s practical consequences should be minimal. “Kennedy does leave the door open to some degree of consideration of race,” he said, “but it’s not very clear what that would be.”

As a consequence, Mr. Clegg said, most prudent school districts would shy from any use of race in assigning students for fear of costly and disruptive litigation.

Professor Greenberg suggested that more than law was at play in yesterday’s decision.

“You can’t really say that five justices are so smart that they can read the law and precedents and four others can’t,” he said. “Something else is going on.”

Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting.

    The Same Words, but Differing Views, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/us/29assess.html

Across U.S., a New Look at School Integration Efforts

June 29, 2007
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

The Supreme Court ruling striking down voluntary programs to integrate schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., left hundreds of school districts struggling yesterday to assess whether they must change policies that use race as a factor in school assignments.

Many lawyers said the 5-to-4 ruling would not end a half century of litigation over school desegregation but rather reignite it, as school districts turn to alternative methods for achieving diversity.

“The decision leaves unanswered questions about when race may be considered, and unanswered questions lead to more litigation,” said Sally Scott, a Chicago lawyer whose firm, Franczek Sullivan, represents dozens of Illinois school districts, some of which use assignment plans that consider race.

But one thing that seems certain, education lawyers agree, is that the decision will lead more districts to consider income as a race-neutral means of achieving school diversity, as is already done in Wake County, N.C.; La Crosse, Wis.; Cambridge, Mass.; and elsewhere.

Louisville, whose plan was struck down by yesterday’s ruling, could move in that direction.

“We didn’t have a, quote, Plan B, ready in case we lost,” said Stephen Imhoff, one of seven members of the Jefferson County school board that oversees the Louisville schools at issue in ruling. “But I began bringing up socioeconomic diversity with the board five years ago, and I think it will be one of the viable options we will discuss. Our board believes that diversity is valuable, and we will work to maintain it.”

Sharon Browne, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group that supported the parents suing Seattle and Louisville, said at a news conference yesterday that in addition to the foundation’s current litigation against policies in Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., schools, her group has identified several other districts, including Lynn, Mass., and Rochester, whose policies now seem ripe for challenge.

There are no reliable statistics on how many districts try to achieve racial balance by using race in decisions about which students go to which schools; estimates range from a few hundred to nearly 1,000. Some states specifically call for such plans.

In Massachusetts, for example, Lynn is one of about 20 districts with a voluntary plan complying with the state Racial Imbalance Act, which provided financial incentives for diversifying schools.

Districts have turned to a variety of strategies to maintain diversity — setting numeric ranges for racial representation in schools, strategically locating schools to attract specific racial groups, setting aside some seats in magnet programs for students of a particular race or forbidding transfers that would tilt a school further into dominance by one race.

The Louisville and Seattle cases were brought by parents whose children were not allowed to go to the school of their choice because of plans that seek to keep racial balance within a particular range.

Deciding how school assignment plans will have to be changed to comply with the ruling will require school boards to show some creativity, said Francisco Negrón, general counsel for the National School Boards Association.

“The court doesn’t give guidelines, and it’s not going to be one size fits all,” Mr. Negrón said.

While the decision makes clear that race cannot be the factor deciding whether a student will be allowed to attend a particular school, he said, the court left some room for districts to take race into account. They can locate schools to promote integration or perhaps assign students based on diversity indexes that take into account their poverty or language proficiency.

In Seattle, where the practice of using race to assign some students to high schools was suspended for the last five years while the case was making its way through the courts, school officials cast the ruling as more victory than defeat, saying it would provide guidance for their efforts to promote racial diversity.

“A majority of the Supreme Court affirmed the principle of diversity in public education,” said Gary L. Ikeda, the general counsel for Seattle Public Schools.

Because it already suspended its race policy, Seattle will not be forced to scramble the way other school districts may have to in light of the ruling. When asked the practical impact of having the race policy struck down, Raj Manhas, the district superintendent, said, “In reality, none.”

Mr. Manhas said the district already was taking steps to encourage racial diversity through other means, including placing highly sought after International Baccalaureate and dual-language programs in locations where they are likely to draw a diverse student body.

In a nation where housing patterns are largely segregated, efforts to integrate schools have been a hot button in education for more than a half-century. There was the fight over segregation that led to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the widespread busing battles in Boston in the 1970s and the long and intimate federal court oversight of desegregation in many of the nation’s cities.

Many of the nation’s largest urban districts now have so few white students that any large-scale effort at racial balance would be impractical.

New York City was largely unaffected by the decision, although officials in the Department of Education said they were considering using the ruling to seek legal action to overturn two court orders from the 1970s that placed racial quota systems at eight middle schools in Brooklyn and Queens.

Chancellor Joel I. Klein has said those quotas are antiquated and no longer reflect the makeup of the neighborhoods, which have seen white flight and the arrival of scores of new immigrants.

Since 1990, as judges ruled that the effects of past segregation had been remedied, court orders were lifted in many districts. But some of those same districts, along with others that were never under court order, voluntarily adopted desegregation plans.

Jefferson County, the Louisville-area district that yesterday’s ruling was concerned with, revised its plan repeatedly after coming out from its court order. It now has some of the most integrated schools in the nation, keeping black enrollment in most schools between 15 percent and 50 percent by encouraging, and occasionally obliging, white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods and black students to attend schools in white ones.

Fran Ellers, a white parent who sends her children to a school in a black neighborhood, said yesterday that she was disappointed with the ruling.

“I have been so proud of Louisville’s very diverse school system,” Ms. Ellers said. “My son has a group of buddies, from all over the county, and they’re black and white, and only one is from our neighborhood. Going back to neighborhood schools would be a big loss.”

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, said about 40 districts consider family income in assigning students.

“If you switch to socioeconomic status,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, “not only do you get a fair amount of racial integration that’s legally bullet-proof, but the research shows that for individual students, it’s more closely aligned with achievement, with higher test scores, than racial integration.”

William Yardley contributed reporting from Seattle, and Jennifer Medina from New York.

    Across U.S., a New Look at School Integration Efforts, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29schools.html?hp

How the Programs Linked to Race Worked in 2 Cities

June 29, 2007
The New York Times

The Supreme Court’s decision on school integration invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky.

The Louisville schools, once segregated by law, operated under a federal court’s desegregation order from 1975 until 2000, when the court found that the district had eliminated the vestiges of official segregation “to the greatest extent possible.” The next year, to keep the schools from resegregating, Jefferson County adopted the plan the Supreme Court struck down yesterday.

Governing student assignments from elementary school through high school, the plan required schools to maintain a minimum black enrollment of 15 percent and a maximum of 50 percent. According to the district, the racial guidelines made a difference in about 3 percent of the student assignments. About two-thirds of the district’s 97,000 students are white and one-third are black.

The Seattle district was never segregated by law, but severe racial imbalances led to litigation, and court decree, resulting in mandatory busing in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1996, the school board adopted a student-choice plan for the district’s 10 high schools, in which race was made a “tie breaker” to fill slots at over-subscribed schools if the school’s enrollment deviated by more than 10 percent from the district’s overall balance of whites and nonwhites.

The district is approximately 41 percent white, with the nonwhite students divided nearly equally among Asians and blacks, with smaller numbers of Latinos and American Indians. According to the district, the plan kept only a few dozen students each year from attending a high school that they had listed among their choices.

    How the Programs Linked to Race Worked in 2 Cities, NYT, 29.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29scotusbox.html

VaTech Report Cites Privacy Law Problems

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:55 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Schools, doctors and police often do not share information about potentially dangerous students because they can't figure out complicated and overlapping privacy laws, according to a report released Wednesday on the Virginia Tech shooting.

As a result, information that could be used to get troubled students counseling or prevent them from buying handguns never makes it to the appropriate agency, the report by three Cabinet agencies said.

President Bush ordered the report in April after Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty before taking his own life in what was the worst massacre in modern U.S. history.

Cho's roommates noticed he had problems, his professors expressed concern about his violent writings, and a judge ordered him into treatment after describing the young man as a danger to himself and others.

But it's unclear whether Cho received follow-up treatment, and because the court order never made it into a federal database, he was able to legally purchase two handguns to carry out the attack.

The report was released Wednesday, just after the House passed what could become the first major federal gun control law in over a decade. The bill would improve state reporting to a federal database used to block gun purchases by prohibited buyers.

Shortly after the shootings, Bush dispatched Cabinet officials across the country, ordering them to meet with school officials, mental health experts and local leaders to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

The report by the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, and Education found that teachers and school administrators feared liability for sharing information and didn't understand whether they could be held responsible for not sharing information.

''This confusion and differing interpretations about state and federal privacy laws and regulations impede appropriate information sharing,'' the study's authors wrote.

The report also recommended that schools develop systems that allow them to quickly notify students when emergencies occur.

Virginia Tech officials waited more than two hours to alert the school's nearly 26,000 students that two of their peers had been shot dead in a dormitory. By then, Cho was in another campus building, murdering 30 more people.

The school is considering programs to alert students of security issues through cell phone text messages.

    VaTech Report Cites Privacy Law Problems, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Report.html

Commencement Speeches

Iraq Is Backdrop for Many Graduation Speakers

June 10, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

For many if not most members of the class of 2007, the war in Iraq has been the constant background of their college years. And so as seniors graduated from thousands of colleges and universities in recent weeks, the war was on the mind of many commencement speakers. Some criticized its prosecution, others commended the sacrifices of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers serving in the armed forces, but few ignored the continuing struggle.

“Most of you were juniors in high school when terrorists attacked America in September 2001, and it became clear we were a nation at war,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told graduates at the United States Naval Academy. “With your credentials, you could have attended another prestigious university, and subsequently pursued a private life, with all its material rewards, your freedom and safety assured by other young men and women who volunteered to serve in the American military.”

Some speakers offered a critical view of the war and its consequences. Anthony W. Marx, the president of Amherst College, spoke at Amherst’s commencement of the lessons of the Roman empire, which he said declined when leaders turned away from civic action toward private pursuits, abdicating civil authority to the military.

“Always, our political reach, our cultural persuasion, our economic integration and our military might are bounded,” Dr. Marx said, drawing analogies between Rome’s decline and the present. “At those boundaries, smugness is challenged. If we fail to heed that challenge, if we do not learn from the limits of our victories, we risk the fate of Rome.”

Boyd Tinsley, an electric violinist in the Dave Matthews Band, told graduates in a speech the day before graduation at the University of Virginia, his alma mater, “I hope that you will once again bring us back to a time when a person’s patriotism was judged by how much they loved their country, and not by how much they loved war.”

Still, there was plenty of customary commencement fare. Graduates were exhorted to be bold and public spirited, to confront environmental degradation and global warming, to end poverty in the United States and curb it internationally. They were urged to find their inner voice, to leap confidently over obstacles in their careers, to avoid apathy and the lure of personal enrichment over civic engagement.

“Times like these call for people like you to stand up and get to work,” Kamala D. Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, told graduates at San Francisco State University. “To break barriers, to drive change, roll up your sleeves instead of throwing up your hands.”

There was also the usual complement of confessions. Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC Nightly News, confided to students at Tulane that he had not earned a college degree, which he described as “one of the great, great regrets of my life.” The mystery novelist Mary Higgins Clark told graduates of Quinnipiac University that she could not sing, dance, cook or sew, though she acknowledged she could tell a story.

And Tom Brokaw, the former news anchor at NBC, said at the Skidmore College commencement that his mentor at the University of South Dakota had characterized his undergraduate career this way: “We always thought his first degree was an honorary degree.”

Then, too, a number of speakers worried aloud that they might be going on too long. The presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminded graduates at Lafayette College that former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was known for giving speeches that lasted as long as three hours.

“Once Humphrey did this, and even he knew he was overdoing it,” Mr. Beschloss said. “He yelled at the audience, ‘Anybody here got a watch?’ and someone yelled back, ‘How about a calendar?’ “

Robert M. Gates

Secretary of defense

The College of William & Mary

Some of you may know the story of Ryan McGlothlin, William & Mary class of 2001: a high school valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa here and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. After being turned down by the Army for medical reasons, he persisted and joined the Marines and was deployed to Iraq in 2005. He was killed leading a platoon of riflemen near the Syrian border.

Ryan’s story attracted media attention because of his academic credentials and family connections. That someone like him would consider the military surprised some people. When Ryan first told his parents about joining the Marines, they asked if there was some other way to contribute. He replied that the privileged of this country bore an equal responsibility to rise to its defense.

It is precisely during these trying times that America needs its best and brightest young people, from all walks of life, to step forward and commit to public service. Because while the obligations of citizenship in any democracy are considerable, they are even more profound, and more demanding, as citizens of a nation with America’s global challenges and responsibilities — and America’s values and aspirations.

Tom Brokaw

Former anchor, NBC News

Skidmore College

You’ve been told during your high school years and your college years that you are now about to enter the real world, and you’ve been wondering what it’s like. Let me tell you that the real world is not college. The real world is not high school. The real world, it turns out, is much more like junior high. You are going to encounter, for the rest of your life, the same petty jealousies, the same irrational juvenile behavior, the same uncertainty that you encountered during your adolescent years. That is your burden. We all share it with you. We wish you well.

Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Supreme Court justice

St. Mary’s College


Decades from now, you may be different than you are today in a lot of significant ways. You may have a lot more than you have today. You may have more money and more status and more power and more accomplishments. You may also have more responsibilities, more worries, more regrets and more bruises. But underneath all of that, you will still be the same person who is here today graduating from college, and it will be good for you to stay connected with the people who know the real you.

Gloria Steinem

Writer

Smith College

In my generation, we were asked by the Smith vocational office how many words we could type a minute, a question that was never asked of then all-male students at Harvard or Princeton. Female-only typing was rationalized by supposedly greater female verbal skills, attention to detail, smaller fingers, goodness knows what, but the public imagination just didn’t include male typists, certainly not Ivy League-educated ones.

Now computers have come along, and “typing” is “keyboarding.” Suddenly, voila! — men can type! Gives you faith in men’s ability to change, doesn’t it?

Kamala D. Harris

San Francisco district attorney

San Francisco State University

As you grow in your career, you may hit another barrier — the limits that others set for you. A ceiling on what you can accomplish and who you can be. That happened to me. When I decided to run for district attorney, it was considered a man’s job even here in San Francisco. No woman had ever been elected district attorney in San Francisco. No person of color had ever been elected district attorney in San Francisco.

I remember the day I got my first poll results back. I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

Well, I didn’t listen.

And I’m telling you, don’t you listen either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it.

John Grisham

Novelist

University of Virginia

Thirty years ago this week, I graduated from college, class of 1977. I don’t recall much about my commencement. I do remember that the speaker was dull and long-winded, and he did inform us that the future was ours and the world was at our feet. I do remember sitting through my commencement being pretty smug: I was graduating from college, I had been accepted to law school and I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to study tax law. I wanted to be a tax lawyer because I was convinced I could make a lot of money representing wealthy people who did not want to pay all their taxes. That was my dream, and I had it all planned. I knew the day I was going to start law school, the day I was going to finish. I had a pretty good idea where my office was going to be. It was all planned.

I don’t know where this idea came from. I did not like tax law. I sure didn’t know any wealthy people. Looking back, I cannot begin to remember where this idea was planted, but that was my dream. I had everything planned. The idea of writing a book had never crossed my mind. I had never written anything that had not been required by school. I had never dreamed of it.

Lesson No. 1: You cannot plan the rest of your life.

Rev. Peter J. Gomes

Professor, Harvard University

Augustana College

Around this time of year I have an annoying habit of asking people, like you seniors, “Do you have a job?” You resist answering that question, but I repeat it, “Your mother and I want to know, do you have a job?” By job we don’t mean simply something that gives you a salary; I think we really mean: “Do you have a purpose? Do you have a calling? Do you have a vocation?”

I want to suggest to you that whether or not you have a job, everyone has a vocation, and that vocation is to live a life that is worth living. The best advice I can give is that which St. Paul gives us in Romans 12, where he says to the likes of you, who all look alike from here, “Be not conformed to this world.” Do not join the throng. Don’t get lost in the crowd. Don’t be a part of the cookie-manufactured college generation, but stake out for yourselves some extraordinary, maybe even eccentric, piece and place of the world, and make it your own.

Representative John Lewis

Democrat of Georgia

Adelphia University

Sometimes I hear some young people say nothing has changed. I feel like saying, come and walk in my shoes. In 1956, at the age of 16, being so inspired by Dr. King along with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins, we went to the little library in Pike County, Alabama, a public library in the little town of Troy trying to get library cards, trying to check out some books. And we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for coloreds.

I never went back to that library until July 5, 1998. By that time I was a member of Congress, and I went there for a book signing of my book. Hundreds of blacks and white citizens showed up. I signed many books. In the end, they gave me a library card. It says something about the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made in laying down the burden of race.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Director of the Earth Institute,

Columbia University

Ursinus College

It’s all about choice, graduates, it really is. There is nothing about fate. It’s all about choice. It’s all about values, creativity, leadership. Let me give you just one small example of choice: the choice we are making, the choice we should be making. Malaria is a disease we don’t know very much in this country, but it is a disease that will kill two million children this year, overwhelmingly in Africa. Two million children. Now this is a disease that is largely preventable and 100 percent treatable. And the treatment costs 80 cents. But people are so poor that two million kids are going to die this year because they don’t even get access to the simplest things, like a bed net treated with insecticide that would protect them from this disease.

Now here’s the basic arithmetic of our time: There are 300 million places in Africa, sleeping sites where people are vulnerable to being bitten by this disease. 300 million. Each bed net costs five bucks. I trust your economics course was sufficiently good so you could quickly calculate this, it’s why I went for a Ph.D. I know that’s $1.5 billion. Or you could take out Excel if you want to do it that way. $1.5 billion. And yet almost none of these children sleeps under a bed net because they are too poor. But what is $1.5 billion in today’s world? That is what we spend every day on the Pentagon. That’s our daily military budget. So here is the calculation and here is the choice. One day’s Pentagon spending would provide all sleeping sites in Africa with five years of bed net coverage, to fend off a disease which kills millions every year. That’s a choice. We haven’t made it. My suggestion is, the Pentagon take next Thursday off.

Shirley Ann Jackson

President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

University of Rochester

I am an optimist. I am short, and short people can only see the glass as half full. So optimize who you are and what you are. Optimize your experiences and what you have learned. Optimize others. Optimize your opportunities. Seize them and do meaningful things.

Berry Gordy Jr.

Founder of Motown Records

Occidental College

I was a songwriter, I was struggling, and I loved it. I wanted to be the greatest songwriter. I was writing about everything — everything I saw. But I was not making money, and I finally agreed with everyone I ever talked to who knew me, who said, “Boy, you need to get a job — a real one.” So I got a job on the Ford assembly line. And every day I watched how a bare metal frame rolling down the line would come off the other end a spanking brand-new car. Wow, I thought. What a great idea. Maybe I can do the same thing with my music — create a place where a kid off the street can walk in one door an unknown and come out another door a star. That little thought that came to me while running up and down that assembly line at Ford Motor Company became a reality you now know as Motown.

Laura Bush

First lady

Pepperdine University

Today starts a period of incredible liberty and adventure — a time to demand the most of life, before life makes specific demands on you. And as you work to make the most of what you’ve received, I can tell you one thing for sure: You won’t waste your talents and education if you freely give them in service to others.

This is especially important for the class of 2007. More than any other generation of Americans, yours is tasked with resolving challenges that lie far beyond your doorstep — even far beyond America’s borders. Between cellphones and the Internet, you have a world of information literally at your fingertips. And because our world is so small, you can’t ignore the genocide in Darfur, or the human-rights abuses in Burma. You can’t turn away as pandemic diseases torment an entire continent. And you can’t look aside as American communities lie in ruin.

Dean Kamen

Inventor and entrepreneur

Bates College

We’re moving from a world of stuff, from the idea that there’s a finite amount of gold out there, a finite amount of almost anything out there. Throughout all of history, people fought over stuff: land, fuel, stuff. But in your generation, the most value that will be created isn’t stuff anymore. It really is ideas. The Internet is an abstraction, and the value of Google exceeds the value of all the car makers. In a world that’s about ideas, it’s not a zero-sum game. You don’t have to win by someone else losing, where you have the gold or oil or water, and somebody else doesn’t.

Angela Davis

Professor, University of California,

Santa Cruz

Grinnell College

I hope that you will treasure the approaches and ways of thinking that you have learned more than the facts you have accumulated. For you will never discover a scarcity of facts, and these facts will be presented in such a way as to veil the ways of thinking embedded in them. And so to reveal these hidden ways of thinking, to suggest alternate frameworks, to imagine better ways of living in evolving worlds, to imagine new human relations that are freed from persisting hierarchies, whether they be racial or sexual or geopolitical — yes, I think this is the work of educated beings. I might then ask you to think about education as the practice of freedom.

Alice Walker

Novelist and poet

Naropa University

When it is all too much, when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of peace, find a human sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of human life.

George Stephanopoulos

Chief Washington correspondent, ABC News

St. John’s University

Solidarity and love are needed more than ever in a world that confounds us with contradictions and confronts us with the challenge of living with its paradoxes.

We live in the strongest military power the world has ever known. No country in the world can match that arsenal, but years of war have taught us the painful limits of military force. And we all have been marked by the day when 19 men armed only with box cutters and a death wish struck at the heart of our culture and consciousness.

You are about to enter one of the biggest economies the world has ever known. We are creating more billionaires and millionaires than ever before, but the gap between our richest and our poorest is bigger than ever before. One out of every eight Americans is living in poverty, with millions more struggling to get by. You’ll be shaping a culture that for better or worse, is copied all over the world. The liberties and opportunities we take for granted make us a magnet for people from all over the world. But the power we project also makes us a target. A country with the reach of an empire cannot avoid the envy of those who have less, or the duty to help care for them.

Tavis Smiley

Radio and television talk show host

Rutgers University

The tragedy of life does not lie, young folk, in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It is not a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to not be able to capture your ideals, but it is a disaster to have no ideals to capture. It is not a disgrace to not be able to reach all the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for.

    Iraq Is Backdrop for Many Graduation Speakers, NYT, 10.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/us/10commencement.html?hp

Study: States Differ on School Standards

June 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:09 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A reading score that rates a fourth-grader ''proficient'' in Mississippi would be a failing score in Massachusetts, according to a report released Thursday by the Education Department.

The wide variations found in how states assess student progress are certain to fuel debate about whether the federal No Child Left Behind law should be overhauled to make standards more uniform from state to state.

The study compared what it takes to be rated ''proficient'' on elementary- and middle-school state reading and math tests to what it means to hit that mark on national tests. It found that most of the scores that would label a student proficient on state tests don't yield that grade on the national tests.

There also are huge differences in where states set their benchmarks.

Massachusetts sets the proficiency score on its fourth-grade reading test just below the proficiency mark on the national test. But a fourth-grader in Mississippi can be rated proficient with a state test score that is more than 70 points lower. Proficiency is defined as working at the level expected for that grade.

The tests given by the states are used to judge schools under No Child Left Behind, the five-year-old education law that is up for renewal this year.

States pick their own tests and set their own achievement scores. When too few students in a school meet proficiency standards, that school typically faces consequences such as having to swap out principals or teachers. States that set high standards generally have fewer students labeled as proficient than states with low standards.

The national test, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is a rigorous exam given in a variety of subjects to students nationwide. It doesn't have consequences attached to it like those linked to the state tests. But it does offer a way to compare states to one another.

The study did not find a clear relationship between high standards in a state and high performance on the national test by students in that state.

For example, North Carolina and South Carolina students score about the same on the national tests, but South Carolina has higher state performance standards than its neighbor.

Susan Fuhrman, president of Columbia University's Teachers College, says educators have long known that solid standards aren't a silver bullet. ''It's not enough to set standards and test achievement on them. There's a lot of other stuff that has to happen instructionally,'' she said.

The discrepancy in state standards has been identified by previous private studies, but the new report is much more detailed and is considered important because it is being released by the Education Department's independent research arm rather than by advocacy groups.

Several groups have called for national standards to be written into the education law in light of the discrepancies in state standards, but Congress is unlikely to go that far because states see education as a fundamentally local prerogative.

''I think that in principle it is a good idea. It is hard to argue why you have different math in Mississippi and Montana,'' said Fuhrman, but she added that states should band together to set common standards and not rely on Washington to do it. There is some evidence that's starting to happen; a group of states recently agreed to share an algebra test.

The Education Trust, a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates for poor and minority students, has recommended that if states significantly raise their standards, the government should reward them by loosening rules requiring all kids to be working on grade level by 2014.

That is among the proposals being considered on Capitol Hill. Massachusetts Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, who chairs the Senate education committee, also is interested in giving states that raise their standards more money to help with the effort.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings opposes moving away from requiring all students to be at grade level by 2014. She has said states should be required to publish report cards showing how students did on the states' tests and on the national assessment.

''I do think it's important to kind of amplify that wide variance among states,'' Spellings said in a conference call with reporters a day before the report's public release. ''Transparency, in my mind, is always the first place to go.''

The report also found:

--Eighth-graders in North Carolina had to demonstrate the least knowledge to be considered proficient readers, while students in Wyoming had to show the most knowledge.

--Tennessee set the lowest bar on the fourth-grade math test, while Massachusetts set the highest one.

--In eighth-grade math, Missouri set the highest proficiency standard -- 12 points above the national one. Tennessee's was the lowest, 69 points below the national bar.

The Education Department's report was based on tests given in the 2004-05 school year. Scores weren't available for some states, because some did not have annual reading and math tests in fourth- and eighth-grade then. All states have them now.

The report comes two days after the Center on Education Policy, a national nonprofit policy group, found that scores on the state tests have gone up in recent years. Spellings said that is an important finding that should not be undercut by the latest study showing a lack of uniformity in state standards.

''Something positive and meaningful and good is going on out in states,'' she said.

------

On the Net:

National Center for Education Statistics:

http://nces.ed.gov/

(This version CORRECTS that Mississippi's standard is set ''more than'' 70 points below the national standard, instead of ''nearly'' 70 points below the national standard.)

    Study: States Differ on School Standards, NYT, 7.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Education-Standards.html

On Education

A School Frees Low-Income Boys From the Pressures of the Streets

May 16, 2007
The New York Times
By JOSEPH BERGER

Where are the boys?

Like many educators, Brother Brian Carty was tossing around that question a decade ago with George Jackson, a former student and onetime president of Motown Records. De La Salle Academy, the coeducational middle school Brother Brian started in 1984 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was steering its poor and working-class students, most of them black and Latino, into the nation’s finest high schools, but the pool of boys applying to the school kept dwindling.

Something was telling boys that being school-smart meant being a wimp or a loser.

“They’re being pressured to dumb down,” was how Brother Brian saw it.

So he and Mr. Jackson came up with an idea — to found a school, one just for talented boys, that would feed their curiosity in an atmosphere free of girls, whose presence might be distracting and stoke their male one-upmanship. As important, the school would emphasize civility and collaboration as a way of defusing the pernicious Darwinism of the streets. It would show that academic savvy needs to be enhanced by emotional savvy.

Mr. Jackson, whose path out of Harlem was helped by another school Brother Brian led, died of a stroke in 2000 at the age of 42. But three years later, Brother Brian opened the George Jackson Academy in the East Village. Next month, the school graduates its first class of 18 boys, and most are heading with full scholarships toward Trinity, Lawrenceville, Riverdale Country and other prep schools as well as the city’s most selective public school, Stuyvesant.

A day spent at Jackson shows how it has flourished — by cultivating a culture where boys consider the feelings of their classmates, a sensitivity American culture has too often demanded only of girls.

A nonsectarian school, Jackson now has 116 low-income students, 51 percent of them black, 33 percent Latino and 16 percent Asian. The generosity of foundations and donors covers 92 percent of the school’s bills; though tuition is $12,500, parents pay only a small fraction, and classes are prep-school small.

A visitor is immediately struck by the fact that the boys, wearing ties as if they were corporate lawyers, greet visitors by looking them squarely in the eye and offering a handshake. There’s none of the roughhousing common to middle school hallways.

“You can be ticked at somebody, but nobody has a right to lay a hand on anybody,” is Brother Brian’s watchword.

An eighth-grade discussion of Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” led by a teacher, Kelly Moloney, was on a level that college professors might envy, laced with comparisons to earlier readings like “Macbeth” and “Native Son,” and with every student engaged. When students discussed the symbolism of the flight by the leading character, Milkman Dead, David Marino speculated that “flight is more of a metaphor for going to heaven.”

As impressive as the content was the statesmanlike way the boys spoke to one another — not with the cutting taunts more common at urban middle schools. Ruben Presley, slender and cheerful, disagreed with Darian Murray but prefaced his argument with disarming delicacy, cautioning, “I want to go against what Darian had said.”

In a writing class taught by André Del Valle, a similar sensitivity was evident in the way fifth-graders analyzed one another’s essays about “Across Five Aprils,” a Civil War novel by Irene Hunt told from a youth’s point of view. “Try working on your punctuation a little more,” is the way a classmate phrased Christopher Mejia’s evaluation, for example.

Mr. Del Valle said the students demonstrated the school’s credo of avoiding offense. “Instead of saying, ‘That was poorly done,’ you might say: ‘I didn’t understand what you were saying. Could you explain that?’ ” Teachers reinforce the code by their own courtliness.

The school’s published ethos of “community” — its version of principles that have come down from the 17th-century founder of the Christian Brothers, Jean-Baptiste De La Salle — tells boys that “the needs of others are often placed before our own” and “everyone helps everyone else.”

Tyrell Niles, 14, recalled that when he was struggling with graphing equations, Christian Hernandez showed him how. “There’s no put-down,” Tyrell said. “We help each other out.”

In a lunchtime chat, David M. Arnold, the school’s head and a former principal at Dalton and Friends Seminary, explained how “early on, the boys recognize they are their brother’s keeper” and that “excellence doesn’t have to come at the expense of others.”

“What does it mean to be a member of a community, to belong to something that’s a greater good than yourself?” he said. “It means one surrenders that selfishness for the betterment of a larger family, that they divest themselves of rampant individualism.”

It was not like that in the public elementary schools they attended, the boys say.

“Public school is more live and let die,” said Jose Rivas, an eighth grader who travels an hour by subway from Jamaica, Queens.

Tyrell added, “In public school, if you have a problem, you have to deal with it within yourself.”

Students say they are teased by neighborhood friends for attending a boys’ school. “They say it’s gay,” Devon Batiz said. But he feels Jackson’s atmosphere “keeps us focused.”

“Girls aren’t in the way,” he said. “We’re not trying to be cool, not trying to impress them.”

WHEN professionals lament that so many black and Latino boys are dropping out and how many fewer men in general are attending college than women, Jackson’s achievement is welcome. But Jackson raises questions worth pondering.

The school may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The students are selected because of high I.Q. scores; the average is 133. How would Jackson do with students who were reading below grade and were disruptive, the kind of students public schools can’t exclude?

Partisans argue that Jackson is a rescue operation of sorts, taking boys with potential out of schools where they might have been dragged down by a whirlpool of resentment, bullying or their own surrender.

“Guidance counselors in the public schools are sending us these kids because they see they are bored, being warehoused and veering off into drugs or other things,” said Mr. Arnold, the school’s head.

There is an incongruity in a collaborative place like Jackson’s taking pride in how many graduates are heading for competitive schools, where Jackson’s low-income alumni may also have to endure seeing classmates pull up in Mercedes convertibles. But the boys say Jackson has prepared them, showing them they can thrive among other bright students while cultivating a sturdy character.

“We were able to develop in this atmosphere,” said Shehab Hassan, an eighth grader, when asked about the more cutthroat places his classmates would be entering. “Now that we’re mature, we have to face the world, and unfortunately the whole world is like that.”

    A School Frees Low-Income Boys From the Pressures of the Streets, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/education/16education.html

Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier

May 16, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Lehigh University has never been as sought after as Stanford, Yale or Harvard. But this year, awash in applications, it churned out rejection letters and may break more hearts when it comes to its waiting list.

Call them second-tier colleges (a phrase some administrators despise) or call them the new Ivies (this, they can live with). Twenty-five to 40 universities like Lehigh, traditionally perceived as being a notch below the most elite, have seen their cachet climb because of the astonishing competitive crush at the top.

“It’s harder to get into Bowdoin now than it was to get into Princeton when I worked there,” said William M. Shain, who worked at Princeton in the 1970s and is now dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. Bowdoin is one of those benefiting from the spillover as the country’s most prestigious colleges turn away nearly 9 out of 10 applicants.

At Lehigh, known for its strength in engineering and business, about 12,000 students applied this year. That is a whopping 50 percent increase in applications over seven years ago and more than 10 times the seats available in a freshman class of 1,150. The median SAT score of admitted students has climbed about 10 points a year in recent years, officials said.

Students have generally been quicker to adapt to the new realities than parents have been, many guidance counselors said.

“My sense is that parents are a lot more concerned with how the name is going to look to neighbors and family members, and there is a real sense among parents that it’s almost embarrassing if your child has to settle for a lower-level school,” said Carolyn Lawrence, a private college counselor and the author of a blog, AdmissionsAdvice.com.

Some students who might have readily won admission to Lehigh, Middlebury College, Colgate University, Pomona College, Emory University or New York University just a few years ago are now relegated to waiting lists, left to confront the long odds that an offer of admission might materialize over the next month.

John Dunham, a senior at the private Delbarton School in Morristown, N.J., had trained his sights on Bucknell University and Lafayette College. He was rejected by Bucknell and put on the waiting list at Lafayette. His college counselor pushed him toward Kenyon College in Ohio, or as the counselor put it “the Williams of the Midwest.”

But Mr. Dunham, a solid student who played football and baseball in high school, decided to play baseball on an athletic scholarship at Central Connecticut State.

“People are definitely broadening their horizons, because it’s gotten so competitive,” Mr. Dunham said.

The logjam is the result of supply and demand. The number of students graduating from high school has been increasing, and the preoccupation with the top universities, once primarily a Northeastern phenomenon, has become a more national obsession. High-achieving students are also applying to more colleges than they used to, primarily because of uncertainty over where they will be admitted.

Supply, however, has remained constant. Most of the sought-after universities have not expanded their freshman classes. The result, said Jonathan Miller, a senior at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., is that many classmates perceive institutions like Tufts University, Bowdoin, the University of Rochester and Lehigh in a new light. “I would say that high school students are looking more and more at these schools,” he said, “the way they used to look at the Ivies.”

An A student with good SAT scores, Mr. Miller said that he considered applying to Brown University, among others, but that his guidance counselor discouraged him, emphasizing the tough odds. Mr. Miller decided instead to apply early admission to Tufts, and by December, had been accepted. He said he was delighted.

Some students who have accepted offers from these colleges were rejected by the most prestigious universities. Others, keenly aware of the extreme competition at the top, decided at the outset to focus on colleges more likely to admit them.

“I’m sure part of what we’re seeing is people are saying, ‘Well, if the Ivies and Duke are inaccessible, where do I go to get a similar academic experience?’ ” said Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at Rochester.

There are other reasons, too, why these colleges and universities find their stock climbing. To position themselves in the fiercely competitive market, they have hired stronger faculty; built new libraries, science complexes, dining halls, fitness centers and dormitories; and created international programs and interdisciplinary majors. Many have also sought to transform themselves from regional institutions to national ones, recruiting across the country.

At Middlebury, applications have increased by 1,000 in each of the last two years; nearly 7,200 students applied this year, compared with 5,200 in 2005. At Kenyon, about 4,600 students applied this year, while 2,000 did six years ago. Colgate received 8,752 applications this year, compared with 5,852 a decade ago.

And at the University of Vermont, a state institution, nearly 19,000 applications poured in this year, compared with 7,400 seven years ago. Many of the most prestigious public universities like Michigan and Virginia have also become much more selective, especially for out-of-state applicants.

The academic profile of students enrolling at these colleges is improving, based on average SAT scores and other data.

“We’re getting a remarkably gifted group of students,” said Gerard P. Lennon, associate dean in the college of engineering and applied sciences at Lehigh, who has taught at the university for 27 years. The median SAT score in the combined verbal and math parts of the test is now 1,320 out of 1,600. (That is not counting the writing section of the test.)

But the spillover at the second level has also created its own spillover; some students who not long ago would have won admission to these colleges no longer are.

The admission rate at Pomona, in Claremont, Calif., was about 15 percent this spring; it was 38 percent 20 years ago. Bowdoin’s rate was 18.5 percent this year and 32 percent eight years ago. At Lehigh, 31 percent were accepted this spring, compared with 47 percent in 2001.

High school guidance counselors have become the reality instructors, encouraging students and parents to think more broadly about colleges.

“Now a kid who is applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton is also applying to the Lehighs and Lafayettes,” said Brett Levine, director of guidance at Madison High School in New Jersey. “It’s the same tier, basically.”

    Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/education/16admissions.html

Modest Gains Seen in U.S. Students’ History Scores

May 16, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

Federal officials reported today that students in fourth, eighth and 12 grade showed modest increases in test scores in history, although more than half of the nation’s high school seniors still showed poor command of even basic facts like the impact of the cotton gin on the slave economy or the causes of the Korean War.

Federal officials said they considered the results encouraging because student performance at every level tested improved since the last time the test was administered, in 2001. “Overall achievement has improved significantly at all grade levels in U.S. history,” the 24-member bipartisan board that administers the test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, said in a statement today.

The best results were in fourth grade, where 70 percent of students attained the basic level of achievement or better. The history scores, and some similar results on a national civics exam also released today, are likely to be closely studied, partly because Congress is considering the renewal of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, which took effect in 2002.

Because that law requires states to administer annual tests in math and reading, and punishes schools where scores fail to rise, a string of studies have shown that thousands of schools have reduced time spent on other subjects, including history.

Lawmakers and educators are likely to puzzle over why, under such circumstances, achievement in history has increased even modestly, and some suggested that the fourth grade results were tied to better reading skills.

“It is especially good news that gains have been made by the lowest-performing students,” said Darvin M. Winick, the University of Texas research fellow who is the board’s chairman.

Still, the national assessment in history, which divides student achievement levels into basic, proficient or advanced, had the highest percentage of 12th grade students scoring below basic of any subject tested in 2005 and 2006, including math, reading and science.

The history test was given early in 2006 to a national sample of 29,200 fourth-, eighth- and 12th grade students. Among the results were these:

¶Some 47 percent of the 12th graders performed at the basic level or above, while 13 percent attained or exceeded the proficient level. Only 1 percent of students at any grade level scored at the advanced level. The last time the test was given in 2001 43 percent were at or above basic.

¶Sixty five percent of eighth-graders achieved the basic level or better, a slight rise from the 62 percent six years ago; 17 percent were proficient or above.

¶Seventy percent of fourth-grade students attained or exceeded the basic level, compared to 66 percent in 2001, while 18 percent were proficient.

The 30 percent of fourth-graders who scored below the basic level lacked the ability to identify even the most familiar historic figures, or to explain the reasons for celebrating national holidays. “It’s heartwarming that the test organizers have found positive things to say, but this report is not anything to break out the champagne over,” said Theodore K. Rabb, a history professor at Princeton who heads the board of the National Council for History Education, a private group that advocates devoting more classroom time to history.

Mr. Rabb pointed to a question on the fourth-grade version of the test, which quoted three sentences from the 1858 speech in which Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

The test asked students, “What did Abraham Lincoln mean in this speech?” and listed four possible answers.

a) The South should be allowed to separate from the United States.

b) The government should support slavery in the South.

c) Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.

d) Americans would not be willing to fight a war over slavery.

Fifty four percent of the fourth graders given the test failed to pick the correct answer, letter c).

“These are very worrisome results,” Mr. Rabb said.

    Modest Gains Seen in U.S. Students’ History Scores, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/education/16cnd-history.html?hp

In Study, College-Prep Classes Left Many Unready

Published: May 15, 2007
The New York Times
By KAREN ARENSON
 

Only one-quarter of high school students who take a full set of college-preparatory courses — four years of English and three each of mathematics, science and social studies — are well prepared for college, according to a new study of last year’s high school graduates released today by ACT, the Iowa testing organization.

The report analyzed approximately 1.2 million students who took the ACT college admissions test and graduated from high school last June. The study predicted whether the students had a good chance of scoring C or better in introductory college courses, based on their test scores and the success rates of past test takers.

The study concluded that only 26 percent were ready for college-level work in all four core areas, while 19 percent were not adequately prepared in any of them.

“It has become increasingly apparent that, while taking the right number of courses is certainly better than not, it is no longer enough,” the report said.

Cynthia B. Schmeiser, president and chief operating officer of ACT’s education division, said she was stunned by the low level of accomplishment for students who had taken the core curriculum, which was recommended 24 years ago in “A Nation at Risk,” a United States Department of Education commission report that prompted widespread efforts to improve American education.

“What’s shocking about this, is that since ‘A Nation at Risk,’ we have been encouraging students to take this core curriculum with the unspoken promise that when they do, they will be college-ready,” she said. “What we have found, now, is that when they do, only one in four is ready for college-level work.”

ACT reported that 54 percent of last year’s graduates who took the ACT exam said they had taken at least a core curriculum.

Those who had not taken this minimum curriculum fared even worse: only 14 percent were judged ready for college work in all four subject areas, while 36 percent were not prepared in any.

The report released today, entitled “Rigor at Risk: Reaffirming Quality in the High School Core Curriculum,” is a sign of growing attention to secondary education, after decades of emphasis on elementary and middle schools, and to what students are really learning in high school.

In 1999, Clifford Adelman, then a researcher at the federal Department of Education, found that the strength of high school work was the most important factor in determining college success, even more than the socioeconomic status of a student’s family.

The new report, which cites Mr. Adelman’s research, makes the case that many high school courses are not providing the necessary quality that he described.

“Course titles don’t matter nearly as much as what is taught and how it is taught,” said Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a Washington-based organization that works with states on academic standards. “There is tremendous variation in what is taught in a course called biology or algebra 2.”

Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, another Washington-based group that advocates standard-setting, said that as she traveled around the country, she found many schools not offering challenging work.

“When you look at the assignments these kids get, it is just appalling,” she said. “A course may be labeled college-preparatory English. But if the kids get more than three-paragraph-long assignments, it is unusual. Or they’ll be asked to color a poster. We say ‘How about doing analysis?’ and they look at us like we are demented.”

Other researchers have also found problems with the rigor of high school education. A study released last year by the National Center for Educational Accountability in Austin, Tex., for example, found that the majority of low-income students who received credit for a college-preparatory curriculum in Texas needed remedial help when they got to college

Chrys Dougherty, the center’s research director, said the ACT report showed that the problem found in Texas was widespread, and that “many high school students are not learning the content implied by the titles of the courses in which they are enrolled.”

ACT officials and other education analysts said that while educators must continue to improve what students learn in elementary and middle schools, so they will be ready to tackle more rigorous high school work, states must also begin to specify course standards and increase the capability of teachers in high school.

The ACT report also found that students who took more courses than the minimum core curriculum performed better on their exams, and had a greater chance of doing well in college. But even then, college readiness was not assured.

The report said that more advanced coursework was necessary to be well prepared after graduation, and that a rigorous set of core courses should achieve that.

    In Study, College-Prep Classes Left Many Unready, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/education/15cnd-report.html?hp

The Critical Years

Middle School Manages Distractions of Adolescence

May 12, 2007
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. — At Briarcliff Middle School, almost any minute of any day can become a lesson in weathering the turmoil of adolescence.

Take the large blue and white sign outside the cafeteria urging students to control their impulses. It didn’t stop Daniel Levine, a sixth grader, from slapping a Groucho Marx moustache on his upper lip and strutting around. But he did hesitate and think about it.

“I just wanted people to laugh,” said Daniel, an energetic 11-year-old. “I fool around, but I know you have to stop sometimes, and I’m still trying to learn that.”

Across New York State and the nation, educators are struggling with performance slumps in middle schools and debating how best to teach students at a transitional, volatile age. Just this week New York City put in place a new budget formula that directs extra money to middle schools.

Briarcliff has emerged as a nationally recognized model of a middle school that gets things right, a place that goes beyond textbooks to focus on social and emotional development.

There is no question that the Briarcliff school starts out with many advantages. It is part of a district in Westchester County that spends $24,738 per student, or more than one and a half times the New York State average, and can afford to buy extra sets of classroom textbooks so that students can leave their own copies at home. Its student body is relatively homogenous — 91.8 percent are white — and so well off that less than 1 percent qualify for free or reduced lunches. In contrast, in nearby New York City, 72 percent of the population qualifies.

But even affluent districts generally see a drop in student achievement in grades six through eight. Briarcliff has not; it is at the upper end of about 50 middle schools — out of more than 600 — in New York State where test scores have held steady and in some cases even increased slightly from the elementary level, according to state education data.

The 390 students here have consistently outperformed their peers on state tests. Last year the number of students passing state reading and math tests at each grade level ranged from 89 percent to 97 percent.

“We’d like high-performing middle grades schools to be the norm in our country, but right now they are more the exception,” said Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, an Illinois-based group.

Briarcliff school officials have made a conscious decision to cultivate the middle school, instead of looking for ways to make middle schools disappear, as other districts have done by stretching elementary schools to cover eighth grade.

In 2003, it was the middle school that moved into a new $24 million red-brick-and-glass building with panoramic views of the countryside while the high school took over its old space next door. The middle school also hires only teachers who express a clear interest in working with sixth, seventh and eighth graders, and trains them to reach the age group better.

The school takes particular pride in its focus on how adolescents think and develop. Susan Howard, the Briarcliff principal, emphasized during a recent orientation for fifth-grade parents that a good middle school had to recognize and respond to the stages of adolescence as well as to fulfill their students’ intellectual promise. “If you think about a recipe, if you leave out a key ingredient, you’re not going to get the same outcome,” she said.

So the school strives to develop critical thinking, teach organizational skills, and instill social and moral values. This is most visible in its adherence to Habits of Mind, a system developed by two educators, Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick, and now used in about 300 schools worldwide.

Since 2004, Briarcliff Middle School has exhorted students to live by the 16 traits that are at the core of Habits of Mind, traits that its supporters contend are common to highly successful people. From “thinking flexibly” and “taking responsible risks” to “managing impulsivity,” these traits are posted on signs around the school and serve as a constant reminder of how students are expected to behave.

Briarcliff is hardly alone in emphasizing social and emotional learning. For instance, more than 4,000 schools worldwide have embraced an alternative program, Tribes Learning Communities, which teaches students to work well together in a group by using skills such as listening, reflecting and problem-solving.

Lions Club International, the service organization, sponsors a program used in more than 1,500 middle schools nationally, called Skills for Adolescence, that teaches them to cope with peer pressure, resist drugs, and build self-esteem. And the 52 schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program, a nationwide network primarily of charter middle schools, rely on extensive team-building activities.

Mr. Costa, a former middle school teacher, said the Habits of Mind system worked particularly well with middle school students because it creates a shared culture of learning that helps them through the transition to adolescence. “They’re very conscious of their peers at that age, and they don’t want to be out of step,” he said. “The Habits of Mind is kind of a club that you belong to. You have a common language.”

Here in Briarcliff Manor, Nadine McDermott, the assistant principal who brought Habits of Mind to the school, said she viewed herself as a life coach for the students.

She said that when students are sent to her office for disciplinary problems, she asks them to reflect on how they failed to follow one or more of the Habits of Mind. She frequently visits classes to grill students on what critical thinking skills they are using, or not using.

“We’re really trying to cultivate intelligent behavior, and the whole school is my classroom,” she said.

Mrs. McDermott, who was observing an eighth-grade class on a recent morning, interrupted after several hands shot up in the air before the teacher had even finished asking the question. “Take five,” she said, asking the students to literally count off the seconds with their fingers. “I want you to be thinking about what you’re thinking.”

Although the Habits of Mind can seem cultlike at times, its language has become a common bond between teachers and students, even creating its own shorthand. “M.I.,” for “managing impulsivity,” is often heard in the hallways. Even students who said they were annoyed by the constant repetition acknowledged that the mental habits had probably kept them out of trouble.

Harry Zimmerman, 13, a seventh-grade student, said that managing his impulsivity during a social studies discussion stopped him from blurting out that he did not like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lives in nearby Chappaqua. “I realized that there might be people in the room who might be offended by that, and I didn’t say it,” he said.

Beyond Habits of Mind, many of Briarcliff’s 46 teachers have come up with creative if somewhat unconventional ways to keep their students focused. For instance, the sixth-grade students in Eileen Gallagher’s health and community class were whispering and interrupting her again on a recent afternoon, so she held up a white rubber ball decorated with world flags. “I have the ball, I have speaker power,” she announced. “All eyes here and all mouths closed.”

Borrowing the idea and the ball from another teacher, Ms. Gallagher laid down the new ground rules for her class: only one person would speak at a time, while everyone else had to pay attention. She then tossed the ball to a student, inviting him to speak, and that student in turn tossed it on to someone else. No one else interrupted. Lesson learned.

“You have to work with the group,” said Sean Glanville, 11, who admitted to calling out a lot in class. He has been trying to listen more, he said, even when his mother gives him chores to do. Now when she tells him to fetch six logs of firewood, he no longer comes back with just two, he said.

The school embraces team-building activities in and out of the classroom to encourage students to achieve as a group. Every year, the entire seventh grade embarks on a three-day outdoor trip to the Catskills for bonding activities such as a ropes course.

Briarcliff students are required to carry a spiral-bound organizer that includes a section to record homework assignments. Sixth graders are assigned a notebook color for each subject — red for science, green for social studies — so that they are less likely to mix them up. Students who need extra help can take a class in organization.

In one eighth-grade social studies class, the 15 students were preparing for a test on the Roaring Twenties by brainstorming about how to best study for it. As the teacher listed their ideas on a board, the old fallbacks like practice quizzes and flashcards gave way to more creative approaches: grouping notes by similar content, guessing at test questions, and even putting dates and facts into song.

In the back of the classroom, Matt Schwartz listened carefully as his classmate, Noah Safieh, said that, starting a week before a test, he writes down notes and quizzes himself on the material so that he would be less likely to forget it.

“It was very helpful because now when I study, I’ll try his method,” Matt said. “If it works, I’ll keep doing it.”

The emphasis on social development has also helped ease the transition for sixth-grade students like Mark Moretto, a slightly built 12-year-old who said that he had worried about bullying and peer pressure when he started in September. He has not had any problems yet.

“There’s a lot of help with problems,” he said. “So people don’t have a lot of anger, and they don’t feel like they want to just pound someone into the ground.”

    Middle School Manages Distractions of Adolescence, NYT, 12.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/education/12middle.html?hp

Va. Tech Graduations Honor Slain Victims

May 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:47 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- Struggling to balance grief with a graduation celebration, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger handed out class rings Friday night to the families of students slain during last month's shooting rampage.

As images of the slain students and faculty flashed on a huge screen at Lane Stadium, Steger and Provost Mark McNamee handed out the rings and got hugs from the victims' relatives.

''Please know that moving on -- moving on is not the same as forgetting,'' Steger said. ''We shall not forget. Yet, one senseless burst of violence -- as horrible and hurtful as it is -- will not turn us from our essence.''

The university planned to hand out diplomas to the slain students Saturday during ceremonies for individual colleges.

''Short was their stay on this mortal stage. Great was their impact,'' Steger said of the slain students in an address earlier Friday to about 600 of the nearly 1,200 graduate students who received master's degrees and doctorates.

Gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed the 27 fellow students, five faculty members and himself. His family will receive neither a ring nor a diploma, the university said.

In many ways, the evening ceremony for some 3,600 undergraduates seemed like most commencements. Grinning students jumped up and down and waved as their faces appeared on the stadium's giant screen while ''Pomp and Circumstance'' played and a faint drizzle fell.

Students chanted ''Let's go, Hokies!'' and the stadium's stands twinkled with constant camera flashes from the graduates' proud family members. Students decorated their mortarboards with ''VT'' and ''Hi Mom.''

But the speeches, while marked by hope, were also laced with sorrow.

''Rest assured, we will define ourselves by where we have been and where we will go,'' class historian Jennifer Weber said.

Survivors have a responsibility to realize the dreams and aspirations of the slain, said the keynote speaker, retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

''While we are saddened by the loss of those who cannot be here today, I believe that they would want this ceremony to commemorate both the tragedy of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow,'' he said. ''I believe that they look down on this gathering with dignified pride.''

Students, parents and faculty rose to their feet and cheered as Abizaid thanked Steger for ''holding things together'' in a time of tragedy.

During the graduate ceremonies, nine slain graduate students were awarded posthumous master's degrees or doctorates. Faculty members hugged the relatives who received them, some wiping away tears and all drawing long and loud applause from the crowd of several thousand.

James Long, whose sister, Michelle, earned a degree in history, said students would not let the tragedy overshadow their celebration.

''There are too many people here to celebrate five, six years of hard work to let one guy screw that up,'' said Long, 25, of Richmond.

Some families couldn't bear to attend graduation. Others said they had no choice but to come.

''We have to. This is right for us,'' said Peter Read, whose freshman daughter Mary Karen Read was among those killed.

Peter and Cathy Read returned to campus for more than their daughter's degree. They also returned to erase an unsettling image from the minds of their two youngest sons, Patrick, 4, and Brendan, 2.

''They're a little concerned that the bad man's going to shoot them,'' Cathy Read said. ''We can't let that idea grow in their heads.''

In Washington, President Bush issued a statement praising ''the compassion and resilient spirit'' of the Virginia Tech community and the 3,600 graduating seniors and others earning advanced or associate degrees.

''Laura and I salute the Virginia Tech Class of 2007. We also remember the students and teachers whose lives were taken last month,'' he said. ''They will always hold a special place in the hearts of this graduating class and an entire nation.''

Twins Andrea and Michelle Falletti of Chantilly, Va., said the shootings will not be what they remember when they look back on four years of college. Rather, they will recall spring breaks, camping trips and partying with friends.

''Obviously, what has happened has affected everything in our lives, and it will affect graduation,'' said Andrea Falletti, 21. ''In a way, it's not going to be celebrating us as much; it's more about what we've done as a community. But that's OK. I'm proud of what we've done here.''

Associated Press writers Sue Lindsey and Vicki Smith contributed to this report.

    Va. Tech Graduations Honor Slain Victims, NYT, 11.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Graduation.html

House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders

May 10, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON and JONATHAN D. GLATER

WASHINGTON, May 9 — The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ban gifts and payments by student loan companies to universities, showing bipartisan resolve to clean up the $85 billion industry.

The vote, 414 to 3, demonstrated how politically potent the issue of paying for college has become at a time when tuition is steadily rising and millions of students depend on borrowing to finance college.

“With this vote,” said Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who leads the House education committee, “the House has taken a huge step in the right direction to put a stop to those practices and make sure that the student loan programs operate on the level, in the best interests of students and families trying to pay for college.”

The bill passed a day before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was scheduled to testify before the House education committee about oversight of the industry.

It comes in the wake of revelations that lenders paid universities money contingent on student loan volume, gave gifts to the financial aid administrators whom students rely on to recommend lenders, and hired financial aid officials as paid consultants.

The nation’s four largest student lenders and at least 22 colleges have already signed on to a code of conduct developed by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

Mr. Miller was joined by the ranking Republican on his committee, Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, in promoting the bill. “We’re stepping up today for a single, fundamental reason,” Mr. McKeon said before the vote, “to ensure our nation’s financial aid system continues to serve the needs of our students.”

But he also urged that Congress be careful “not to overreach.” The bill has bipartisan support in the Senate, said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the education committee.

A senior Education Department official said that the agency was prepared to move quickly to draft regulations to enforce the bill.

Ms. Spellings is expected to face tough questions Thursday about the department’s policing of the industry, as well as about enforcement of its own internal policies on conflicts of interest after reports that an official with oversight over the student loan database held stock in a student loan company.

Ms. Spellings’s chief of staff, David Dunn, said in an interview that the secretary wanted to “set the record straight” and show that the department had taken the steps it could to regulate lenders. Ms. Spellings has convened a task force that is to make recommendations by the end of May on how to regulate the lists of recommended lenders at university aid offices.

Ms. Spellings is also expected to face questions about the oversight of Reading First, a program designed to teach poor children to read by third grade. The department’s inspector general, John P. Higgins, has issued reports finding conflicts of interest, cronyism and bias in how officials and private consultants operated the program and awarded grants.

Mr. Kennedy, in a report, added new detail Wednesday on how four officials contracted by the education agency to advise states on buying reading materials had lucrative ties with publishers.

Edward Kame’enui, head of the department’s western technical assistance center in Oregon from 2002 through May 2005, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from Pearson/Scott Foresman from 2001 to 2006, the report said. It also said that Douglas Carnine, who replaced Dr. Kame’enui in 2005, also earned royalties — $168,470 from McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin and Pearson last year.

Joseph Torgesen, who advised Eastern states about materials, and Sharon Vaughn, who advised Central states, also received thousands of dollars in royalties from educational publishers while representing the department, the report said.

Katherine McLane, a department spokeswoman, said: “The department is deeply concerned about conflicts of interest and takes the allegations contained in Senator Kennedy’s report very seriously.

“We are studying this report to determine if further actions are necessary and will act aggressively if any wrongdoing is found.”

    House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders, NYT, 10.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/washington/10loans.html?hp

50 Years Later, Little Rock Can’t Escape Race

May 8, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Fifty years after the epic desegregation struggle at Central High School, the school district here is still riven by racial conflict, casting a pall on this year’s ambitious commemorative efforts.

In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him. Whites insist that test scores and enrollment have improved under the brusque, hard-charging Mr. Brooks; blacks on the board are furious that he has cut the number of office and other non-teaching jobs and closed some schools.

The fight is all the more disturbing to some here because it erupted just as a federal judge declared Little Rock’s schools finally desegregated, 50 years after a jeering white mob massed outside Central High to turn back integration.

In 1957, the fight was over whether nine black students could attend an entirely white high school. Now it is over whether the city’s black leaders can exert firm control over the direction and perquisites of an urban school district in the way that white leaders did for decades. When Mr. Brooks, who declined a request for an interview, cut 100 jobs, he saved money but earned the fierce ill will of many other blacks, who see the district as an important source of employment and middle-class stability.

Many whites, on the other hand, see the district, where issues of race have long been a constant backdrop, as a bloated bureaucracy, ripe for Mr. Brooks’s pruning. Where some blacks say Mr. Brooks disregards them and cozies up to the white business establishment, many whites say he is merely trying to stop white flight.

The bitter racial split has left some residents questioning the dimensions of advancement in the intervening years. There are no mobs in the street this time, but the undercurrents are nasty.

“We’re quite concerned about what kind of progress we have or haven’t made,” said Andre Guerrero, a white member of the Central High School 50th Anniversary Commission.

“This is a power struggle about whose voice is going to prevail,” Mr. Guerrero said as the school board prepared to meet last week.

Mr. Brooks’s tenure and the fight over him has thrown the district into turmoil.

“I’ve never seen anything like this — the divisiveness, the hate,” said the leader of the teacher’s union, Katherine Wright Knight. Another outspoken critic, Katherine Mitchell, the board president, said, “I’m saying, we have really regressed.”

The judge’s ruling in February, disputed by activists and black board members but welcomed by Mr. Brooks, freed the city’s schools from federal oversight. It marked the end of a government engagement that began in September 1957 when Army soldiers escorted the nine black students up the stone steps of Central High.

But it did not end longstanding resentments, and after a black majority was elected to the board for the first time last fall, the gloves are off.

Other urban public school districts in the South have suffered through similar racial battles over leadership, aggravated by symptoms that prevail here, too: white flight, inner-city poverty and what is referred to as the “achievement gap,” the wide divergence in test results between white and black students. The gap fuels resentment and makes an anathema of any perceived administrative leaning toward white students.

The fight here has been especially bruising because of its symbolic overtones and practical implications. Though whites have deserted the schools in many other Southern cities, they have not done so to the same degree in Little Rock, where they make up about a quarter of the 23,000 students. Birmingham, Ala.; Jackson, Miss.; New Orleans and Memphis, by contrast, had white percentages in the single digits or barely above, according to 2000 Department of Education data.

Most important, the 1957 racial ugliness at Central High is tightly bound up with the local identity. It was Little Rock’s shaming turn on the world stage, televised live, and the city has sought to overcome it for 50 years. Signs on the Interstate point visitors to the school and its visitors center; a festival, forums, ceremonies, theatrical events and more are planned in advance of an anniversary now clouded by the strife. Any hint that the troubles may echo that of 50 years ago, however distantly, is painful to some civic leaders.

“Here we are, coming up to the 50th, and we thought we were coasting,” said Nancy Rousseau, the principal of Central High, her voice trailing off.

Now integrated in its student body, if largely white in its advanced classes, the school is still an imposing brick-and-stone, Art Deco and collegiate gothic ziggurat towering over the old neighborhood surrounding it. It also remains a magnet for some of the best teachers and students in the state.

So polarized are the two sides that after Mr. Brooks summoned a statistician to demonstrate improvements in the schools at a recent board meeting, his opponents summoned another statistician to demonstrate precisely the opposite. Black and white board members took turns rolling their eyes and looking skeptical.

Jay P. Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, said in an interview that Little Rock’s scores had been improving, like scores around the state, though pushing them up in a troubled urban district “itself is an achievement.”

The chamber of commerce backs Mr. Brooks, and the conservative editorial page of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette crusades for him. Neither endorsement helps his image with black critics, who see his actions as inherently favoring whites.

He is “a person who doesn’t identify with black people at all,” said John Walker, a Little Rock civil rights lawyer who represents black students in the court case, which he has appealed. “The only thing he stands for is putting black people down.”

Though many whites hail the cuts in administration — a legislative study found it “terribly bloated,” a lawmaker said — Ms. Mitchell, the board president, said of them angrily: “African-American employees have lost $918,000,” and she enumerated positions lost or downgraded. Many whites laud the closing of the three schools with low attendance.

Dr. Greene, of the University of Arkansas, said he feared that the dispute was really about patronage, not educational quality. “I think it would be hard to make strong criticisms of the superintendent on educational grounds,” he said.

Yet Mr. Brooks has evidently neglected the political role vital to a superintendent’s success, some say.

“Roy Brooks has done a credible job reaching out to the grass tops, and a lousy job reaching out to the grass roots,” said James L. Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, part of the University of Arkansas.

Mr. Brooks came from Orlando, Fla., three years ago, an administrator and former principal with a reputation for toughness and improving intractable schools, and he was opposed from the beginning by Ms. Mitchell and the teachers’ union, whose leader immediately predicted he would fail. His fortunes went downhill when blacks achieved their historic majority on the board.

Mr. Brooks sat impassively through the recent board meeting, never making eye contact with his critics. They voted to send him a letter outlining why they wanted to be rid of him; on April 30 he sued the board president in federal court, saying she was intimidating potential witnesses who might testify for him at a likely administrative hearing over whether he should be dismissed.

Black parents remained largely silent at the board meeting. But several other black parents interviewed as they picked up their children at Dunbar Middle School were not following the board majority’s line.

“He’s a real hands-on superintendent,” said Ray Webster, whose two small boys were jumping up and down in the back seat. Mr. Webster had met Mr. Brooks through the parent-teacher association.

“He actually cares about the kids. He actually shows concern for the kids,” he said, but that is a view vehemently rejected by his critics.

    50 Years Later, Little Rock Can’t Escape Race, NYT, 8.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/us/08deseg.html?hp

Mo. Teen Brutally Stabbed on School Bus

May 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 p.m. ET
The New York Times

STEELE, Mo. (AP) -- A teenager boarded a school bus with a hunting knife and stabbed another student more than a dozen times before bystanders could pull him away, police and the victim said.

John Moore, 14, was in good condition Friday, two days after the attack. The suspect, also 14, was put in juvenile custody. No motive has been determined.

A hearing is planned for Monday to determine if the suspect should be charged as an adult, said Sheriff Tommy Greenwell, adding that his office will likely ask prosecutors to consider a charge of attempted murder.

The stabbing happened as John got on the South Pemiscot School bus on Wednesday and headed toward the back, where the suspect was sitting, the sheriff said.

John said the attack came as a surprise.

''He was like, what's up? So I was like, what's up too. I turn around and he starts stabbing me,'' he told Fox News Channel in an interview aired Friday. ''I scooted up 3 feet and I fall down, and he keeps on stabbing me. Just stabbing me, stabbing me, stabbing me.''

The bus driver pulled into a convenience store parking lot and began calling for help, Greenwell said. The store owner and other bystanders managed to pull the suspect off the bus and disarm him.

''I was just wondering if I was going to die and if my 6-year-old sister was watching, because she must be traumatized from seeing that,'' John said.

John said he was stabbed 20 times and had a collapsed lung.

A few other students were on the bus, but no one else was hurt, Greenwell said.

Pemiscot County is in Missouri's southeast corner.

Mo. Teen Brutally Stabbed on School Bus, NYT, 4.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bus-Stabbing.html

Seeing No Progress,

Some Schools Drop Laptops

May 4, 2007
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Liverpool’s turnabout comes as more and more school districts nationwide continue to bring laptops into the classroom. Federal education officials do not keep track of how many schools have such programs, but two educational consultants, Hayes Connection and the Greaves Group, conducted a study of the nation’s 2,500 largest school districts last year and found that a quarter of the 1,000 respondents already had one-to-one computing, and fully half expected to by 2011.

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

Matoaca High School just outside Richmond, Va., began eliminating its five-year-old laptop program last fall after concluding that students had failed to show any academic gains compared with those in schools without laptops. Continuing the program would have cost an additional $1.5 million for the first year alone, and a survey of district teachers and parents found that one-fifth of Matoaca students rarely or never used their laptops for learning. “You have to put your money where you think it’s going to give you the best achievement results,” said Tim Bullis, a district spokesman.

Everett A. Rea Elementary School in Costa Mesa, Calif., where more than 95 percent of students are Hispanic and come from low-income families, gave away 30 new laptops to another school in 2005 after a class that was trying them out switched to new teachers who simply did not do as much with the technology. Northfield Mount Hermon School, a private boarding school in western Massachusetts, eliminated its five-year-old laptop program in 2002 after it found that more effort was being expended on repairing the laptops than on training teachers to teach with them.

Two years ago, school officials in Broward County, Fla., the sixth-largest district in the country, shelved a $275 million proposal to issue laptops to each of their more than 260,000 students after re-evaluating the costs of a pilot project. The district, which paid $7.2 million to lease 6,000 laptops for the pilot at four schools, was spending more than $100,000 a year for repairs to screens and keyboards that are not covered by warranties. “It’s cost prohibitive, so we have actually moved away from it,” said Vijay Sonty, chief information officer for the district, whose enrollment is 37 percent black, 31 percent white and 25 percent Hispanic.

Here in Liverpool, parents have long criticized the cost of the laptop program: about $300,000 a year from the state, plus individual student leases of $25 a month, or $900 from 10th to 12th grades, for the take-home privilege.

“I feel like I was ripped off,” said Richard Ferrante, explaining that his son, Peter, used his laptop to become a master at the Super Mario Brothers video game. “And every time I write my check for school taxes, I get mad all over again.”

Students like Eddie McCarthy, 18, a Liverpool senior, said his laptop made him “a lot better at typing,” as he used it to take notes in class, but not a better student. “I think it’s better to wait and buy one for college,” he said.

More than a decade ago, schools began investing heavily in laptops at the urging of school boards and parent groups who saw them as the key to the 21st century classroom. Following Maine’s lead in 2002, states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and South Dakota helped buy laptops for thousands of students through statewide initiatives like “Classrooms for the Future” and “Freedom to Learn.” In New York City, about 6,000 students in 22 middle schools received laptops in 2005 as part of a $45-million, three-year program financed with city, state and federal money.

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in 2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against.

Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” (Teachers College Press, 2006), also found no evidence that laptops increased state test scores in a study of 10 schools in California and Maine from 2003 to 2005. Two of the schools, including Rea Elementary, have since eliminated the laptops.

But Mr. Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, said schools like Liverpool might be giving up too soon because it takes time to train teachers to use the new technology and integrate it into their classes. For instance, he pointed to students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online.

“Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research,” he said. “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”

In Liverpool, a predominantly white school district of nearly 8,000 students, one in four of whom qualify for free or reduced lunches, administrators initially proposed that every 10th through 12th-grade student be required to lease a laptop, but decided to make the program voluntary after parents protested. About half the students immediately signed up; now, three-quarters have them.

At first, the school set up two tracks of classes — laptop and non-laptop — that resulted in scheduling conflicts and complaints that those without laptops had been shut out of advanced classes, though school officials denied that. In 2005, the school went back to one set of classes, and bought a pool of 280 laptops for students who were not participating in the lease program.

Soon, a room that used to be for the yearbook club became an on-site repair shop for the 80 to 100 machines that broke each month, with a “Laptop Help Desk” sign taped to the door. The school also repeatedly upgraded its online security to block access to sites for pornography, games and instant messaging — which some students said they had used to cheat on tests.

Maureen A. Patterson, the assistant superintendent for instruction, said that since the laptop program was canceled, she has spoken to more than 30 parents who support the decision and received five phone calls from parents saying they were concerned that their children would not have technological advantages. She said the high school would enlarge its pool of shared laptops for in-class use, invest in other kinds of technology and also planned to extend building hours in the evening to provide computer access.

In a 10th grade English class the other day, every student except one was tapping away on a laptop to look up food facts about Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Burger King for a journal entry on where to eat. The one student without a computer, Taylor Baxter, 16, stared at a classmate’s screen because she had forgotten to bring her own laptop that day.

But in many other classrooms, there was nary a laptop in sight as teachers read from textbooks and scribbled on chalkboards. Some teachers said they had felt compelled to teach with laptops in the beginning, but stopped because they found they were spending so much time coping with technical glitches that they were unable to finish their lessons.

Alice McCormick, who heads the math department, said most math teachers preferred graphing calculators, which students can use on the Regents exams, to laptops, which often do not have mathematical symbols or allow students to show their work for credit. “Let’s face it, math is for the most part still a paper-and-pencil activity when you’re learning it,” she said.

In the school library, an 11th-grade history class was working on research papers. Many carried laptops in their hands or in backpacks even as their teacher, Tom McCarthy, encouraged them not to overlook books, newspapers and academic journals.

“The art of thinking is being lost,” he said. “Because people can type in a word and find a source and think that’s the be all end all.”

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops, NYT, 4.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html