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Bias Isn't Just A Police Problem, It's A Preschool Problem : NPR Ed

Bias Isn't Just A Police Problem, It's A Preschool Problem : NPR Ed
A new study out of Yale found that pre-K teachers, white and black alike, spend more time watching black boys, expecting trouble. LA Johnson/NPR hide caption toggle caption LA Johnson/NPR A new study out of Yale found that pre-K teachers, white and black alike, spend more time watching black boys, expecting trouble. First, a story: Late one night, a man searches for something in a parking lot. A woman passes, stops, takes in the scene. "What are you looking for? "My car keys. "You dropped them right around here?" "Oh, no. "Then why are you looking here?" The man pauses to consider the question. "Because this is where the light is." New research from the Yale Child Study Center suggests that many preschool teachers look for disruptive behavior in much the same way: in just one place, waiting for it to appear. The problem with this strategy (besides it being inefficient), is that, because of implicit bias, teachers are spending too much time watching black boys and expecting the worst. The study Related:  For Introduction to SociologyBarriers to excellent education

The Marijuana Industry Alienates Black People and Benefits White Folks In 1992, Tupac famously said “instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” The effects of the War on Drugs are still active and visible 25 years after the rapper called attention to this already decades old problem. Black people are nearly four times more likely to get arrested for marijuana possession than white people, despite marijuana usage being the same between the two groups. In 2015, African-Americans made up 30 percent of the population of Oakland,California but 77 percent of cannabis arrests, compared to 4 percent for whites. Like many of the public policies in the U.S., the policies around the prohibition of marijuana was racialized and relied on racist propaganda instead of factual, scientific research. Before Richard Nixon, the man known for inciting the War on Drugs, there was Harry J. Today, those same white women are benefitting heartily from the legal cannabis market. Related: PART TWO: BLACK-OWNED URBAN FARMS IN THE DMV Simply Pure

In Our Schools, Very young Black Lives Matter, Too In Our Schools, Black Lives Matter, Too Students in kindergarten listen to their principal read a book at the International Community School on December 17, 2015 in Decatur, Georgia. The elementary school, a public charter school for grades K-5, has about 400 students from 30 nations speaking 25 languages. ICS was strategically designed in 2002 to bring together refugee, immigrant and local children in an academically challenging and nurturing environment. The surrounding community is noted for its ethnic diversity. The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn much-needed national and worldwide attention to the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of those sworn to protect them, igniting a long-overdue discussion about the systemic injustices African-Americans face in the realms of policing and criminal justice. As a society, however, we need to take that discussion a step further. Disparities in education begin at an early age. Yes, you read that right.

Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person... Years ago, some feminist on the internet told me I was "Privileged." "THE FUCK!?!?" I said. I came from the kind of Poor that people don't want to believe still exists in this country. Have you ever spent a frigid northern Illinois winter without heat or running water? So when that feminist told me I had "white privilege," I told her that my white skin didn't do shit to prevent me from experiencing poverty. After one reads McIntosh's powerful essay, it's impossible to deny that being born with white skin in America affords people certain unearned privileges in life that people of another skin color simple are not afforded. "I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented."" If you read through the rest of the list, you can see how white people and people of color experience the world in two very different ways. I do understand McIntosh's essay may rub some people the wrong way. I know now that I AM Privileged in many ways.

Schools still use violence to punish kids Depending on whom you’re inclined to believe, the recess exercise at Horton Elementary School in San Diego was either a physical education exercise instilling healthy practices or an instance of punitive physical abuse. On a hot Friday afternoon in mid-October, a group of 4th and 5th graders caused a disturbance in the cafeteria. Some of the nine- and 10-year-olds banged on tables, like nine- and 10-year-olds are inclined to do. According to a letter drafted by the local ACLU, one kid may have taken a bathroom pass from a staff member’s pocket. If they chose not to comply, the principal told them, they’d be sent to juvie—a school-to-prison pipeline of the most literal kind. It’s worth noting that the Unified school district, one of the largest in California, employs its own police force and launched an inquiry into the diversity of its administrators following a blackface incident a few years ago. “It’s hard to speculate about the new administration,” he says.

Why women get attacked by trolls: A new study unpacks the digital gender safe... Yesterday, Pew released its most recent research study on online harassment. Forty percent of 2,849 web users surveyed earlier this year reported experiencing online harassment, categorized as name calling, purposeful embarrassment, stalking, sexual harassment, physical threats and sustained harassment. Age and gender were the most consequential factors contributing to whether or not a person has been harassed. People between the ages of 18-29 were the most likely say they’d been harassed. The survey found that, in general, men are more likely to experience online harassment, but they are experiencing less severe forms and significantly fewer emotional, personal or perceived reputations harms. Women, on the other hand, report higher rates of more extreme abuses and related impacts. There is clearly a difference between being “called a name” and being stalked or sexually harassed, sometimes for weeks, months or years.

Why Preschool Suspensions Still Happen (And How To Stop Them) : NPR Ed Something's wrong in America's classrooms. According to new data from the Education Department, black students — from kindergarten through high school — are 3.8 times more likely to be suspended than white students. Now the really bad news. This trend begins in preschool, where black children are already 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than white students. In all, 6,743 children who were enrolled in public pre-K received one or more out-of-school suspensions in the 2013-14 school year. Glass half-full: That number's down slightly and relatively small considering the 1.4 million kids who, according to the Education Department, attended public pre-K that year. Glass half-empty: That's 6,743 kids too many, say several top child development experts. "To be clear, preschool suspension just shouldn't be a thing for any kid," says Maryam Adamu, who until recently studied early childhood policy at the Center For American Progress. Training and pay for preschool teachers are often abysmal.

The Real Story of Asians in America That Hardly Anyone Is Talking About On May 24, a heartbreaking article was published in the New York Post. According to the story, an elementary school in Flushing, New York, held a carnival during school hours May 21, complete with food, a jumping castle, inflatable slides and "a twirly teacup ride." All P.S. 120 students grades pre-K to 5 were invited to attend, as long as they paid a $10 entry fee. Unfortunately, more than 100 children could not afford the fee. The story gets sadder — one girl reportedly asked a teacher if she was "being punished" — but especially interesting for our purposes is the demographic breakdown of these kids. It's a story we're not used to hearing. Thursday night's Scripps National Spelling Bee seemed to highlight this point, with an Indian-American champion — two cochampions, actually — being declared for the seventh year in a row, and for the 14th time in 18 years. 1. But they do not represent all of Asian America. 2. 3. 4. 5. And that's saying nothing of mental health: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

5 Big Ideas That Don't Work In Education : NPR Ed There are few household names in education research. Maybe that in itself constitutes a problem. But if there was an Education Researcher Hall Of Fame, one member would be a silver-haired, plainspoken Kiwi named John Hattie. Hattie directs the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Over the past 28 years he has published a dozen books, mostly on a theory he calls Visible Learning. Obvious? Small classes. Hattie doesn't run his own studies. Over the years, he has scrutinized — and ranked — 1,200 different meta-analyses looking at all types of interventions, ranging from increased parental involvement to ADHD medications to longer school days to performance pay for teachers, as well as other factors affecting education, like socioeconomic status. If you are the kind of person who finds certain graphs sexy, beholding Hattie's ranking of educational effect sizes will be exhilarating. Technical Challenges 1. 2. 3. The alternative: teacher choice. 4.

Concrete Examples of How Video Games Normalize Violence Against Women CLIP: Dragon Age: Origins “Grab a whore and have a good time” Welcome to the second part of our mini-series examining the Women as Background Decoration trope in video games. I need to stress that this video comes with a content warning and is not recommended for children. The game footage I’ll be showcasing will be particularly graphic and include scenes of extreme violence against women. I define the Women as Background Decoration trope as: The subset of largely insignificant non-playable female characters whose sexuality or victimhood is exploited as a way to infuse edgy, gritty or racy flavoring into game worlds. These sexually objectified female bodies are designed to function as environmental texture while titillating presumed straight male players. In our last video we discussed the concept of Sexual Objectification and looked at a specific subset of non-essential female characters which I classify as Non-Playable Sex Objects. CLIP: Far Cry 3 “Where’s my fucking money, bitch?”

Study Finds More Evidence of Racial Bias in Teachers' Expectations for Students - Teaching Now UserID: iCustID: IsLogged: IsSiteLicense: UserType: DisplayName: TrialsLeft: 0 Trials: Tier Preview Log: Exception pages ( /teachers/teaching_now/2016/03/bias.html ) = NO Internal request ( 108.162.216.96 ) = NO Open House ( 2016-04-09 11:25:02 ) = NO Personal SL : ( EMPTY ) = NO Site Licence : ( 198.27.80.99 ) = NO ACL Free A vs U ( 2100 vs 0 ) = NO Token Free (NO TOKEN FOUND) = NO Blog authoring preview = NO Search Robot ( Firefox ) = NO Purchased ( 0 ) = NO Monthly ( 8639e3d3-0fe6-f2a9-64ea-ac5adffdf495 : 1 / 1 ) = NO 0: /teachers/teaching_now/2015/08/is-there-a-teacher-shortage-yes-no-maybe.html Can add to monthly ( /teachers/teaching_now/2016/03/bias.html ) = NO Access denied ( -1 ) = NO Internal request ( 66.151.111.54 ) = NO Open House ( 2016-04-09 11:26:02 ) = NO Site Licence : ( 66.151.111.54 ) = NO Search Robot ( EPE Bot ) = YES Access granted ( 5 ) = YES

There's No Such Thing as a Slut — Atlantic Mobile A new longitudinal study examined how college students slut-shame—and found that the practice is as illogical as it is damaging. In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students. Like two Jane Goodalls in the jungle of American young adulthood, they did their observing in the students’ natural habitat. The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college. Their findings about the students’ academic success later formed the basis for Paying for the Party, their recent book about how the college experience bolsters inequality.

3 Ways Exponential Technologies are Impacting the Future of Learning – SingularityU – Medium Exponential Technologies Impact What Needs to be Learned In a 2013 white paper titled Dancing with Robots: Human Skills for Computerized Work, Richard Murnane and Frank Levy argue that in the computer age, the skills which are valuable in the new labor market are significantly different than what they were several decades ago. Computers are much better than humans at tasks that can be organized into a set of rules-based routines. If a task can be reduced to a series of “if-then-do” statements, then computers or robots are the right ones for the job. However, there are many things that computers are not very good at and should be left to humans, at least for now. 3 Main Things Humans Are Still Better at Robots 1. Humans are significantly more effective when the desired outcome or set of information needed to solve the problem are unknowable in advance. 2. 3. Future-Proof Skill Sets What are these skills exactly? Exponential Technologies Impact How We View Schooling and Society

Why Don’t We Talk About the Gender Safety Gap in the U.S.? This week, John Krakauer’s book, Missoula, “a depressingly typical” story about college town rapes, was released. In a recent NPR interview, Krakauer describes his dawning realization about how many women in the United States have been sexually assaulted, most often by people they know. His prior lack of awareness about women’s experiences, either of being assaulted or avoiding assault, is hardly rare. A primary reason most people can remain blissfully unaware of the reality of sexual assault is that media continues to ignore the role that gender plays in the experience of violence. What does this gap mean, why is it so persistent and why are we not talking about it? Earlier this year, the United Nations released yet another report documenting “alarmingly high rates” of gender-based violence against girls and women. The question asked by Gallup in its U.S. crime survey—“Is there anywhere near where you live, that is, within a mile, where you would be afraid to walk at night?”

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