College of Education wins behavior research hinds
■The two grants will fund
the creation of new research
centers within the college
By John Liebhardt
Oregon Daily Emerald
The University’s College of Edu
cation recently received two grants
totaling nearly $9 million to study
methods on improving student be
havior and reading skills.
The grants, awarded by the U.S.
Department of Education, will fund
two research centers within the
College of Education to develop
methods to help children from
kindergarten to third grade who
have difficulty reading or who ex
hibit behaviors that may become
future discipline problems.
“These grants speak to the ex
traordinary breadth and depth of
the faculty and students at the Col
lege of Education,” said Martin
Kaufman, dean of the College of Ed
ucation. “These centers are making
cutting-edge research available to
those in the teaching profession so
they can implement best practices
in the classroom.”
The U.S. Department of Educa
tion only awards six research grants
in this area, and the University was
the only institution to receive more
than one, Kaufman said.
Robert Horner, professor of spe
cial education and one of the ad
ministrators of the grants, said the
two awards are “collaborative
grants” because they fund research
on schools’ two most important
tasks: teaching students how to get
along with other students and
teaching students how to read.
The reading grant will create the
Center for Improving Reading Com
petence Using Intensive Treatments
Schoolwide program, which will
help identify beginning readers
who are not developing reading
skills at the same level as their
peers, said Deborah Simmons, as
sociate professor of education and
an administrator of the grant. Un
der the department of education’s
Institute for the Development of Ed
ucational Achievement, CIRCUITS
will work with students from 12
schools in three states to develop
strategies for reading intervention
programs. The grant will also moni
tor the progress of these strategies.
Research shows that struggling
readers may make up to 20 percent
of an individual classroom, Sim
mons said. Reading skills are enor
mously important because the
United States is based on text
heavy information technology, she
said.
“Students today are not poorer
readers than they were years ago —
the demands are higher,” she said.
“The literacy bar has been raised.”
In fact, she said, U.S. grade
schools develop curriculum as if
every student knows how to read
by the end of the third grade. In ed
ucation jargon, it is said that stu
dents between the grades of kinder
garten and grade three “learn to
read”; after third grade, students
“read to learn.”
However, teaching appropriate
behavior is a more complex task,
Horner said. While schools assume
that students have learned to read
by the end of the third grade, “We
don’t have something as clean as
that with school behavior,” he said.
The basis of behavior programs is
to proactively teach every student
behavior rules, Horner said. For ex
ample, each student is taught basic
rules, such as taking turns and be
ing respectful to others. School fac
ulty, staff and administrators ex
plain the rules beginning on the
first day of school, reward students
for good behavior and punish them
for poor behavior.
The behavior grant will create
the Center for Schoolwide Behav
ior. Under the Institute on Violence
and Destructive Behavior, the new
center will work with 90 schools
from five states to track changes in
behaviors, academic performance
and effect on families.
Students react positively to
schoolwide approaches, Horner
said, because everyone under
stands the same non-negotiable
rules.
“The students are taught how to
behave correctly, not just how not
to behave badly,” Horner said. “All
the kids in the school know what is
expected of them. ”
Members of the College of Educa
tion have been promoting school
wide behavior for the past ten
years, often to great results, Horner
said. In one middle school, the
most common type of office refer
rals dropped 50 percent in the first
year after a schoolwide behavior
program was instituted.
“Kids like organized schools,”
Horner said. “They are not happy
with chaotic, random environ
ments.”
John Liebhardt is the higher education editor
for the Oregon Daily Emerald. He can be
reached at johnliebhardt@dailyemerald.com.
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Supreme Court reviews
virtual child pom law
By Judy Peres
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON (KRT) — The
U.S. Supreme Court this week will
hear arguments on an amendment
to the federal child pornography
law that critics say is so broad it
would make such mainstream films
as “Risky Business” and “Romeo
and Juliet” criminal.
The government has asked the
top court to uphold the Child
Pornography Protection Act of
1996, which it contends is a legiti
mate and essential tool to keep pe
dophiles from preying on children.
In oral arguments set for Tuesday, a
group of civil libertarians will try to
convince the justices that the law vi
olates the First Amendment’s guar
antee of free speech.
The challengers claim the statute
targets numerous mainstream films
that depict sexually active teenagers,
as well as video games, cartoons, pho
tographs and paintings. They main
tain it is so vaguely worded that indi
viduals have no way of knowing what
is over the line until police knock on
their doors and confiscate it.
That’s because the law bans not
only real child pornography — that
is, pictures of individuals under the
age of 18 in sexual situations — but
also images that “appear to” or
“convey the impression” that they
depict minors engaged in sexually
explicit conduct.
Mere possession of what some are
calling “virtual” child porn carries a
prison term of up to 10 years; the
penalty for creating or distributing
such images is up to 30 years.
The legislators who amended an
earlier child pornography statute said
the change was a necessary accom
modation to the computer age, in
which anyone with a computer can
alter photographs and video clips or
create fictional images to look exactly
like actual images. That way, a film
purporting to show children engaged
in sexual activity might be based on
no real people at all.
“Since there are no real children in
volved,” saidEric Freedman, a profes
sor of First Amendment law at Hofstra
University, “what the statute targets is
the concept of sex with children.
Down that road lies thought control. ”
Supporters deny the law was
meant to target mainstream films or
artwork.
“This law merely regulates sexual
ly explicit images which are virtually
indistinguishable to unsuspecting
viewers from un-retouched photo
graphs of actual children engaging in
the act,” said Jay Sekulow, chief
counsel for the American Center for
Law and Justice, which represents
members of the House and Senate
who drafted the 1996 amendment.
But challengers of the law say its
language is so broad that it criminal
izes far more than child pornogra
phy, and it makes no exception for
legitimate users of what might ap
pear pornographic, such as sex ther
apists, researchers and the authors
of textbooks and safe-sex manuals.
Within weeks of passage of the
amended child pornography law in
1996, a legal challenge was mount
ed by the Free Speech Coalition, an
adult-entertainment trade associa
tion, along with a publisher, an
artist and a photographer who
feared the law would infringe on
their constitutionally protected
right to artistic expression.
A federal district court judge
found the law constitutional, but
the U.S. court of appeals in San
Francisco struck it down, saying
“censorship through the enactment
of criminal laws intended to control
an evil idea cannot satisfy the con
stitutional requirements of the First
Amendment.”
Other appellate courts have dis
agreed, which likely helped persuade
the Supreme Court to take the case.
The government says computer
generated images of minors engaged
in sexually explicit conduct “whet
the appetite” of pedophiles and al
low them to seduce real children. It
also argues that the statute is unen
forceable without the “virtual” pro
visions, since the government would
have the burden of proving that the
image depicts a real child, and mod
em computer technology makes that
distinction extremely difficult.
Supporters of the legislation ar
gue that even though no real child
was exploited in the manufacture of
a virtual image, such images can
lead to the molestation or exploita
tion of real children.
But Ann Beeson of the American
Civil Liberties Union, which filed a
friend-of the-court brief siding with
the challengers, says that can never
be a sufficient reason to ban other
wise-protected speech: “All the
government would have to say to
justify any censorship law is, ‘This
speech might cause a crime.’”
©2001, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by
Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.