COFFEE BREAK
Saturday, May 21, 2016
PARENTS TALK BACK
The year I quit
looking at my
kids’ grades
I
cared about my grades as a student.
My parents did too, although not
oppressively so. I learned early on the
positive attention that came along with A’s.
Once they knew I had internalized their
expectations as my own, they focused on
all the other things they had to worry about
while raising six children.
My parents assumed I would try my
best in school, because,
why wouldn’t I?
They relied on
twice-a-year report cards
and occasional progress
reports to reafirm this
belief.
My relationship
with grades became
more complicated when
Aisha
it was my children
Sultan
Parents talk back
being assessed. After
elementary school, not a
single paper report card
comes home.
Like students across the country, all
of their grades are accessible through an
online portal. The portal for our district
is called Ininite Campus. Even the name
sounds ominous. So vast, those grades —
creeping into every corner of time, space
and existence.
Teachers are expected to post every
homework assignment, quiz and test
result. Some schools send notiications
with each update. Some parents download
the portal app on their smartphones and
check the updates hourly. I never became
that involved, but during the irst year
of this transition to online grades, I paid
close attention to my daughter’s marks.
If I saw a score that seemed lower than
usual, I would urge my child to take the
retest. If an assignment appeared to be
missing or incomplete, I’d suggest she
talk to her teacher or turn it in for partial
credit. I would remind her and follow up
frequently.
It took me a year to realize that so much
information can quickly go from blessing
to burden. I wanted her to do her best, but
not because I had a hawkeyed focus on her
scores.
I can be a slightly obsessive,
competitive workaholic, and worry about
my children being too similar and feeling
so much pressure. But then I also worry
about them not being motivated and
competitive enough. I recognized this
impulse and wanted to check it before
I made all of us miserable. Up-to-the-
minute, 24/7 access to their grades isn’t
the best thing for my mental health, or my
relationship with my children.
I also didn’t want to become a crutch
for her academic achievement. If there is a
missing assignment, let her igure out how
to make it up.
Easy access to every grade can lip
a free-range parent into a hovering
helicopter. One parent posted a question on
the Free Range Kids website which asked:
Are hourly report cards a good idea?
Parents have to igure out where their
child thrives and struggles, and decide how
to help them grow in the areas they need
extra support. Some kids need additional
academic help. Others need to grow
emotionally or to learn independence.
I decided that by taking responsibility
for my child’s work, I was robbing her of
the opportunity to do so on her own.
This year, I never logged into the online
portal. I asked regularly about what she
was learning in her classes, which books
she was reading and how the tests were
going. If she was struggling with a subject,
we helped her or found a tutor who could. I
talked to her about her presentations, group
projects and class discussions. I responded
promptly to any teacher email and attended
all the conferences. I volunteered for
ield trips but stepped aside from school
projects.
As an Asian-American mother, I may
be parenting against type by opting out
of hypervigilant grades monitoring. For
children of immigrants, there can be a
culture of high academic expectations. I
don’t have the will (or energy, frankly) to
be a Tiger Mom, but I lean in that general
direction.
Even with this hands-off approach, I
knew I had a safety net.
My husband kept tabs on her progress
through the website. He is much more
laid-back about all aspects of parenting,
so perhaps it makes more sense for him to
keep an eye on the online grade book.
I asked her if she noticed that I hadn’t
checked in on her speciic grades this year.
“Not really, because Dad was stalking
my grades, like, every week,” she said. (He
looks at her grades every few weeks.) It’s
kind of like role reversal, she added, that
her father would ask about assignments.
I explained to her the difference
between internal and external motivation.
“I want you to learn to do well for your
own satisfaction — not to please your
parents or teachers.”
“I do everything for myself, anyway,”
she said.
Were truer teenage words ever spoken?
I asked her how she ended up doing this
year. Just as good or slightly better than
last year, she said.
Bonus: I had nothing to do with it.
■
Aisha Sultan is a St. Louis-based
journalist who studies parenting in the
digital age while trying to keep up with her
tech-savvy children. Find her on Twitter:
@AishaS.
East Oregonian
Page 9C
Report: Segregation in education on the rise
By JENNIFER C. KERR
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Six decades after the
Supreme Court outlawed separating students
by race, stubborn disparities persist in how
the country educates its poor and minority
children.
A report Tuesday by the nonpartisan
Government Accountability Ofice found
deepening segregation of black and Hispanic
students at high-poverty K-12 public schools.
These schools often offered fewer math,
science and college prep classes, while having
disproportionally higher rates of students who
were held back in ninth grade, suspended or
expelled.
“Segregation in public K-12 schools isn’t
getting better. It’s getting worse, and getting
worse quickly,” Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia
said. The analysis, he said, conirmed that
America’s schools are largely segregated by
race and class, leaving “more than 20 million
students of color now attending racially and
socioeconomically isolated public schools.”
“This report is a national call to action,”
said Scott, the House education committee’s
top Democrat and among the lawmakers who
requested the study. Its release coincided with
the 62nd anniversary of the Brown v. Board
of Education ruling, which declared segre-
gated schools unconstitutional.
“While much has changed in public
education in the decades following this
landmark decision and subsequent legislative
action, research has shown that some of the
most vexing issues affecting children and
their access to educational excellence and
opportunity today are inextricably linked to
race and poverty,” the report said.
GAO studied three school districts in the
South, Northeast and West. Each took steps to
increase racial and economic diversity in the
schools but were hampered by transportation
issues and getting support from the parents
and the community.
In a separate paper, the Civil Rights
Project at UCLA said New York and Illinois
have been “at or very near the top of the list”
of states where African-American and Latino
students have been most severely segregated.
It found that “residential resegregation” in
some parts of Maryland spilled over into the
schools and that in California, the percentage
of Hispanics was increasing as the overall
school population declined.
“We need to create schools that build a
society where the talent of all is developed
and students of all races-ethnicities are
prepared to understand and live successfully
in a society that moves beyond separation
toward mutual respect and integration,” the
group said.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Pre-K teacher Epernay Kyles, center, holds Jenny Rivas, left, and Linden Videnieks as
she talks about the day’s class activities with her students at Garrison Elementary
in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, May 17. Six decades after the Su-
preme Court outlawed separating students by race, stubborn disparities persist in
how the country educates its poor and minority children.
The GAO report found that in the 2013-
2014 school year, 16 percent of the nation’s
public schools had high concentrations of
poor and black or Hispanic students, up from
9 percent at the start of the millennium. The
student body at these schools were at least 75
percent black or Hispanic and poor — and in
some cases 100 percent. The indings were
based on an analysis of Education Depart-
ment data.
These schools tended to provide fewer
math courses, with calculus and seventh and
eighth grade algebra seen as particularly
lacking. In science, they had less biology,
chemistry and physics courses than their more
afluent counterparts with fewer minority
students.
Less than half of the mostly poor, mostly
minority schools offered AP math courses.
Looking at all public schools, low-income
and minority students were far less likely to
enroll in these more rigorous courses.
Hispanic students at these schools tended
to be “triple segregated by race, income
and language,” according to specialists and
educators who were interviewed by the GAO.
Education Secretary John B. King, Jr., said
one big reason for the disparities is money.
Inequitable resource distributions “are
shaping inequitable opportunities for
students,” King said after the report was
released. He said President Barack Obama has
asked for more education dollars, including
money for grant programs to support districts
with community-developed plans that
increase socio-economic diversity in schools.
Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president and
director of policy at The Leadership Confer-
ence on Civil and Human Rights said, “We
must focus on ixing resource disparities that
have plagued students of color and low-in-
come students for generations.”
Other indings:
• Students at these high-poverty minority
schools were 7 percent of all ninth grade
students in the country, but were 17 percent of
all students held back that grade.
• Students at these schools accounted for
12 percent of all students nationwide, and
represented 22 percent of all students with
one or more out-of-school suspensions and
16 percent of all students expelled.
• In the 2013-14 school year, Hispanic
students were the largest minority group in
schools — 25 percent Hispanic students,
compared to 16 percent black students. Both
groups have poverty rates two to three times
higher than the rates of white students.
The report recommends that the Education
Department more routinely analyze its civil
rights data to identify disparities that need to
be addressed. At the Justice Department, the
GAO auditors suggested more monitoring of
open federal desegregation court cases.
OUT OF THE VAULT
Truck-train collision spurs crossing closure
A
coalition of
representatives of
Umatilla County, Oregon
state, Union Paciic Railroad
and the Confederated Tribes of
the Umatilla Indian Reservation
was scheduled to meet May 19,
1994, to discuss the closure of
a dangerous unmarked railroad
crossing in front of Pendleton
Readymix near Mission due to
safety concerns — and almost
too late. Two hours before the
scheduled meeting, a collision
at the intersection demolished
a Gordon’s Electric pickup
and injured two employees.
Miraculously, neither man was
seriously hurt.
Employees of the concrete
plant who witnessed the crash
at 12:02 p.m. said it was a
miracle the
men survived
at all. The
train, traveling
eastbound, hit
the back of the
pickup and spun
it around. One
of the men was
Renee
Struthers thrown through
Out of the vault a window. The
pickup was
dragged by the
train 72 feet down the track from
the crossing, according to Tribal
Police Chief Leonard Cardwell.
Employees of Pendleton
Readymix and Paciic Power
rushed to provide aid until
emergency services could arrive.
The stopped train blocked the
intersection and the cars were not
separated, so EMTs had to lift
the injured men between two rail
cars. Gordon’s employee Ivan
Nicley, 33, of Milton-Freewater
suffered extensive facial injuries
and was admitted to St. Anthony
Hospital for surgery. His partner,
H. Tom Thompson, 29, of Helix
was treated and released the
same day.
Readymix employees
expressed frustration over
the crossing, which they said
didn’t afford good visibility
for oncoming trains that were
usually moving at a good clip
at that point. “We sit there
every day and watch as one
after another almost gets hit,”
said Readymix employee Jane
Clarke. “And then the sickening
sound. ... It was just a nightmare
seeing people hanging out the
front of the pickup,” she added.
The accident did have one
upside: Oficials at the meeting
had a irst-hand account of the
danger posed by the crossing.
Work was slated to begin as
early as the following summer
to close the crossing and another
in front of Hall’s Trailer Court,
and build a new crossing about
halfway between the two with
a frontage road alongside the
railroad tracks to access the two
businesses.
■
Renee Struthers is the
Community Records Editor for
the East Oregonian. See the
complete collection of Out of
the Vault columns at eovault.
blogspot.com
ODDS & ENDS
Public Safety says in a statement
that the man entered KaCees
World of Water car wash Friday
night and dropped an empty
potato chip bag on the counter.
He told the cashier to ill it
with money, warning that he had
a gun. The man gestured that the
weapon was in the empty bag,
but the cashier saw it held only a
piece of cardboard and called a
co-worker for help.
Police say when the other
employee approached, the
suspect led on foot.
Texas woman sells
‘housebroken’ bison
she let wander inside
ARGYLE, Texas (AP) — A
1,000-pound “domesticated”
bison that was allowed to roam
in her owner’s Dallas-area home
has moved on to pastures new.
Bullet the bison was
transported Saturday from Karen
Schoeve’s home in Argyle to her
new home, which she will share
with two cows, 15 miles away in
Flower Mound.
Schoeve says she was
struggling to balance work and
looking after Bullet and her
two paint ponies, so she sold
off the horses and two months
ago advertised Bullet for sale on
Craigslist for $5,960. She tells
The Dallas Morning News she
received several offers.
Schoeve describes Bullet
as house-trained, although she
sometimes tracks mud inside.
She says the bison is “good
hardy stock, but “not scary” and
that she has “a great personality.”
Nebraska man insists
he’s not dead yet
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A
Lincoln man says he’s not dead,
despite what the Social Security
Administration has said.
Chuck Zellers, 73, learned
of his demise in March after
his Social Security deposit was
removed from his bank account
while he and his wife, Alice,
Vernon Bryant/The Dallas Morning News via AP
Bullet walks through the hallway of her owner Karen
Schoeve’s home in Argyle, Texas on May 13. Bullet has been
sold, and was transported May 14, from Schoeve’s home in
Argyle to her new home, a pasture which she will share with
two cows, 15 miles away in Flower Mound.
were in Arizona, he told the
Lincoln Journal Star.
They talked to a woman at
the Social Security ofice who
checked her computer and told
him, “Oh, by golly, you are
dead,” Zellers said.
“She told me it could be
a funeral home declared you
deceased; or that someone just
put in a wrong keystroke or
something like that,” he said.
So, he’s spent the past few
weeks going from agency to
agency, business to business,
proving with various documents
that Charles Richard Zellers II,
of Lincoln, Nebraska, is not dead
yet.
He retired from his computer
job at Unisys in 2000, and since
then his pension and Social
Security checks have been his
main source of income. He
hadn’t received either check in
over two months.
Luckily, when he cut his
Arizona trip short and returned
home, his local Social Security
ofice paid him what he was
owed after they saw him alive.
Man attempts robbery
with potato chip bag
ROHNERT PARK, Calif.
(AP) — Authorities say a
man tried to rob a car wash in
Northern California with an
empty potato chip bag and an
alleged handgun.
Rohnert Park’s Department of
Lawsuit: McDonald’s
toilet paper dispenser
caused eye damage
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A
northern New Mexico woman
is suing a Santa Fe McDonald’s
franchise after she said a toilet
paper dispenser fell off a
bathroom stall door and slammed
into her face.
The lawsuit iled last week in
Santa Fe District Court alleges
that the 2013 public bathroom
mayhem left Veronica Espinoza
with a damaged retina.
According to the lawsuit,
Espinoza reached for toilet paper
in the “usual, common manner”
when it “came crashing down”
on her face, causing damage
to her nose, face and eye. The
lawsuit says the dispenser was
attached to a bathroom stall door.
Espinoza is seeking an
unspeciied amount in damages
and medical bill.