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Source: Black Voices.com (Shutterstock Photo)

From BlackVoices.com

Black and Latino students may be getting less critical, but helpful, feedback from teachers than their white counterparts, a new educational study indicates.

“The social implications of these results are important; many minority students might not be getting input from instructors thatstimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement,” study researcher Kent Harber, a Rutgers-Newark psychology professor, said in a press release.

This positive bias in feedback to minority students may be contributing to the achievement gap between white and minority students, a stubborn national problem, Harber said.

The study “tested” 113 white middle-school and high-school teachers in two public school districts, one middle class and white, and the other working class and racially mixed. Both are located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area.

Get the rest of the story at BlackVoices.com. 

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Last Tuesday, while most folks were distracted by all the election day coverage, the School District of Philadelphia quietly announced its plan to restructure the city’s public school system, including closing 64 schools in the next five years.

Calling the plan an attempt to right size a district, which has been bleeding both seats and money, while making it competitive by offering parents more choices, Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen said that 40 schools would close by next year and six additional schools would be closed every year thereafter until 2017. The remaining schools would get distributed into “achievement networks” where public or private groups compete to manage them while the Central District headquarters would be reduced to a skeleton crew of about 200. The District chief also said that the ultimate goal is to have about 40 percent of students in Philly’s public school system moved to charter school management by 2017.

The announcement of basically the dissolution of the School District of Philadelphia, a city that’s the fifth largest city in the nation, has received minimum attention in the mainstream media. Even as the city of brotherly love becomes the latest city to weaken under the prospects of trying to balance budgets, while working with decreasing amounts of funding, meet the standards of federal No Child Left Behind guidelines and compete with the sudden rise in charter schools, which continues to pull necessary monies and resources from the already battered school districts. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, “across Pennsylvania, school boards are finding it increasingly difficult to manage tax dollars responsibly as the pressure to open more charter and cyber-charter schools builds, even as these schools show little evidence of performing better than regular public schools.”  And it is not just Pennsylvania.

In Detroit, which last year announced plans to close half of that city’s schools and increase high school class sizes to 60 students, the city has also embraced charter schools as the cornerstone of its “Renaissance 2012″ plan even as the performance of the district’s 14 authorized charters so far has been less than impressive.  In New York City, which has undergone a similar style restructuring plan similar in kind to Philadelphia, has too not seen the success as promised through its reduction of publicly held schools in favor of privately managed charter schools.

According to Diane Ravitch, former Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, New York City has not gotten the remarkable results it promised. She writes, “The city’s proficiency rates, which seemed to be flying up by leaps and bounds every year, got deflated in 2010 when the State Education Department admitted lowering the cut scores on state examinations. Overnight, the New York City miracle disappeared, as the percentage of students who reached proficiency fell to levels near where they had been years earlier. And the achievement gap was as large as it had been in 2002, when the mayor took charge.”

From TheGrio.com

An estimated 1.5 million black students could see interest on their student loans increase unless Congress and President Obama reach an agreement to keep current rates in place.

Obama will give speeches at the University of North Carolina and the University of Colorado Tuesday, pushing his proposal to prevent a scheduled hike in rates for subsidized Stafford Loans. In 2007, Congress and President Bush agreed to gradually reduce the interest rates of these loans from 6.8 to 3.4 percent, but that provision expires in July, and new loans would be issued with the 6.8 percent rate if legislation is not passed.

The Department of Education estimates the increase would result in about $1,000 in additional loan costs for each student. African-Americans carry the highest levels of high student debt among demographic groups, as 16 percent of black graduates owe more than $40,000 in loans, according to a recent Philadelphia Inquirer report.

About eight million American students use subsidized Stafford loans each year, most of whom are in households with income below $50,000. These loans have particular appeal because the federal government pays the interest rates on them when students are in college, while students are responsible for the interest of unsubsidized federal Stafford Loans as soon as they start borrowing.

For the complete story, visit TheGrio.com.

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At one point, young professionals were said to be the least affected by the down economy, as older workers were being pushed out in favor of cheap labor and forced to rely on diminished retirement savings to survive. The fact that the young labor force would have time to build up their 401ks was seen as their saving grace but you can’t put money up for retirement when you don’t have a job at all.

That’s the reality painted by a new analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press that has found about 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 were unemployed or severely underemployed last year. That number is the highest it’s been in at least 11 years.

“Simply put, we’re failing kids coming out of college,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers. “We’re going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow.”

Professional prospects varied by industry and region. For instance, demand is strong in science, education, and health fields, but dwindling in the arts and humanities. Median wages are lower for those with bachelor’s degrees across the board when compared to 2000 data, and sadly most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention for the aging population.

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor’s degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants,” Yahoo news report. “Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren’t easily replaced by computers.

The Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed—about 3 out of 5. Grads in the rural southeast followed behind, while the Pacific region ranked high on the list as well. The south, particularly Texas, appears to be the place to be right now. The area was was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.

In more sobering news, American workers are also struggling to compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs and degree inflation as more and more young people earn bachelor’s degrees, making them commonplace for low-wage jobs, but inadequate for higher-paying ones. Sigh.

What advice would you give a recent grad trying to make it as a young professional?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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Oftentimes, most of America associates high paying careers with those of doctors, lawyers, and MBAs but there are other jobs that command good salaries. Yahoo writer Jennifer Barry compiled a list of careers that may surprise you in terms of how much salary they demand.

Loan Officer

Average annual salary for top 10 percent of workers: $112,370*
Average annual salary: $65,900*

Loan officers are dealing with lots of money and risks, which easily explains why they command such a good income.

Requirements: Loan officer positions sometimes require a bachelors’ degree in economics or related field.

Source: plus.google.com

The way people grossly underestimate children never ceases to amaze me. Children are people, with brains that develop at a much faster rate than ours. Sure every once in a while they may say things that will catch us off guard but we should never underestimate what they are and are not able to comprehend.

We re-learned this lesson in the clips from CNN’s upcoming special, “Kids On Race: The Hidden Picture.” In this video psychologists and even some of the CNN journalists, including Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brein, spoke with a diverse group of children and even their parents to discuss the issue of race in their schools, in their friendships and in their homes.

Check the video clip below:

The video found that while both children recognize differences in race, black children are more likely to be open and optimistic when it comes to interracial friendships.

Are you surprised about the results from this video?

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Source: Stamford Advocate

First-degree larceny and conspiracy seem like odd charges for sending your child to school, but that’s what Connecticut mother Tanya McDowell has pleaded guilty to after she “fraudulently” enrolled her son in the wrong school district. The prosecution says she stole money from taxpayers by putting her child in the wrong school and now she’s been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

But what’s the appropriate school district for your child when you have no home? Tanya and her son were homeless at the time that she enrolled him in Kindergarten in the Norwalk school district last year, using her babysitter’s address, rather than the district of Bridgeport where her last home was. Unmoved by her circumstances, police say Tanya stole up to $15,686 in educational services from the city of Norwalk, which is the documented average cost for educating a child in 2010. In addition to her jail sentence she’s been ordered to pay back up to $6,200 in restitution.

Tanya’s 12-year sentence also includes four counts of drug possession and sale charges, which she pleaded guilty to as well, and her sentence is expected to be suspended after she serves five of the 12 years. Despite support from the NAACP, the defense was unable to get the charges dismissed, now Tanya is stuck serving time for trying to educate her son and explain to him why she’s going away. She said he’s read the newspapers that say she stole something and he doesn’t understand what’s happening.

“He is curious because he thinks I stole Brookside [the school he attended] away from him,” she said, “that I took it away from him,”

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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By Blair Bedford

The path to employment isn’t limited to just one road or direction. There are various ways you can make the most out of your time and energy in-transition during the job searching process. Although interning and volunteering have a stereotype for only being opportunities for young, inexperienced college students looking to get coffee and answer phone calls all day, these methods are some of the best ways to occupy your time while on the job hunt. Plus, if you find the RIGHT internship you can be given a lot of responsibility, and in turn, get your foot in the door and possibly be offered a position in the end. While you’re waiting, try utilizing and broadening your skill set and experience with some of these non-traditional employment alternatives for some of the traditional college degrees:

The Tennessee tea party wants to move “incidents” like slavery and genocide out of the history textbooks. Why? Because they are afraid that these “incidents” would tarnish the image of the founding fathers of the U.S.

Yes, you are reading this right. They want to erase history and the fact that our country was founded on both slavery and the wipe out of the native’s population.

On January 11, members of the Tennessee tea party presented this idea to their state legislatures, with five priorities of action to change the state’s history curriculum and supposedly to educate students on “the truth” about America.

Some of the changes presented that they’re hoping for include the following: to reference the slave trade as the “Atlantic Triangular Trade,” to have the first black President to be announced as “Barack Hussein Obama,” (how convenient) and to state that the Constitution created a Republic and not a Democracy.

Salon reports that the tea party also doesn’t want their kids to learn that many of the founding fathers owned slaves.

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

Overall it would push for a more biased and skewed version of history, one that is completely false and untrue. It is bad enough that the educational system doesn’t teach our full American history or that of other individuals of color who helped build this country. Unfortunately, American history equals white history and the occasional lessons of slavery, the civil rights movement, and if you’re lucky (as hell) the Harlem Renaissance. But now people are trying to rub out the little acknowledgement of our struggles and history that we get?

This is a complete white wash of history at its finest. Will they actually get to change the curriculum? Most likely not, but it’s scary to think there are people out there are who are trying very hard to paint a false picture of our country’s history and founding fathers as clean as a whistle for the most random and useless of purposes. Go get a hobby.

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Skip money. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Word on the street is that not only does Terrell Owens have a slew of baby mother drama on his plate, but the wide receiver tells GQ that he is going broke. Not just any ‘ol broke, we’re talking damn near $80 million. The running line of the piece is that if you asked where T.O. was a few months ago, especially since he hasn’t touched a football during this NFL season because no team will take him, his answer in text form would be, “I’M IN HELL.” It’s no secret that Owens is known in the NFL for his crappy attitude and sometimes his dismissal of authority, and while he has had his golden years in the league, it seems that reputation is coming back to haunt the brother. After tearing his ACL and spending the 2011 NFL season doing rehabilitation for it, no teams made an effort to bring him on. Who knew a temper could trump true talent?

Since he’s been on the sidelines, or in the house (let’s keep it real), he hasn’t made the money he’s used to. And on top of that, the mothers of his four children have been coming after him during this tough period, asking him to contribute more than what he claims to have in child support. The drama behind it has blown up so big that he doesn’t even get to see his youngest child thanks to beef with the mother of the child–a son. This is what it says in the article:

“…he pays a total of $44,600 a month in child support for his four children, ages 5 to 12: “If there’s anything I’m sorry about, it’s getting involved with all that.” He never actually dated any of the women, he says. One was a one-night stand, the others “repeat offenders.” Owens, who has never been married, concedes he is “not a very good judge of character.” Still, he “never suspected they were the types to do what they done in the past year.”