Courtesy  SFGate:

(12-12) 19:15 PST BERKELEY — Eight people were in custody Saturday after a crowd of angry protesters broke windows and threw burning torches at UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s campus residence in protest of fee hikes and budget cuts, authorities said.

As many as 75 people – some of them carrying torches – surrounded the mansion, known as University House, on the north side of campus off Hearst Avenue at about 11:15 p.m. Friday, police said.

The crowd, including a man taken into custody in a university protest a day earlier, chanted, “No justice, no peace,” and began smashing planters, windows and lights. Several hurled their torches at the building, said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof.

Birgeneau was sleeping at the time and was awakened by his wife, Mary Catherine, Mogulof said. They were frightened, but unharmed, he said.

“These are criminals, not activists,” Birgeneau said in a statement issued Saturday morning. “The attack at our home was extraordinarily frightening and violent. My wife and I genuinely feared for our lives.”

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger condemned the attack Saturday as a form of terrorism.

-Article continues @ Source.

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Courtesy SFGate:

(11-20) 21:44 PST BERKELEY, CALIF. — Forty protesters who barricaded themselves inside Wheeler Hall for 11 hours Friday didn’t win back the 38 custodial jobs they demanded, nor did they persuade the UC regents to rescind their decision to increase tuition by 32 percent next fall.

But their daylong protest spoke directly to the mood of students, faculty and university workers, who demonstrated their frustration with ever-increasing fees and ever-decreasing jobs.

The occupation of the two-story building on the Berkeley campus ended Friday night as Alameda County sheriffs deputies escorted the protesters, all but two of whom where students, out of the building and past more than 2,000 chanting supporters. The protesters will face misdemeanor trespassing charges.

The third and most tumultuous day of protests reflected the anger being displayed on many UC campuses Friday, a day after the regents voted to increase undergraduate tuition and graduate-level fees to help make up a $535 million budget gap brought on by reduced state funding and inflation.

At Berkeley, the daylong occupation of Wheeler Hall began at 6 a.m. when the group entered the second floor of the building. Three students were arrested immediately for burglary as they moved heavy furniture to block doorways, according campus police.

“We decided it was necessary to take action,” said Andi Walden, a Middle Eastern studies and political science major. “A lot of people have been saying, ‘Whose university? Our university.’ So we decided to put that into action.”

Speaking to The Chronicle by phone, she said the protesters had enough food and water to last four days. She also estimated the group as 60-people strong, but later in the day, police said there were 40 protesters inside.

-Article continues @ Source.

On occasion, when Americans talk about freedom, we talk about how students in other cultures are taught a very whitewashed view of history.  It’s no big secret that some of what’s taught at younger grades about the greatness and honesty of the founding fathers is simplified, and that some of their deeds are glorified and others ignored.  But Texas seems to be taking it a step further.

From yesterday’s Houston Chronicle:

Social studies books turning a controversial new page

from HoustonChronicle

Some proposed curriculum changes, which will be discussed by a state board this week, are sure to inflame Texans.

AUSTIN — Biographies of Washington, Lincoln, Stephen F. Austin? Not fit reading material for children in the early grades.

Cesar Chavez? Not worthy of his role-model status.

Christianity? Emphasize its importance.

Such suggestions are part of efforts to rewrite history books for the state’s schoolchildren, producing some expert recommendations that are sure to inflame Texans, no matter their political leanings.

The State Board of Education expects to start discussing new social studies curriculum standards this week, with members of the public getting their first opportunity to speak this fall and a final board vote next spring.

The process is a long one with lasting impact: reshaping the social studies curriculum, including history, for 4.7 million Texas public school children.

But of course Washington and Lincoln are to be left in, right?  Especially as we celebrate Presidents’ Day in February, right??

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YouTube Link
Obama on 60 Minutes. More at Huffington Post.

Start listening at 7:50

Please note that the California Teacher of the Year got a pink slip because of the economy.

Courtesy Red, Green and Blue.

Who will protect us from the protectors?
Sometimes things get out of hand. And, usually, there is a group of people whose occupation it is to protect us from those situations. But as was the case on Monday night in Minnesota, the people who are supposed to protect us got a little bit out of hand themselves.

On Monday night, three colleagues of mine from the Kentucky Kernel were arrested while documenting the protests outside the Republican National Convention. Photographers Ed Matthews and Britney McIntosh, along with photo advisor Jim Winn were all arrested and charged with rioting. Matthews and McIntosh were both charged with felonies, while Winn was charged with a misdemeanor.

Nothing indicates that any of the three were actually participating in the protests, much less violating any laws that would warrant their arrest. The police officers subdued the Kernel staff members with the use of pepper spray and the threat of a gun, certainly unnecessary given that all evidence suggests that Matthews, McIntosh and Winn were not actually breaking any laws. Regardless, we cannot know whether or not they were acting inappropriately, as they are still incommunicado in the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center. If convicted, Matthews and McIntosh would face a minimum sentence of one year in jail and a $3000 fine. Perhaps the bright spot in all of this is that at least we know what they have been charged with.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Courtesy YahooNews

WASHINGTON – Paddlings, swats, licks. A quarter of a million schoolchildren got them last year — and blacks, American Indians and kids with disabilities got a disproportionate share of the punishment, according to a study by a human rights group.

Even little kids can be paddled. Heather Porter, who lives in Crockett, Texas, was startled to hear her little boy, then 3, say he’d been spanked at school. Porter was never told, despite a policy at the public preschool that parents be notified.

“We were pretty ticked off, to say the least. The reason he got paddled was because he was untying his shoes and playing with the air conditioner thermostat,” Porter said. “He was being a 3-year-old.”

For the study released Wednesday, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union used Education Department data to show that, while paddling has been declining, racial disparity persists. Researchers also interviewed students, parents and school personnel in Texas and Mississippi, states that account for 40 percent of the 223,190 kids who were paddled at least once in the 2006-2007 school year.

Porter could have filled out a form telling the school not to paddle her son, if only she had realized he might be paddled.

Yet many parents find that such forms are ignored, the study said.

Widespread paddling can make it unlikely that forms will be checked. A teacher interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Tiffany Bartlett, said that when she taught in the Mississippi Delta, the policy was to lock the classroom doors when the bell rang, leaving stragglers to be paddled by an administrator patrolling the hallways. Bartlett now is a school teacher in Austin, Texas.

And even if schools make a mistake, they are unlikely to face lawsuits. In places where corporal punishment is allowed, teachers and principals generally have legal immunity from assault laws, the study said.

“One of the things we’ve seen over and over again is that parents have difficulty getting redress, if a child is paddled and severely injured, or paddled in violation of parents’ wishes,” said Alice Farmer, the study’s author.

A majority of states have outlawed it, but corporal punishment remains widespread across the South. Behind Texas and Mississippi were Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida and Missouri.

African American students are more than twice as likely to be paddled. The disparity persists even in places with large black populations, the study found. Similarly, Native Americans were more than twice as likely to be paddled, the study found.

The study also found:

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

I used to teach in a Jewish school that had a strict separation between religious and secular subjects. Never really understood why. Later taught for one that had an integrated curriculum at the elementary levels, and I loved that. But I have never heard of a Jewish school that taught biblical content in science classes, and certainly not at the high school level.

Not so with Christian schools, and there’s a controversy developing in California over the universities there accepting certain course credits from certain high schools.

Judge says UC can deny religious course credit

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts – not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

Otero’s ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university’s system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero’s rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

“It appears the UC is attempting to secularize private religious schools,” attorney Jennifer Monk of Advocates for Faith and Freedom said Tuesday. Her clients include the Association of Christian Schools International, two Southern California high schools and several students.

Charles Robinson, the university’s vice president for legal affairs, said the ruling “confirms that UC may apply the same admissions standards to all students and to all high schools without regard to their religious affiliations.” What the plaintiffs seek, he said, is a “religious exemption from regular admissions standards.”

The suit, filed in 2005, challenged UC’s review of high school courses taken by would-be applicants to the 10-campus system. Most students qualify by taking an approved set of college preparatory classes; students whose courses lack UC approval can remain eligible by scoring well in those subjects on the Scholastic Assessment Test.

Christian schools in the suit accused the university of rejecting courses that include any religious viewpoint, “any instance of God’s guidance of history, or any alternative … to evolution.”

But Otero said in March that the university has approved many courses containing religious material and viewpoints, including some that use such texts as “Chemistry for Christian Schools” and “Biology: God’s Living Creation,” or that include scientific discussions of creationism as well as evolution.

UC denies credit to courses that rely largely or entirely on material stressing supernatural over historic or scientific explanations, though it has approved such texts as supplemental reading, the judge said.

For example, in Friday’s ruling, he upheld the university’s rejection of a history course called Christianity’s Influence on America. According to a UC professor on the course review committee, the primary text, published by Bob Jones University, “instructs that the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of historical events” and evaluates historical figures based on their religious motivations.

Another rejected text, “Biology for Christian Schools,” declares on the first page that “if (scientific) conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong,” Otero said.

He also said the Christian schools presented no evidence that the university’s decisions were motivated by hostility to religion.

UC attorney Christopher Patti said Tuesday that the judge assessed the review process accurately.

“We evaluate the courses to see whether they prepare these kids to come to college at UC,” he said. “There was no evidence that these students were in fact denied the ability to come to the university.”

But Monk, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said Otero had used the wrong legal standard and had given the university too much deference.

“Science courses from a religious perspective are not approved,” she said. “If it comes from certain publishers or from a religious perspective, UC simply denies them.”

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

VIDEO

No credit for creationism 2:23

CNN’s Kara Finnstrom reports on a battle over how much religion is too much in Christian school curriculums.

• CNN.com

h/t Tengrain

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Courtesy Local-6 (Texas):

HARROLD, Texas — The tiny Harrold, Texas, school district will allow teachers and staff members to carry concealed firearms when they return to class this month.
The superintendent said they’re a 30-minute drive from the Wilbarger County Sheriff’s Office, leaving students and teachers without protection.
He told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started.”

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.