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A group of Florida high school students is waging war against a local curfew.
The law — which bars under-18s from downtown West Palm Beach after 10 o’clock on weeknights and eleven on weekends — is, they say, unconscionable age discrimination. But that’s not all.
The law exempts married young people, but not those who are out with parental permission. On the contrary, it imposes fines on parents who “knowingly permit or by insufficient control allow” their children to break the curfew. “Insufficient control” is apparently nowhere defined — is a parent whose 17-year-old is in college expected to exercise “sufficient control” to keep him or her indoors at night?
The most bizarre — and, in a bizarre way, comforting — provision of the two-year-old law is one which exempts young people who are “attending or traveling directly to or from an activity that involves the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” from the curfew.
That’s right. The curfew as written only applies to those young people who don’t intend to speak while they’re out on the town. If you’re going to be exercising your freedom of speech (or assembly, or religion, or the press, or, you know, petitioning the government for redress of grievances), you’re golden. If you’re heading out to sit by your grandmother who’s in a coma, though, you’re getting a ticket.
(Only not really. The city is mostly just using the law as a mechanism for rousting young people rather than going through the hassle of ticketing them — as of the end of March it had issued a thousand warnings but only five citations.)
It’s ridiculous, is what it is, and the National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida is doing something about it.
NYRASEFL leaders Zach Goodman and Jeffrey Nadel (both 16) spent a big chunk of the spring explaining to the mayor and city commission just how farkakte the law is, but didn’t get anywhere. Then in late March they retained local civil rights attorney Barry Silver, who managed to get a law that criminalized feeding the homeless (yes, really) overturned last year. But so far he hasn’t had any luck either.
So on the evening of May 1, they took to the streets, letting the city know when and where they would defy the curfew.
During the protest they were tailed by two officers on Segways, but otherwise left alone. Their presence does seem to have gotten under the cops’ skin, though, as police ticketed several teens who were waiting for their parents outside a nearby movie theater as the protest was going on.
NYRASEFL intends to make one final effort to convince the city commission to repeal the curfew law before filing suit against the city. We’ll keep you informed as the story develops.
Update: As Justin Graham notes in comments, NYRASEFL is on Twitter, too.
It seems like every month or so there’s a big media buzz around another deeply flawed study that claims to confirm negative stereotypes about American college students. In February it was the one that explored students’ supposed “sense of entitlement” in the classroom, in March it was the one that claimed that students spend more time drinking than studying.
In April it was the one from Ohio State University researcher Aryn Karpinski that found that Facebook users have lower grades than students who aren’t on FB. It was only a draft paper, based on a small group of students from one college, but it made a huge splash all over the world.
And now it turns out that it’s pretty much worthless as scholarship.
A new response from three scholars in the field (Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai) looks closely at the Facebook study, and finds it incredibly weak. In comparing the grades of students who use and don’t use Facebook, for instance, one needs a substantial number in each category, but this study’s sample only included 15 non-FB undergrads. It also found major differences in Facebook adoption across majors, but made no effort to determine whether it was those population differences, rather than an actual tie to Facebook use, that was responsible for grade variation.
At least as important, the response looks at data obtained from three large studies, and found no significant connection between Facebook use and low grades. Indeed, one set of data suggested that Facebook use was, as the authors put it, “slightly more common among individuals with higher grades.”
As for Karpinski, despite the fact that she was quoted as saying that there was a “disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing that they had lower grades,” and despite the fact that she invited administrators “to find ways to limit access [to Facebook] … resulting in better academic performance,” she now says her findings were just “exploratory,” and that she never intended them to be seen as conclusive.
“People, she says, “need to chill out.”
Afternoon update: In the interest of fairness and completeness, here’s a link to Karpinski’s original conference presentation and to her rebuttal to the three scholars’ response to it. (She argues that their study has “serious methodological and statistical flaws” of its own.)
Late afternoon update: And here’s a link to Pasek, more, and Hargittai’s rebuttal to the rebuttal, courtesy of Hargittai.
I love student media, and I don’t think it gets anywhere near the respect it deserves. I don’t like it when people pick on the campus press. But when a student newspaper adopts the bad habits of the mainstream media, and publishes a sloppy, hostile-to-students story, it should get called on it, I think.
Yesterday’s Kent State News includes a piece on the aftermath of the local student riot that happened a couple of weeks back, a riot that some have blamed on police misconduct. The title of this story?
“Some incoming freshmen rethinking their decision to attend KSU after riots.”
But there’s a problem — the article doesn’t give any evidence that the headline’s claim is true.
The piece says the mother of incoming student Kayla Will is having second thoughts about Kent State in the wake of the riots, but that Kayla isn’t. “These riots,” the article says, “don’t impact her desire to go to Kent State.”
Another entering student, Leah Friedlander, says her parents “trust me to stay out of harm’s way.” According to the paper, “she has been planning on attending Kent State for pre-pharamacy since her junior year of high school, and the riots didn’t change her decision.”
That’s the total of the interviewing the paper did. Two students, neither of whom is rethinking anything.
And if the university itself is worried, they’re not saying so — they sent out a letter to incoming students to reassure them, one administrator says, but they’ve received only “minimal calls” about the issue.
This article is grounded in the premise that last month’s student rioters harmed the image of Kent State among likely attendees, but the article provides no support for that premise. None.
A yearlong drug investigation at the University of Illinois culminated in more than two dozen arrests last week.
But all the cops found was six ounces of pot and some Xanax.
The UI campus police launched “Operation Thunder Strike” last fall, and the force decided to make “a little bit of a splash” before the end of the semester, according to Lt. Roy Acree. They obtained search warrants and arrest warrants for seventeen people, and swept in on three fraternity houses and several apartments starting last Tuesday.
They made twenty-five arrests, twenty-one of UI students, but Acree said the total haul was “180 grams of cannabis, numerous pieces of drug paraphernalia, cocaine residue, and some Xanax pills.” Cops also confiscated two vehicles, three television sets, two computers, and about three thousand dollars in cash.
Spring classes end tomorrow at UI, and final exams start this Friday.
(The Chronicle of Higher Education swallowed the campus cops’ line on this bust, by the way, but the comment thread on their story is turning into a real doozy.)
The mayor of Providence, Rhode Island is looking to close a $17 million budget deficit on the backs of the city’s college students.
Mayor David Cicilline is proposing a new tax of $300 per year on all undergraduate and graduate students in the city’s four private universities. The flat tax, which he’s calling a “student municipal impact fee,” would — if he gets his way — be paid as part of students’ tuition bills.
Story via the usually-excellent blog The Kept Up Academic Librarian, which unfortunately gave it the pointlessly anti-student headline “You Attend College Here So You May As Well Pay Taxes.”
studentactivism.net 
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