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Quick hit, via Inside Higher Ed:
“A new research study … has found that ending the [SAT] requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.”
Hans and Sophie Scholl have long been student activist heroes of mine. The Scholls were members of the White Rose, a tiny group of German opponents of the Nazi regime. Hans was a veteran, and he and his sister were both students at the University of Munich, where they were caught scattering pamphlets on February 18, 1943. Four days later the two were tried, convicted, and guillotined, along with their friend and ally Christoph Probst, a 23-year-old father of three.
Google Alerts sent me a link to a new article on the White Rose this morning, and I figured I’d pass it along.
A fifth grade class in Murfreesboro, TN learned about the civil rights movement this month by staging a protest march … against junk food.
Here’s the meat of the article:
After a two-week lesson on civil rights, the students picked their own issue, eating healthy and exercise, and marched in protest.
Parent Belinda Pate said she thought it was a good way to get the history lesson across, plus healthy eating a exercise are “what us parents are always trying to protest with our kids.”
The teachers also had the students wear different colored T-shirts – either red, green or blue – and treated the groups differently depending on what color they wore.
For example on the way to the protest, red-shirted students had to sit in the back of the bus, blue-shirts sat in the middle and weren’t allowed to talk, and green-shirts could sit in the front of the bus and talk all they wanted, student Asha Phillips explained.
The teachers also made different groups use different bathrooms at school.
This kind of thing leaves me deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it’s great to see kids learning about activism and organizing in school, and being encouraged to think of themselves as potential activists.
On the other hand…
If you think about what would have happened if the “protest” had been about a controversial subject — gay teachers, say, or prayer in the schools — you see just how problematic the exercise is. Because you really couldn’t do an event like that. Whatever position the class adopted would be offensive to somebody’s parent, and probably go against the values of at least a few of the kids. This “protest” was only possible because it wasn’t the contemporary equivalent of a civil rights march. And that’s not even getting into the whole t-shirt thing.
I don’t want to get off on too much of a rant here. I’m sure these teachers meant well, and I give them credit for trying to bring this particular moment in history alive. But teaching about social justice movements is hard. It’s challenging. If you make it easy, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Anyway, that’s my reaction. What’s yours?
Seventeen-year-olds will have open access to “Plan B” emergency contraception thanks to a judge’s ruling yesterday, and access for younger teens is likely to follow.
A federal court ruled yesterday that the Bush-era Food and Drug Administration relied on politics, not science, when it limited non-prescription sales of Plan B to women aged 18 and over. The court blasted the FDA’s “political considerations … and implausible justifications” in its consideration of Plan B.
The court directed the FDA to allow 17-year-olds access to non-prescription Plan B within 30 days, and to review its decision to require prescriptions for younger teens.
The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in the case of a 13-year-old eighth grader who was strip-searched in 2003 by school officials who were searching her for ibuprofen.
An appeals court ruled last year that the search violated Savana Redding’s constitutional rights, as well as “any known principle of human dignity,” but the ruling was a split decision. The Supreme Court will also be faced with the question of whether Redding has the right to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search.
Redding is now an undergraduate at Eastern Arizona College, majoring in psychology.
studentactivism.net 
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