In an extraordinary rejection of parental decision-making over their children’s diets, the administration at Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side has banned homemade lunches to protect students from the unhealthy diet choices of their parents.
Students will now need a medical excuse to bring a lunch because Principal Elsa Carmona does not trust the nutrition choices of the parents. She explains “[n]utrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school. It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”
While I respect the motivation, I find this policy to be another unnecessary intrusion into parental rights and authority. I have no problem with Carmona sending nutritional flyers to parents and encouraging their inclusion of healthy foods.
I will not get into conspiracy theories surrounding certain lunch ladies:
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jonathan Turley
Maryland man removed from Walmart toilet seat after prank
For one unfortunate Maryland man, April Fool’s Day was not a laughing matter.
CNN reports that a man was glued to a toilet at a Walmart in Elkton, Maryland on the night of March 31st, the eve of April Fool’s Day.
The 48-year-old man called for help after he realized he was stuck when he attempted to stand up to leave the restroom.
Police made the scene and it took about 15 minutes to remove the man from the stall but couldn’t separate his body from the actual seat.
The man was taken to a hospital where the seat was detached. Embarrassment aside, he only suffered minor injuries to his buttocks.
Investigators believe the sticky situation was just a case of a random prank that went wrong (or right, if you are the pranker in this case). If the pranker gets caught, he or she could face second-degree assault charges, police said.
-Chance Welch
Read more: http://startelegram.typepad.com/crime_time/#ixzz1JElRGTDw
That looks like a meal fit for a king. Ms. Elaine my Mom used to make me that same meal every Friday. God rest her soul.
kathy,
I was a teacher for many years. I still remember one lunch–which I called a monochromatic meal…or the infamous “white lunch.” It was macaroni and cheese, wax beans, cornbread, and vanilla pudding–all served on a cream-colored plate. Very appetizing!
Just to clarify:
I’m pretty sure JT just grabs images off of Google Image search, or Wikipedia. In fact, it looks like that’s the first image that pops up when you search “School Lunch Tray” in GIS
If the meal shown is representative, any mom worth her salt could do better. Two items are fried, a third is a nutritionally worthless sweet, and there’s no trace of a green veggie present.
It must come down to profit.
the picure above is the worst lunch I have ever seen
breaded meat,french fries, sauce with frutose corn syrup in it
and Milk with bovine hormones that’s a lunch that will make your child fat you might as well eat fast food there’s no difference. whom decided this lunch above a idiot. I say take your lunch your safer.
Give me an Orange sufficiently injected Vodka over school lunch again and I am game…
[Principal Elsa Carmona] explains “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom).”
This phrase cracks me up – “excellent quality food.” I seen enough lunchroom food to conclude it is pretty universal, and I remember what my meals of institutional spaghetti, Jello and breaded fish-like sticks were like.
Those lunch ladies were magical. They could boil/broil/bake/fry/steam any shred of nutrition right out of whatever it was we were eating that day.
Give me a sack lunch with a PBJ and apple any day!
Food….You have to be kidding me…right…
Wow, was Schroeder correct when he withdrew support for invasion of Iraq because of this type of behavior….
Puzzling,
Even if I get all the money I pay as property taxes back, I wouldn’t be able to afford to send my kid to a private school. So my son’s stuck going to a private school, just like a large percentage of the population. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “So what? it’s not fair for the other parents to pay for the poor kids’ education.” Well, if you look at just who gets the immediate benefit of having quality public education available to everyone, you’re right. Where you run into problems is when you take the two seconds to realize that when the general populace is educated EVERYBODY in the society benefits. Including those whose children go to private schools.
It’s like a fire department, even if your house never catches on fire, you still benefit when someone two houses down used them.
Human society has ALWAYS benefited from pooling resources. From tribes of hunter gatherers up to monumental effort needed build hydro-electric dams.
Puzzling,
Our schools are a reflection of our society. Many children in our society come from troubled homes where they are abused and/or neglected. Some come to school hungry. We need to address these societal problems if we want fewer children coming to school with issues. Public schools don’t create those problems.
In addition, some children are never read to by their parents. Some parents don’t teach their children the alphabet, numbers, colors. Parents are their children’s first teachers. Yet, some parents expect the schools to do it all.
As Buddha said–there are good public and private schools…just as there are bad public and private schools.
BTW, I don’t want MY tax dollars going to subsidize for-profit private schools.
I taught at a public school that was one of the best in the area where I live. In fact, it was better than the private, parochial, and charter schools in these parts. We had an amazing faculty! My daughter attended school there from kindergarten through fifth grade. She had fabulous teachers and a very enriching curriculum.
Puzzling, Many public school districts in this country are better than the private schools in the same area. For example, New Trier is superior to the local private and parochial schools in that area. It varies from district to district.
Elaine,
If public schools are so good then give parents a voucher and see where they spend it.
Of course, like a homemade lunch, only government really knows what’s best for kids, right? No need for parental choice.
The State uses its power to mandate compulsory, free education to indoctrinate. More often chronically broken schools drive teens to opt out into the narco-economy or entitlement economy, both truly perverse government creations. This system is indefensible regardless what the AFT says.
Buddha,
I went to two high schools, both were horrible, but the Charter school was so bad that after 1 month I transferred back to the public school.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino KOs Soda, OKs Alcohol
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has banned soda, sports drinks and sweetened ice teas from city property, according to a recent government press release.
In an attempt to reduce the city’s rising obesity rates, Menino has banned all sugary drinks from city vending machines, cafeterias and concession stands, just one day after reaching an agreement with the Boston Red Sox that allows the team to sell mixed drinks at its ballpark.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/04/10/boston-mayor-thomas-menino-kos-soda-oks-alcohol/
So it’s all about nutrition … or is it?
“Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.” (http://newschicago.net/tag/little-village-academy/)
Chef Twinkie is twinkling in her eyes …
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2010/10/closer-look-at-momcoms-dna-2.html
As anecdotal evidence, some of the worst schools I attended – and I moved a lot as a kid – were public schools and private schools.
Conversely, some of the best schools I attended were public schools and private schools.
Schools, no matter who owns them, are like franchise restaurants.
They all serve basically the same menu, but the quality of the food and service varies from location to location based upon local resources and management.
Puzzling,
The Myth of Charter Schools
November 11, 2010
By Diane Ravitch
New York review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/
Waiting for “Superman”
a film directed by Davis Guggenheim
Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” is different. It arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the subject of major stories in Time and New York, but it was featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was the centerpiece of several days of programming by NBC, including an interview with President Obama.
Two other films expounding the same arguments—The Lottery and The Cartel—were released in the late spring, but they received far less attention than Guggenheim’s film. His reputation as the director of the Academy Award–winning An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming, contributed to the anticipation surrounding Waiting for “Superman,” but the media frenzy suggested something more. Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.
The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
The Cartel maintains that we must not only create more charter schools, but provide vouchers so that children can flee incompetent public schools and attend private schools. There, we are led to believe, teachers will be caring and highly skilled (unlike the lazy dullards in public schools); the schools will have high expectations and test scores will soar; and all children will succeed academically, regardless of their circumstances. The Lottery echoes the main story line of Waiting for “Superman”: it is about children who are desperate to avoid the New York City public schools and eager to win a spot in a shiny new charter school in Harlem.
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23→Waiting for “Superman”
a film directed by Davis Guggenheim
Paramount Pictures
Anthony, a fifth-grade student hoping to win a spot at the SEED charter boarding school in Washington, D.C.; from Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for ‘Superman’
Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” is different. It arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the subject of major stories in Time and New York, but it was featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was the centerpiece of several days of programming by NBC, including an interview with President Obama.
Two other films expounding the same arguments—The Lottery and The Cartel—were released in the late spring, but they received far less attention than Guggenheim’s film. His reputation as the director of the Academy Award–winning An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming, contributed to the anticipation surrounding Waiting for “Superman,” but the media frenzy suggested something more. Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.
The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
The Cartel maintains that we must not only create more charter schools, but provide vouchers so that children can flee incompetent public schools and attend private schools. There, we are led to believe, teachers will be caring and highly skilled (unlike the lazy dullards in public schools); the schools will have high expectations and test scores will soar; and all children will succeed academically, regardless of their circumstances. The Lottery echoes the main story line of Waiting for “Superman”: it is about children who are desperate to avoid the New York City public schools and eager to win a spot in a shiny new charter school in Harlem.
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For many people, these arguments require a willing suspension of disbelief. Most Americans graduated from public schools, and most went from school to college or the workplace without thinking that their school had limited their life chances. There was a time—which now seems distant—when most people assumed that students’ performance in school was largely determined by their own efforts and by the circumstances and support of their family, not by their teachers. There were good teachers and mediocre teachers, even bad teachers, but in the end, most public schools offered ample opportunity for education to those willing to pursue it. The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985.
Waiting for “Superman” and the other films appeal to a broad apprehension that the nation is falling behind in global competition. If the economy is a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments of the population, if American kids are not as serious about their studies as their peers in other nations, the schools must be to blame. At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it’s the public schools, their teachers, and their unions.
The inspiration for Waiting for “Superman” began, Guggenheim explains, as he drove his own children to a private school, past the neighborhood schools with low test scores. He wondered about the fate of the children whose families did not have the choice of schools available to his own children. What was the quality of their education? He was sure it must be terrible. The press release for the film says that he wondered, “How heartsick and worried did their parents feel as they dropped their kids off this morning?” Guggenheim is a graduate of Sidwell Friends, the elite private school in Washington, D.C., where President Obama’s daughters are enrolled. The public schools that he passed by each morning must have seemed as hopeless and dreadful to him as the public schools in Washington that his own parents had shunned.
Waiting for “Superman” tells the story of five children who enter a lottery to win a coveted place in a charter school. Four of them seek to escape the public schools; one was asked to leave a Catholic school because her mother couldn’t afford the tuition. Four of the children are black or Hispanic and live in gritty neighborhoods, while the one white child lives in a leafy suburb. We come to know each of these children and their families; we learn about their dreams for the future; we see that they are lovable; and we identify with them. By the end of the film, we are rooting for them as the day of the lottery approaches.
*****
The situation is dire, the film warns us. We must act. But what must we do? The message of the film is clear. Public schools are bad, privately managed charter schools are good. Parents clamor to get their children out of the public schools in New York City (despite the claims by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that the city’s schools are better than ever) and into the charters (the mayor also plans to double the number of charters, to help more families escape from the public schools that he controls). If we could fire the bottom 5 to 10 percent of the lowest-performing teachers every year, says Hoover Institution economist Eric Hanushek in the film, our national test scores would soon approach the top of international rankings in mathematics and science.
Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?
The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?
Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can overcome the effects of student poverty, even though there are countless studies that demonstrate the link between income and test scores. He shows us footage of the pilot Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, to the amazement of people who said it couldn’t be done. Since Yeager broke the sound barrier, we should be prepared to believe that able teachers are all it takes to overcome the disadvantages of poverty, homelessness, joblessness, poor nutrition, absent parents, etc.
*****
The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement. But this proposition is false. Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5–10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10–20 percent of achievement outcomes. Teachers are the most important factor within schools.
But the same body of research shows that nonschool factors matter even more than teachers. According to University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income. So while teachers are the most important factor within schools, their effects pale in comparison with those of students’ backgrounds, families, and other factors beyond the control of schools and teachers. Teachers can have a profound effect on students, but it would be foolish to believe that teachers alone can undo the damage caused by poverty and its associated burdens.
Guggenheim skirts the issue of poverty by showing only families that are intact and dedicated to helping their children succeed. One of the children he follows is raised by a doting grandmother; two have single mothers who are relentless in seeking better education for them; two of them live with a mother and father. Nothing is said about children whose families are not available, for whatever reason, to support them, or about children who are homeless, or children with special needs. Nor is there any reference to the many charter schools that enroll disproportionately small numbers of children who are English-language learners or have disabilities.
The film never acknowledges that charter schools were created mainly at the instigation of Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997. Shanker had the idea in 1988 that a group of public school teachers would ask their colleagues for permission to create a small school that would focus on the neediest students, those who had dropped out and those who were disengaged from school and likely to drop out. He sold the idea as a way to open schools that would collaborate with public schools and help motivate disengaged students. In 1993, Shanker turned against the charter school idea when he realized that for-profit organizations saw it as a business opportunity and were advancing an agenda of school privatization. Michelle Rhee gained her teaching experience in Baltimore as an employee of Education Alternatives, Inc., one of the first of the for-profit operations.
**********
Diane Ravitch
http://www.dianeravitch.com/vita.html
The nuggets and orange looks lot more appetizing than what is actually served these students, in or out of the classroom.
Bad enough these public schools poison so many minds. Now government wants to make it mandatory to poison their bodies too?
I did finally see “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery” documentaries over the last few weeks. These school systems are destroying these kids. It is criminal to make this system compulsory on anybody. These children are being robbed of a real education and starved by their own government.