The school bus addiction

Peter Meyer / June 3, 2011

The other night, during one of our marathon budget workshops, we heard from a woman who had started a ?walking school bus? pilot program in one of our schools.? It's part of an anti-obesity grant and she had a wealth of information about the benefits of walking to school. She warned, ?We are raising a generation of kids who are afraid to walk.?? As soon as she finished, several hands shot up; parents worried about ice and snow, worried about roads without sidewalks, worried about kidnappers?..? My board colleagues immediately ditched the notion of cutting back on busing.? And it occurred to me that perhaps we are already well into the second generation of kids afraid to walk.? And so the obesity epidemic continues, with its many deleterious physical, emotional, and economic effects.? As a Times' headline today has it, Heavy in School, Burdened for Life. Three social scientists write that ?obesity affects not only health but also economic outcomes: overweight people have less success in the job market and make less money over the course of their careers?.? ?The researchers find that fat women are more prone to educational and economic disadvantage than fat men, but the point is that ?obesity is occurring in children at younger and younger ages, so prevention needs to start as early as primary school.?

Get out of the school buses, folks.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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The school bus addiction

Habits of mindlessness (with all due deference to David Brooks*): A no-brainer

Peter Meyer / March 26, 2011

Though Deborah Meier's newest post on Bridging Differences is ostensibly about hypocrisy (she says she tells her left-wing friends that ?we should honor hypocrisy?), I was drawn to her reference to habits of mind.? The phrase is one of the most useful in understanding the huge responsibility of our public school system.? In fact, the epigraph I chose for my story on the Catalyst charter schools in Chicago is all about habits. It's from the Old Testament (Proverbs 22:6): ?Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.??

The power of a habit should be indisputable, but the nature of the habit, especially?a habit?of the mind,?is subject to some misdirection.? (Dare I remind our readers that drug addictions, etc. are also habits.)

Meier suggests a 2007 blog essay by Bruce Schauble (who says he is Director of Instruction at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii) as a good summary of the field; and I trust her judgment on this. Schauble reviews?Ted Sizer's habits of mind ? perspective, analysis, imagination, etc., -- and Meier's habits ? evidence, connections, viewpoints/cause and effect, etc. ? and those of Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, at the Institute for Habits of Mind ?? thinking and communicating with clarity and precision, managing impulsivity, gathering data through all senses, etc. ? but he leaves out Sizer's important introduction to the whole?subject:

Good schools are places where

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Habits of mindlessness (with all due deference to David Brooks*): A no-brainer

A plague of violence in Chicago: What can schools do?

Peter Meyer / March 24, 2011

NPR's Morning Edition has been running a series on youth violence in Chicago ? this morning's story is here.? And it's worth paying attention to. ?I just finished a story for Ed Next on two new charter schools in the badlands of Chicago's Westside (Catholic Ethos, Public Education) and know that if there's any single challenge that defies a quick fix in our inner city schools, it is this: violence.?

I have, over the years, done a great deal of reporting on childhood violence (see my book Death of Innocence), meeting my share of horror along the way.? It is not a continuum; it is a swamp.? (The book I wanted to write on the subject is called The Triple A of Childhood Violence: Armed, Angry and Amoral.) There is nothing worse than seeing a child arrive at school in the morning?bearing the scars of such terror -- these kids are victims.? (I have met kids who, academically, are reading two grade levels ahead of their peers, but who are unable to eat lunch using a fork and spoon.) But I can't help but looking at these kids and thinking, `They are learning the ways of violence.' ?And though there is plenty of research linking environmental and domestic victimization of children -- sexual abuse is a terribly underreported story here -- to future behavioral problems (that's the anger part), I'm sure anyone who has ever worked in a

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A plague of violence in Chicago: What can schools do?