One must wonder what type of sexual syndrome would cause an adult woman teacher to have sex with a minor student. This week, Allenna Williams Ward, 23, a South Carolina teacher was arrested and charged with sexual misconduct with at least four students in places such as at the school, in her car, a motel and behind a restaurant. The students were 14 and 15 years old.

Last year another female teacher was arrested in a community only 20 miles distant from this incident. In her case, however, the student was only 11 years old.

The frequency of such events are alarming. While psychologists poised to testify in defense of the latest offending teacher claim that female teacher abuse of minors is extremely uncommon, the facts say differently.

Adrianne Hockett, Houston, rented an apartment for her escapades with a male student. Amber Jennings, Sturbridge, Mass., had sex and e-mailed naked photos of herself to a male student. Amber Marshall, Indiana, had sexual relations with several students before turning herself in and confessing. Amira Sa?™Di, Georgia, said that she didn?™t think her sex with a student was wrong because the age of consent is 16 in that state. Angela Corner, Kentucky, ran away with her 14-year-old student, claiming that they planned to marry. Angela Stellwag, N.J., sex with a 14-year-old boy in her apartment. Beth Raymond, Maine, charged with sexual assault on a minor. Bethany Sherrill, Florida, sex with a 15-year-old student. Carneo Patch, substitute teacher in Utah, oral sex with a 17-year-old student. Carol Flannigan, Florida, slept with an 11-year-old student. Cathy Herninghaus, Missouri, sex with three special education students. Celeste Emerick, Ohio, had parties showing porno. Christina Gallagher, N.J., sex with a 17-year-old student. Georgianne Harrell of Georgia whose sexual escapes was with a 9-year-old student and Kelly Lynn Dalecki of Florida whose affair was with a 13-year-old. Mary Kay Letourneau, Washington, in prison for sex with a 12-year-old. Pamela Turner, former model, Tenn., sex with a 13-year-old student.

There are no less than 41 additional cases either recently resolved in courts or on the dockets. One can only imagine how many other cases exist that have not been discovered.

The quantity of such offenses would clearly suggest that the occurrence is not uncommon nor unusual. It is becoming an epidemic. Psychologists suggest that some of these women had an arrested sexual development and were themselves, sexually children. Perhaps that, in itself, led them to enter the teaching profession. The phenomena is even more complex, however, since the majority of these teachers are strikingly attractive. Some are downright beautiful.

While the number of such offenses climbs annually, there can be no doubt that there is some discrimination at work here. The sexual activities between male teachers and female students are almost legendary and create a far less outcry of public indignation. These cases, in fact, are almost expected on the typical campus. The defining difference here appears to be that the average age of a girl student having sex with a male teacher is 16.7 years old. In the case of female teachers, the average age of their male student sex partners is 14.2.

We used to call it recess. Now they call it cease fire and teaching ranks as a hazardous profession right up there with putting out oil well fires or driving at Indy. The truth is that teachers deserve a lot of credit (Of course, if we paid them more, they wouldn?™t need it. Side-bar humor) for placing dedication above personal security, all for the love to teaching and children.

Part of the problem, however, can be found in the tendency of some school districts to conform the education system to the ?œstreet culture??instead of changing the street culture to conform to society. Street English is accepted in classrooms and some examinations have been adjusted to the mores of the street.

I can image the new examinations:

1) Joe has 2 ounces of cocaine. If he sells an 8 ball to Antonio for $320 and 2 grams to Juan for $85 per gram, what is the street value of the rest of his hold?

2) Raul got 6 years for murder. He also got $10,000 for the hit. If his common-law wife spends $100 per month, how much money will be left when he gets out?

3) Latisha will have her baby June and she is now in her fourth month so in what month did LeRoy get her pregnant?

There would appear to be an inherent injustice in this position since today education compromises with the language of the street but prohibited American Indians from speaking their native languages in schools of the early 1900s.

Reducing education quality to serve sub-cultures does not appear to me to be the best route to public service. I cannot believe that qualifying corruptions of language is the best inheritance we can provide to future generations. What will we permit next, students rapping the National Anthem?

We will always have social anomalies expressed in language, dress, music and actions but that does not mean that we should perpetuate them by giving them status or recognition. The hippie came and went and with him went all the beautiful flower people, music, poetry and unity. The remnants, however, were increased drug usage and new social values. What will be the final residue of the street culture and what affect will it have on our way of life? The question is valid since we are inviting the decline of social values by expressing the viewpoint in education that sub-cultures must be honored simply because they exist.

I’m reminded of Buckminster Fuller’s words, “There is no environmental crisis, or food crisis, or energy crisis. There is a crisis of ignorance.” As an educator, those words should be disturbing to you. Why are we so ignorant? What is it about our approach to education and our way of living that has caused this crisis?

According to a study conducted by the Manhattan Institute of Policy Research in 2002, nationally, 34 percent of high school students graduate without the skills and qualifications to attend college. Not only is the high school dropout rate increasing, that number does not include the number of students who stay in school, but have mentally “dropped out.”

Equally alarming is the number of students who begin college but do not graduate and the fact that the students who do not graduate as well as those who do end up with a huge debt before they even get started in getting jobs.
Our young people - the ones graduating from high school not qualified for college and the college students carrying a large debt and fearing unemployment - are only part of the problem. The concern I’m raising is how to live in the 21st century. How can we create learning environments that prepare students for their futures when we are not even certain what the future will be like? How can we overcome the “crisis of ignorance” and become educated to meet the economic and environmental challenges we are facing?
One way is to look at the present trends that are shaping the future and to ask what future do we want and what skills will we need to achieve that future. By asking those questions, we can create 21st century schools that are more relevant to the world we are living in. Right now, the emphasis on NCLB standards is stifling educators from creating relevant curricula for the 21st century.
Equally disturbing is our approach to education does not consider how the brain works and how people actually learn. Why do so many children lose their uniqueness and joy of learning?

For many students, it’s the extra-curricular activities - music, theater, sports - that excite and fully engage students. These activities bring out the best in young people and foster important skills - the ability to collaborate and commit to a high quality performance - to do their best. Students choose these activities and I’m convinced that if students had more choice in what they learned and classes were more project- and problem-based, more experiential and hands-on, students would develop the essential skills for the 21st century. In other words, the three Rs would be replaced by the three Cs - creative problem solving, collaboration and communication - integrating the basic skills in deeper, more relevant learning experiences.
At present, however, most schools still follow an obsolete Industrial Age model. The NCLB legislation is emphasizing skills that are being learned through drill rather than developing those skills through relevant learning experiences that prepare young people for the 21st century.
We have the financial resources to create schools that build on our understanding of how children learn and the technology to offer learning experiences that bring an awareness of the challenging environmental and economic issues our children and their children will be facing. We have the financial resources in this country to lower the cost of college, eliminate student debt, have high schools that are more exciting, relevant and actually prepare students to live in more sustainable ways.
We have models and the financial resources to create 21st century schools, but unfortunately, our leaders have other priorities.

The Emma Lazarus poem engraved on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty has long been symbolic of the out-stretched arms of a benevolent nation. But how do we teach of these historic postures and symbolisms after 14 million immigrants accepted that invitation and are now the theme of a national controversy?

Surely there are those who will argue that the poem invites immigrants but through a legal system. Unfortunately, that?™s not true. When immigration was at its peak in the mid-1800s, thousands fleeing from Ireland?™s potato famine entered merely by signing their names at Ellis Island. There are reports of Italian freighters docking in New York and depositing hundreds of aliens on American shores with no legal process or consequences. Literally tens of thousands of immigrants entered the United States without dealing with the bureaucracy or its red tape.

Textbooks used to hawk the national reputation of ?œthe melting pot of the world.?? Now there is a strange silence about that identity. The melting pot boiled over. America closed its arms and the Border Patrol and the National Guard took over. Bush even imitated Nikita Khrushchev by constructing a wall to contain its neighbors.

On July 28 of this year, the US News reported that, ?œCurrent allocations for the Lebanese are slightly more than $1.5 million, department spokesman Tom Casey said, and the department has notified Congress it wants to send urgently another $10 million. Israel has received slightly more than 3 billion dollars in U.S. military aid since 1985. Hebrews killing Lebanese with U.S. weapons and Lebanese killing Hebrews with . . . . you guessed it. Now teach kids about the American dream of world peace.

In the Land of the Free you are supposed to teach about the wonders of living in its privileged society. But about 15 million children — one out of every four — live below the official poverty line. 22% of Americans under the age of 18 — and 25% under age 12 — are hungry or at the risk of being hungry. Everyday 2,660 children are born into poverty; 27 die because of it. Children and families are the fastest growing group in the homeless population, representing 40%

Teach about images, about concepts, about prescribed descriptions written in books. But how do you teach about the truth?

A number of the schools are related as campuses within university systems. Yet in some cases, it appears that other campuses do still require testing.

Testing critics say one reason to drop the requirement is that preparing for the tests takes away too much time from schoolwork, and life. They say the requirement places too much importance on one test and causes too much stress for students.

Admissions officers at other schools, however, say test scores are important but are only one of the things they consider.

Still, critics question just how much the tests really show about a student. They say higher scores in some cases might only show that a student’s family had the money for costly test-preparation classes.

One of the first colleges to drop the requirement was Bates College in Maine in 1984. Over the next twenty years, it compared students who provided their test scores and those who did not. The study found that grades and graduation rates were the same.

Bates College also found an increase in the number of women, minorities and poor students who applied. The same was true of students with learning disabilities and international students.

Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts ended its requirement in 2001. Mount Holyoke is a small, highly rated liberal arts college for women. Recently its president, Joanne Creighton, wrote in the Los Angeles Times about the effects of making the SAT optional.

Like Bates, Mount Holyoke has compared student performance. Joanne Creighton says the study has found “no meaningful difference.”

The truth is that the SAT might have made sense in the 1920s when it was developed. College then was only for a relatively limited group of people. But today schools are too different today for a “one-size-fits-all test.” The thing we can hope for next is that the same rejection will happen with TOEFL.

“It really is. We’ve spent about 10 years developing the test, and we’ve changed the theoretical underpinning of the test itself,” says Eileen Tyson, representative of ETS in New Jersey where TOEFL originates.

That means, of course, that for the past ten years people have been taking, passing or failing TOEFL examinations. Some of the people who passed probably had no communication skills in English.

That?™s exactly the complaint that was issued ten years ago by the largest education organization in Latin America, the International Academic Assistance Program (IAAP). ?œWe have had students come to us with sufficient TOEFL scores to enter a United States university but who could not conduct a simple conversation,??says Magdalena Juarez, president of IAAP. ?œThat forced us to question the real value of TOEFL and how it truly presented a person?™s language skills.??r

IAAP officials claim that they have had students who did not fare well on their final evaluations in the IAAP English course but later took and passed the TOEFL. ?œWe considered them to be deficient,??said Juarez, ?œbut they received an academic green light from TOEFL. For that reason, we have actively encouraged universities to drop the TOEFL as an entrance requirement. In fact, we have taken the same position with ACT and SAT.??r

In spite of the decade of IAAP criticism, TOEFL is now presenting a verbal skills portion to their examination and are hawking it as something new.

?œWe have presented a four-hour English Proficiency Examination for the past ten years,??says Juarez, ??and it has always contained a verbal skills section. We frankly feel that if you cannot communicate in a language, you obviously have not dominated it. I have never been able to understand how a truly reputable examination could omit the most important element of a language, the ability to speak. We appreciate that TOEFL is finally realizing that fact but it just happens to be ten years too late.??r

Even before TOEFL gears up with its new examination, experts are already leveling their cannons. Many complain that the examination will now be even more unfair to some foreign students taking the exam and that the method in which the verbal portion is presented makes evaluation that much more difficult.

According to the Department of Education, one in every five teachers leaves after the first year, and almost twice as many leave within three. If any business had that rate of turnover, someone would do something smart and strategic to fix it. This isn’t any business. It’s the most important business around, the gardeners of the landscape of the human race.

Unfortunately, the current fashionable fixes for education take a page directly from the business playbook, and it’s a terrible fit. Instead of simply acknowledging that starting salaries are woefully low and committing to increasing them and finding the money for reasonable recurring raises, politicians have wasted decades obsessing about something called merit pay. It’s a concept that works fine if you’re making widgets, but kids aren’t widgets, and good teaching isn’t an assembly line.

The real fix is to simply face the facts. If a product has flaws on the production line, the analysts consider all things; inferior materials, errors in the design, employee fatigue, etc. But teachers receive kids coming from a society that is in massive decline in moral values, tremendous economic woes, increasing education costs and lowered family values and from that raw material are expected to produce the finished product. More sadly, if the product does not meet the quality control of government standards, only the teacher is at fault.

It seems preposterous that a society complains that a nation is at war with a commander in chief that has never seen a war. And yet, when speaking of education issues, no one considers that the president has never taught a class. The greater truth is that the highest levels of academic authorities have come from administrative ranks and not from classrooms.

And so we have the voice of the inexperienced directing the classroom veterans and kids contaminated by their own society. We have a historic tradition of ignoring those who teach and now complaints about the quality of education. What we do not have is a dash of logic to mix with common sense. That can only come from someone who?™s been there.

Last month, the Florida Board of Education approved a program that will link increases in teachers??pay to improvements in students??test scores.

The program will take effect next school year. It increases a teacher?™s pay if his or her students increase their scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The test measures reading and mathematics knowledge. It is now used to decide if students will pass to the next grade level. The state gives extra money to schools whose scores are good or have increased from the year before. Normally, the money is divided among the school workers.

The new program requires all school districts in the state to list the top ten percent of teachers in each subject area. These teachers will receive an increase of five percent in their yearly pay. For an average teacher, that would be about two thousand dollars.

Those who teach reading and mathematics will be judged on the test scores only. That is, how much their students have improved since the year before. But those who teach other subjects like geography, art and music will have to be judged differently. State officials say they will develop a system to do this.

Florida is not the only state with a plan to link teacher pay and student performance. Schools in Texas, Colorado and Minnesota have similar programs. But not all of them link pay with test scores alone.

Teacher groups around the country generally oppose such programs. They say it is not fair to judge teachers by how well students score on a test. They say many things affect a student?™s test scores, such as learning problems or lack of sleep. They also say that there are other ways to judge strengths and weaknesses of students.

Some teachers say the quality of teaching will decrease if teachers are forced to compete with each other for money and praise. They fear that teachers will refuse to work in schools where many children have learning problems or do not speak English well.

Those who support the new pay programs say teachers must be judged the way other professionals are ??by the results of their work. And they say that using student test scores is a true measure of a teacher?™s performance.

What falls through the cracks with such ideas is that some teachers inherit kids from neighborhoods where education isn?™t the priority of life. That cannot be compared with teachers who have kids from the country club areas where Mom and Dad have degrees and education is not lauded, simply expected.

It?™s just like Buddy Bell. You can only play with what you?™ve got. Teachers have the same problem but, of course, someone has to stir the pot and come up with yet another scheme where teachers are both the victim and the villain.

A number of the schools are related as campuses within university systems. Yet in some cases, it appears that other campuses do still require testing.

Testing critics say one reason to drop the requirement is that preparing for the tests takes away too much time from schoolwork, and life. They say the requirement places too much importance on one test and causes too much stress for students.

Admissions officers at other schools, however, say test scores are important but are only one of the things they consider.

Still, critics question just how much the tests really show about a student. They say higher scores in some cases might only show that a student’s family had the money for costly test-preparation classes.

One of the first colleges to drop the requirement was Bates College in Maine in 1984. Over the next twenty years, it compared students who provided their test scores and those who did not. The study found that grades and graduation rates were the same.

Bates College also found an increase in the number of women, minorities and poor students who applied. The same was true of students with learning disabilities and international students.

Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts ended its requirement in 2001. Mount Holyoke is a small, highly rated liberal arts college for women. Recently its president, Joanne Creighton, wrote in the Los Angeles Times about the effects of making the SAT optional.

Like Bates, Mount Holyoke has compared student performance. Joanne Creighton says the study has found “no meaningful difference.”

The truth is that the SAT might have made sense in the 1920s when it was developed. College then was only for a relatively limited group of people. But today schools are too different today for a “one-size-fits-all test.” The thing we can hope for next is that the same rejection will happen with TOEFL.

Criticisms of teaching are usually less about the working conditions than about the pay. A new report calls for an immediate pay increase of fifteen to twenty percent. It says this would lift teachers from the bottom in starting pay among professions.

The report, “Teachers and the Uncertain American Future,” is from the Center for Innovative Thought. The College Board formed this group last year with “some of the best minds in education,” in its words.

The College Board is a non-profit organization that owns the SAT college entry test. It also administers the Advanced Placement program.

The report urges new programs to solve a crisis in the number of qualified math and science teachers. It says less than half of students who finish high school are ready for college-level math or science.

It says another problem is a shortage of minority teachers, to better represent society. It says two times as many black and three times as many Hispanic, Asian and Native American teachers are needed.

The report says the nation needs a new agreement, a “compact,” with its teachers to defend its position in the world. All this would be financed with public and private money through a proposed “Teachers’ Trust.”

The suggested fifteen to twenty percent pay raise would rise to fifty percent. Teachers would work eleven months of the year instead of ten. Excellent teachers and those who agree to teach in troubled schools and subjects with shortages could get extra pay.

The plan also calls for better working conditions, and more pathways into teaching for those without traditional training.

Reg Weaver of the NEA says schools will not improve until teachers have the support, skills and training necessary to do their jobs. He says the surest way to end the teacher shortage is for all teachers to receive pay that recognizes the job they have to do.