New Emphasis on Rights Laws and Green Building
Posted on: 3/8/2010
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Officials Step Up Enforcement of Rights Laws in Education
Seeking to step up enforcement of civil rights laws, the federal Department of Education says it will be sending letters in coming weeks to thousands of school districts and colleges, outlining their responsibilities on issues of fairness and equal opportunity.
As part of that effort, the department intends to open investigations known as compliance reviews in about 32 school districts nationwide, seeking to verify that students of both sexes and all races are getting equal access to college preparatory curriculums and to advanced placement courses. The department plans to open similar civil rights investigations at half a dozen colleges.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is to announce the initiatives in a speech on Monday in Selma, Ala., where on March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten by Alabama state troopers.
Mr. Duncan plans to say that in the past decade the department’s Office for Civil Rights “has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities,” according to a text of the speech distributed to reporters on Sunday.
It continues, “We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.”
At the end of high school, white students are about six times as likely to be ready to pursue college-level biology courses as black students, and more than four times as likely to be ready for college algebra, department officials said. White high school graduates are more than twice as likely to have taken advanced placement calculus classes as black or Latino graduates.
The department enforces civil rights laws in schools and universities by responding to specific complaints from parents, students and others, but also by scrutinizing its own vast bodies of data on the nation’s school and university systems, looking for signs of possible discrimination. A school seen to be expelling Latino students in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the student population, for instance, might become a candidate for compliance review, officials said.
As it seeks to combat discrimination in schools and universities more aggressively, the administration will be acting in an area in which some Supreme Court rulings in recent years have brought more ambiguity. Federal policy for decades had aimed at compelling school districts to end racial inequality, for instance.
But in examining longstanding desegregation efforts in the Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., schools in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that school authorities could not seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race, a decision that seemed to reverse the thrust of four decades of federal policy.
Some civil rights advocates said they had hoped the administration would move more quickly last year to ramp up the activity of the Office for Civil Rights, the department’s second-largest, with 600 employees.
“This whole area has been a dead zone for years, and people were worried that new actions were too slow in coming,” said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a Washington group that monitors federal policy and practices. “There had been strong hopes that they would move more quickly. This sounds like positive movement, which we’ve all been asking for.”
Russlyn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in an interview that the department would begin 38 compliance reviews before the current fiscal year ended on Oct. 1. That number compares with 29 such reviews carried out last year, 42 in 2008, 23 in 2007 and nine in 2006, she said.
“But the big difference is not in the number of the reviews we intend to carry out, but in their complexity and depth,” Ms. Ali said. “Most of the reviews in the recent past have looked at procedures.”
In cases analyzing potential sex discrimination, for instance, federal investigators would often check to see if schools and universities had grievance procedures in place, and if so, take no enforcement action, she said.
“Now we’ll not simply see whether there is a program in place, but also examine whether that program is working effectively,” she said.
The department plans to begin a major investigation on Wednesday in one of the nation’s largest urban school districts, Ms. Ali said. She declined to identify it because, she said, department officials were still notifying Congress and others of the plans.
The compliance reviews typically involve visits to the school district or university by federal officials based in one or more of the department’s 12 regional offices.
The department intends to send letters offering guidance to virtually all of the nation’s 15,000 school districts and several thousand institutions of post-secondary education, officials said.
The letters will focus on 17 areas of civil rights concern, including possible racial discrimination in student assignments and admissions, in the meting out of discipline, and in access to resources, including qualified teachers. Other areas include possible sex and gender bias in athletics programs, as well as sexual harassment and violence. Other letters will remind districts and colleges of their responsibilities under federal law with regard to disabled students.
Source: The New York Times
As LAUSD tightens belt, 'green' resolution helps trim water, energy costs
The 3-year-old program has been carving away at future utility expenses for the sprawling system. 'Our mission is to be the greenest school district in the country,' says school board president.
While the Los Angeles Unified School District grapples with budget slashing, teacher layoffs, program cuts and increasing class sizes, a 3-year-old program has been steadily carving away at future water and electricity costs for the 14,000 buildings in the sprawling system.
Since passage in 2007 of the Green LAUSD resolution, the district has been working to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and its energy and water use by 10% from 2007 levels by 2013. It also will install 50 megawatts of solar photovoltaic arrays, a move that could save the district more than $20 million annually on an electricity bill that normally costs $85 million.
In March, hundreds of decades-old buses will be upgraded to less-polluting, more energy-efficient propane models. Eight of a planned 250 schools will have solar power installations. Still others will be outfitted with "smart" irrigation systems to reduce the millions of gallons of imported water the district guzzles each day, more than half of which is used for outdoor watering.
"Our mission is to be the greenest school district in the country," said L.A. Board of Education President Monica Garcia, one of three board members who presented the Green LAUSD resolution in late 2007 to outline specific goals for water and energy conservation. "It's good for the students, good for the planet, good for the neighborhoods."
Most of the changes have been funded with voter-approved state bond measures, utility incentives and grants from agencies including the South Coast Air Quality Management District, Southern California Edison and the L.A. Department of Water and Power. An additional $120 million in federal Clean Renewable Energy Bonds may also be available to LAUSD to help it go solar.
"If we can demonstrate that it's possible to be green in a cost-effective manner in a school district as large as L.A., it can be done almost anywhere," said Randy Britt, director of sustainability initiatives for LAUSD. "All this is part of an investment plan that will help build assets that will then be able to generate savings in the general fund."
Under a program unveiled for this school year, a portion of water and energy savings are being returned to schools that institute conservation measures, such as fixing leaky faucets or turning off lights in empty rooms.
The 44 campuses the district plans to build by 2013 will be designed in compliance with the standards of the Collaborative for High Performance Schools, which sets water- and energy-efficiency standards and encourages better classroom acoustics and air quality, mold prevention and natural lighting.
"People think of the whole green issue as focusing on energy, but it's actually only one-fifth energy. It's also focused on air quality, land use and human comfort," said Vivian Loftness, professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and co-chair of a 2008 National Research Council report on green schools. "There's a much broader set of issues."
The report found that many green building practices also aided learning.
For instance, insulated walls and double-pane windows also reduce noise pollution that affects students. Increasing the amount of natural light in classrooms also triggers melatonin production that leads to healthy sleep cycles and makes textbooks and other materials more colorful and compelling to students, Loftness said. Using paints without volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, reduces respiratory problems such as asthma, the No. 1 cause of absenteeism in schools.
The combination of green architectural practices and improved learning and teaching opportunities led to Project Frog, a San Francisco firm that designs and manufactures zero-energy classrooms and portable trailers, such as the one at an LAUSD charter school opening this fall.
In addition to featuring recycled denim insulation, low- and no-VOC interiors and a tall, pitched roof allowing so much natural light that overhead lighting may not be necessary, the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in San Fernando will be used as a training center to prepare high school students for careers in California's budding green economy.
Jay Gonzales, an advisor in LAUSD's Office of Curriculum and Instruction, is working to infuse core math, science, language arts and social studies curricula with hands-on learning opportunities resulting from the district's sustainability initiatives. "My mantra is, 'Use what you have in the house,' " Gonzales said.
This spring, Gonzales is piloting a project that will get students involved in mapping out more water-efficient irrigation systems at their schools.
"LAUSD's mandate is to educate, so everything we do should somehow be connected," said Gonzales.
"Kids like to do things," Gonzales added. "If we give them all this knowledge and we don't give them an opportunity to use the knowledge to see how it works in practice, we're short-circuiting something that's naturally going for us with children, and that is their innate curiosity."
Source: Los Angeles Times
Tags: Green Schools Education Policy
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