2 ∙ News
February 23, 2012
The ROCK
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W rld in brief
Chinese Vice President tours US, builds relations
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ast Friday was the final day of Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s five-day tour of the United States. The tour aimed to create a better understanding between the two nations. China’s current president, Hu Jintao, announced his retirement for later this year, making Xi the heir apparent to the presidency. The meetings between Chinese and American heads of state went without any significant developments as expected, with neither country backing down on key issues including trade deficits and devalued Chinese exports. Xi made a stop for tea in Iowa after touring the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and followed up with a visit to the Port of Los Angeles where he watched a basketball game. Both visits were mostly to foster better relations between the two nations. Protesters decrying China’s poor human rights record, particularly in Tibet, followed the tour across America closely. Xi defended his country’s record on human rights, saying China had ‘’made tremendous and well-recognized achievements in the field’’ in the last 30 years, but conceded there was still room for improvement. Xi is scheduled to visit Ireland and Turkey within the next two months.
photo used with permission from AP
Eurozone approves new bailout for Greece’s debt
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ollowing more than 13 hours of talks, eurozone finance ministers reached an agreement Tuesday morning to approve a new bailout of 130 billion euros, or $172 billion, to save Greece from its imminent default. The bailout is the second in two years and faces many of the same criticisms as the first in 2010. Many consider the two to be unrealistic methods of solving Greece’s $265 billion debt, take away focus from more serious, underlying issues. However the biggest problem Greece may face is its shrinking economy. Extreme reductions in the nation’s operating budget, slashed minimum wages and harsh public-sector job losses all add to the struggle of the nation’s economy. Without economic growth, Greece will not be able to pull itself out of the red. In response to the Greek financial crisis, the eurozone is set to introduce a new permanent fund called the European Stability Mechanism of 500 billion euros, or $660 billion, in June. The fund would provide a way to handle future crises more swiftly. The bailout could possibly be a turning point in the European debt crisis, which has questions about the euro’s viability as well. Some hurdles still remain though. All 17 eurozone countries must still approve the bailout’s terms, but reports leaked from the International Monetary Fund show the bailout may be enough to stave off another crisis until 2020. sources: www.time.com, www.nytimes.com
–Sami Pathan
photo by Muhammad Al-Rawi
Creating discussion: Seniors Rick Flinn and Syed Ejaz discuss plans for an honor court. The court would aim to give students a voice in administrative decisions in areas like punishment.
Honor court looks to give students voice New group proposes system to check administrative decisions Kirsten Buchanan
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nstead of having administrators hand down punishments alone, seniors Syed Ejaz and Rick Flinn spent six months researching ways for students to have a say in disciplinary actions. With the help of the debate team, Flinn and Ejaz plan to pitch the idea of a studentrun judicial system, called an honor court, to administrators sometime in the future, although they have not set a specific date. Their vision is to have a group of student judges preside over student disciplinary cases. This panel would assist in giving punishments, except in extreme or sensitive cases. “Basically the whole purpose of this is to both provide students with education about the whole legal system … and eventually give them experience to people who want to go into professions such as law or perhaps being a judge or similar law authorities,” Flinn said. “Basically we’re just going to ask
administrators to listen to the majority decision in every case that the [student] judges decide.” One major step in setting up an honor court at RBHS is having administrators on board, Flinn said. Many high schools across the country have student Supreme Court systems; administrator Tim Wright enjoyed a similar policy at a former school. “Typically you don’t see [student court systems] in a public high school but I’ve also been involved in a situation where I was teaching in a private school … and we had a student review board kind of. It sounds like this honor court,” Wright said. “If there was a case of expulsion, there was a panel made up of the dean of students, assistant principal, a student representative that was elected by the student body and then a faculty representative ... and basically those individuals would hear the circumstances behind the code of conduct violation and make a recommendation [for punishment].” However, because of privacy restrictions,
Immigration could trouble Missouri school districts story continued from page 1 “Every program costs money,” White said. “It is imperative, however, that [ELL] children receive education just like the other kids in the school.” Kraus said the ELL portion of the bill was wellintentioned and “strictly for legal purposes.” He does not wish for any programs to be cut. Rather, he wants the federal government to reimburse the state. The bill “puts the district in a very difficult situation,” said Michelle Baumstark, Community Relation Coordinator of Columbia Public Schools. “We are not here to be immigration [services]. … We’re here to educate the children that come to us from the public.” The bill also requires all immigrants to prove their citizenship at any lawful stop, detention or arrest if the officer has “reasonable suspicion” of their citizenship and charged with a class C misdemeanor. Guzman and other immigration activists met with local Sen. Kurt Schaffer at a public meeting to explain why SB590 is detrimental to the community. Schaffer believes illegal immigration in Missouri is a nonissue and doubts the bill’s ability to pass. Guzman’s group hopes Schaffer’s prediction will be right but is not convinced. She worries the educational future of immigrants in Missouri is endangered, for both ELL students and the student’s whose parents are illegally residing in America. “If a parent is illegal, they will get scared of deportation and won’t send their kids to school … and if they cut the program where kids learn English they won’t be able to have a good life here,” Guzman said. It “just interrupts the kid’s education. It isn’t the school’s place to judge which kids they will teach. … Public school is not the immigration department. It’s a place of learning.”
Wright believes an honor court is more suited for a private school. He said the law prevents administrators from talking about specific punishments of one student with another, so the honor court would have to focus on generalities instead. Another difficulty Ejaz and Flinn anticipate is the process in which judges will be appointed. Flinn said he wants to see an application process similar to a college application where a student must prove to be an objective judge. “We’re probably not just going to leave it up to a popularity contest because obviously there is a potential for people [to be elected] because they’re popular and then let their friends off. That’s exactly what we don’t want to see,” Flinn said. “For now we don’t know essentially how the election process is going to work or who’s going to have input on it. We do however know that the administration is going to have a huge part in selecting these people and that they will have to prove their objectivity.”
Tenure decision still in flux story continued from page 1 Tenure “exists to protect academic freedom in the classroom,” social studies teacher Bill Priest said, who has been teaching at RBHS for 26 out of his 32 total years in the educational field. He cited an experience teaching in southeastern Missouri where a superintendent refused to give teachers tenure in order to keep them “at his mercy.” Situations like these where teachers are pressured to make “politically wise” decisions rather than “academically sound” ones would be more common without tenure, he said. But social studies teacher Austin Reed disagrees, arguing the risk of having this sort of administrator to be “miniscule” compared to the harm tenure does by protecting bad teachers. “If you’re a good teacher, you’re going to be fine in a school with or without tenure,” Reed said. “But [tenure] just makes it more difficult, causes more headaches, to fire bad teachers. If we really want to solve education, it
has to start with difficult issues, which involves firing bad teachers.” Maus said at CPS, removing a tenured teacher is a longer process because it requires administration to work with the teacher towards improvement. If these steps failed, the administration must document the problem and the steps they took to help the teacher improve, he said. While the steps to fire an incompetent teacher could become easier without tenure, Reed and Priest agreed RBHS teachers would approach their jobs the same way, an idea supported by 2009 research from Cornell that said tenure had little effect on teacher performance around the nation. “This school is a rarity in education. We’ve always understood that we’re here to focus on teaching and learning,” Priest said. But “it would be a very unfortunate message to people thinking about going into education, since not everyone’s going to teach at Rock Bridge High School or in Columbia Public Schools.”
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If you’re a good teacher, you’re going to be fine in a school with or without tenure...” Austin Reed social studies