E Wayne Ross

TEACHERS CAN SAY NO TO STUDENT BATHROOM BREAKS
Two attempts this spring to limit students’ bathroom breaks have led to shame and controversy, reports G. Jeffrey MacDonald in USA TODAY.

In late April, a sixth-grader in Ohio wet his pants during a standardized test after a teacher refused to let him use the bathroom. In early May, a California eighth-grader said he urinated into a Gatorade bottle in a classroom corner because his teacher had refused to dismiss him. Such cases, though perhaps extreme, highlight a daily challenge for teachers. They must balance classroom control with a duty to accommodate the varied and hard-to-predict biological needs of their students. In seeking that balance, should they ever say no when a student asks permission to use the bathroom? That’s a matter of debate among teachers, administrators and medical professionals.

“Students make requests frequently to use the restroom when they really have intentions to do other things,” says Peter Reed, associate director of professional development services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “The real key is for every student to expect, when he or she is in (a teacher’s) class, that the full amount of time needs to be devoted to the learning activities for that day. You don’t have time for anything else.” But some urologists worry about the consequences of waiting too long between trips to the bathroom. ”

Responding to your body’s need to urinate or defecate is a basic human right, or even one step below that, it’s a basic animal right,” Dr. Christopher Cooper says. “I don’t think we would (restrict) animals, yet we do restrict the kids.” Complicating matters is the reality that some students avoid bathrooms because they’re dirty, smelly havens for bullies.

Via the PEN Newsletter: WHITE SUPREMACY IS NOT COLOR BLIND

A Supreme Court ruling this summer on voluntary integration plans of Louisville and Seattle schools could sound the death knell for Brown v. Board of Education, warn the editors of Rethinking Schools in their spring issue. If the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to uphold voluntary integration plans in these two cities, it would wipe out the last vestiges of the 1954 Brown decision still in place. Over the years, the court has so chipped away at Brown that it is a mere shell of a decision, honored in speeches every Martin Luther King Jr. holiday but ignored in practice 365 days of the year. While conservatives argue that race-conscious policies are no longer necessary because the United States is becoming a multiracial, multiethnic society, Theodore Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund points out that “This country has always been a multiracial, multiethnic society. The problem has never been mere race consciousness. It has been white supremacy.” The editors challenge teachers to find new ways to struggle against our increasingly resegregated schools.

I’ve recently podcast three episodes of Michael Baker’s “Room 101”, including an interview with Jon Albert and Matt O’Neill, the Emmy award winning producers/directors of the HBO documentary Baghdad ER and a two-part interview of Noam Chomsky in which he discusses the contradictions of education and the media as well as threats to the future of human survival.

“Room 101” podcast are available on my web site as well as directly from iTunes.

In an outrageous attack on the academic freedom of a progressive high school teacher, Michael Baker, a long-time social studies teacher at Lincoln (Nebraska) East High, was fired from his job earlier this month for showing the Emmy award winning documentary Baghdad ER.

Baker is one of fewer than 50 teachers in the state of Nebraska with National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification. NBPTS certification is voluntary and an indication that Baker has meet the highest level of the teacher profession in the US.

Baker cannot talk freely about what happened because he reached an agreement with the school district. Part of that agreement prohibits him from saying anything “disparaging” about it, he says.

Baker hosts the radio program “Room 101,” an interview/call-in show that focuses on progressive education issues. Podcasts of “Room 101” are available here. He recently interviewed the producers and directors Baghdad ER on the show.

Baker expects to continue teaching at Southeast Community College and at the University of Nebraska, where he teaches a course on the history of American public education.

Read the Lincoln Journal Star story on Baker’s forced retirement here.

Read Matthew Rothschild’s (editor of The Progressive magazine) piece on about the firing on CommonDreams.org.