Nation’s Public School Personnel Embroiled in Cheating Scandals

The presence of religion, and more specifically, prayer, in public schools has long been a hot-button topic in the United States. Religious parents maintain that their child has the right to pray and engage in other religious activities while at public school. Meanwhile, parents on the other side of the issue argue that their children should not be subjected to state-sponsored religious activities. Numerous court battles have more clearly defined the role religion can play in public schools, however, the debate regarding the nature and extent of religious practices at school continues.

Religion in Schools: A Brief Overview

In the late 1950s, the Board of Regents of New York’s public schools system composed a nondenominational prayer for students to recite at the beginning of the school day. The prayer was strictly voluntary. A group of parents, including Steven Engel, took exception to the practice and filed suit against the Board. After state courts sided with the Board, thus upholding the school’s right to hold the voluntary morning prayer, Engel appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In 1962 the Court handed down their decision in the landmark case, Engel v. Vitale, in which they declared the practice of school-sponsored prayer unconstitutional.

This video deals with the question of whether or not prayer in school is legal.

In the majority opinion, the justices argued that neither the voluntary nature nor the nondenominational nature of

Everything is bigger in Texas, including the educational system. No state has experienced more growth in the number of K-12 students over the last decade than Texas. Although the majority of the growth is among the Hispanic student population, all ethnic groups except Caucasians experienced both numerical and percentage increases in enrollment during the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years. These increases in minority enrollment and decreases in white enrollment continue a trend that dates back to the 1980s.

Enrollment Reflects Increasing Diversity

According to the Texas Education Agency, over the last decade, the state’s public school system has added over 820,000 students, which reflects a 19 percent increase in total enrollment. When viewed longitudinally, enrollment growth in Texas is even more pronounced: Since the 1987-1988 school year, enrollment has increased by a whopping 1.85 million students, representing a growth of over 57 percent.

In the 2012-2013 academic year, Texas public school students were:

• 51.3 percent Hispanic;
• 30 percent white;
• 12.7 percent African-American;
• 3.6 percent Asian, and
• 1.8 percent multi-racial.

These numbers are representative of the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of students enrolling in Texas public schools. The Hispanic student population surpassed the 50 percent mark in 2011 and is the fastest-growing segment of Texas’ student population. Conversely, white enrollment, which has been decreasing for years, is projected to continue declining for the next several decades. In 2000, over 41 percent of Texas students were white, but that number now stands at just over 31 percent. By 2050, experts

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Yet, 60 years later, public schools across the nation continue to be highly segregated based on race and socioeconomic status. Curiously, America’s most segregated schools are not in the Deep South but in New York, a state that has expansive ethnic, cultural, social, and economic diversity. Perhaps even more surprising, New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the world, also has one of the most segregated school districts in the country.

Segregation by the Numbers

According to a report by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, school segregation in New York is widespread. It occurs in metropolitan New York City, rural areas, and urban locales upstate. However, as the nation’s largest public school system with 1.1 million students, the New York City Public Schools greatly influenced the depth and breadth of the segregation problem. And a significant problem it is. Although the number of Asian and Latino students has dramatically increased since the late 1980s, exposure of these groups to white students has decreased. In fact, of New York City’s 32 school districts, 19 had less than 10 percent white enrollment as recently as 2010. Some of New York City’s schools, particularly charter and magnet schools, are identified by the authors of the report as being so segregated that they are classified as “apartheid schools.”

Compounding the problem

The Common Core State Standards began, in part, as the brainchild of Janet Napolitano, former governor of Arizona. As the chairperson of the National Governors Association in 2006-2007, Napolitano created a task force on education that released a report calling for standardized benchmarks in education. That report eventually formed the basis of the Common Core State Standards, which thus far have been adopted by 45 states, Washington, D.C., four U.S. territories and the edu8cational branch of the Department of Defense.

This video offers a guide to the Common Core State Standards.

Today, the Common Core is a set of high-quality, rigorous standards that outline what children should learn, know and be able to do at each grade level in the areas of math and language arts. The standards seek to address the variability between state-level educational standards that have for years produced high school graduates with widely ranging academic abilities.

Benefits of Common Core

The Common Core Standards are both relevant and rigorous. Students are engaged in activities that build higher-ordered analytical skills, critical thinking skills, and problem-solving skills that are necessary for success in today’s world. In that regard, the standards are not focused solely on the acquisition of knowledge, but the application of that knowledge as well. Additionally, in states where the standards have been adopted, students receive comparable instruction no matter who their teacher is or what school