DETROIT (AP) — High school economics teacher Jay McDowell says he didn’t like where the discussion was going after a student told his classmates he didn’t “accept gays,” so McDowell kicked the boy out of class for a day. In return, the teacher was kicked out of Howell High School in Michigan for a day — suspended without pay for violating the student’s free speech rights. The incident has sparked intense debate in Howell, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) northwest of Detroit, over defending civil rights without trampling the U.S. constitution’s right to free speech. It’s gained far wider attention since a local newspaper released video of a 14-year-old gay student from another city defending McDowell at a Howell school board meeting. On Oct. 20, McDowell told a student in his classroom to remove a belt buckle with the Confederate flag, the symbol of the southern confederacy that seceded from the United States over slavery, kicking off the Civil War in the 1860s. She complied, but it prompted a question from a boy about how the flag differs from the rainbow flag, a symbol of pride for the gay community. “I explained the difference between the flags, and he said, ‘I don’t accept gays,’” said McDowell, 42, who was wearing a shirt with an anti-gay bullying message. McDowell said he told the student he couldn’t say that in class. “And he said, ‘Why? I don’t accept gays. It’s against my religion.’ I reiterated that it’s not appropriate to say something like that in class,” McDowell said Monday. McDowell said he sent the boy out of the room for a one-day class suspension. Another boy asked if he also could leave because he also didn’t accept gays. “The classroom discussion was heading in a direction I didn’t want it to head,” McDowell said. McDowell soon received a reprimand letter from the district that said his actions violated the students’ free speech rights as well as school policy. It also said he “purposefully initiated a controversial issue” by wearing the T-shirt featuring the anti-gay bullying message. “I thought it was a really great, teachable moment,” McDowell said of his decision to remove the student from class. Graeme Taylor is among those who agree. The 14-year-old, who does not go to Howell schools, says he is gay and attended a recent school board meeting to praise a teacher who “finally stood up and said something.” “I’ve been in classrooms where children have said the worst things,” the boy told the board. “The kinds of things that drove me to a suicide attempt when I was 9 years old.” Video of Graeme’s comments had been viewed on YouTube more than 13,000 times as of Monday evening, when Howell schools held a community diversity forum that district spokeswoman Kim Root said was meant to be a step forward. “We can learn some things from this episode,” she said, adding the district hoped to receive recommendations from the public to improve “the tolerance of the district and enhance diversity efforts we already have in place.” Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan’s LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) Legal Project, credits McDowell for trying to create a “welcoming environment for all students.” But Kaplan said the “teachable moment” would have come if the students stayed in the classroom. “We believe, based on those statements — as offensive and upsetting as they were — they were protected speech,” Kaplan said. “The only way we’re going to create a better environment in schools is to start talking about this.” Kaplan said Howell schools have expressed interest in accepting the ACLU ‘s offer to provide in-person training to students, faculty and staff. He said such training could provide a better understanding of what can be said and done. McDowell has filed a complaint against the district over the discipline he received, but said Monday he primarily wants to “force the school to look at itself.” “I want to force adults to look at what situation we’ve created,” he said. “I would really like us to be more aggressive in our policing of harassing and bullying.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NEW YORK — Do public school teachers get tenure just by breathing? It’s a claim made by a charter school leader in the education documentary Waiting for Superman , which places much of the blame for bad schools nationwide on union rules that protect incompetent teachers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on national television last week that he would overhaul the way city teachers are granted tenure, linking their advancement to improving student test scores. “Just as we are raising the bar for our students through higher standards, we must also raise the bar for our teachers and principals — and we are,” Bloomberg said. But city teachers say that if bad teachers have won tenure protection it’s the fault of the administrators who gave it to them. “We don’t make that decision. Whoever the principal is makes that decision,” said LezAnne Edmond, a Manhattan high school teacher with 15 years of experience. Teacher tenure has its roots in academic tenure, which was intended to protect academic freedom; once granted, professors are rarely fired. Tenure rules for K-12 teachers vary from state to state, with some operating more like universities and others that offer no stronger protection than job security laws that prevent people from being fired without cause. States including California, Florida and Colorado have passed or proposed legislation to change tenure laws in hopes of securing education funding under President Barack Obama ‘s ” Race to the Top ” program. New York City teachers can win tenure after three years. Once they are granted tenure they cannot be fired without an administrative hearing. What the teachers union calls due process, Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein call a system that has protected incompetence. The issue gained prominence with the Sept. 24 release of “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” opening to wider release on Friday. The documentary from ” An Inconvenient Truth ” director Davis Guggenheim suggests that kids receive a superior education in charter schools without unions. NBC ‘s Sept. 27-28 education summit covered much of the same ground. Bloomberg used a 15-minute MSNBC segment to announce a tenure crackdown. “We’ll do more to support teachers and reward great teaching, and that includes ending tenure as we know it,” he said. Bloomberg said principals must start denying tenure unless their students have made two years of progress on state tests. Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers , responded that principals can already deny tenure “for any reason” and that teachers “would welcome an objective tenure-granting process based on agreed-upon standards.” But the union has opposed using state test scores — the city’s preferred benchmark — to measure teacher performance. City Department of Education spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said the union is being disingenuous. “On one hand, they seem to be blaming principals for too many teachers getting tenure,” she said in an e-mail. “On the other hand, they don’t want principals to take into account student performance when making tenure decisions.” This year, 3.7% of teachers who reached the end of their three-year probationary period were denied tenure, up from 2.3% the year before. Another 7.2% saw their probation extended by a year. Ernest Logan, president of the union representing New York City principals, said his members take student achievement into account. “I don’t think people are just granting people tenure because they’ve been there three years,” Logan said. Veteran city teachers say they need tenure for job security and to protect the First Amendment rights it was designed to safeguard. “I need tenure to speak out,” said Arthur Goldstein, a union chapter leader at Francis Lewis High School in Queens. Goldstein said he has complained publicly about overcrowding and other issues. “I’m standing up for the kids of Francis Lewis High School and I absolutely need tenure,” he said. Katharine Dawson, who retired last summer after 12 years as a city schoolteacher, said tenure “protects you from favoritism, it protects you from all kinds of things.” Asked about tenure protecting bad teachers, she said, “Maybe there’s two bad teachers per school. Is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater?” One teacher whom Bloomberg would like to throw out is Melissa Petro, whose essay about using Craigslist to sell herself as a prostitute was published in the Huffington Post on Sept. 7, the same day she was awarded tenure by the principal of her Bronx elementary school. Bloomberg demanded that Petro be pulled from the classroom, but she has tenure and cannot be fired without due process. She has been assigned to an office job pending an investigation. A phone number for Petro could not be found. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NEW YORK (AP) — The City University of New York and IBM will open a unique school that merges high school with two years of college, allowing students to earn an associate’s degree, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday in announcing a series of ambitious educational initiatives. Those students will be “first in line for a job at IBM,” Bloomberg said in his announcement. The mayor also renewed a proposal to do away with automatic teacher tenure and instead ensure it’s linked to classroom performance. He also said the city would work with the state to end “seat time” — requiring students to spend a certain number of hours in desks learning every subject — and would try to change a state law that requires schools to buy printed textbooks rather than use digital content. “That may be good for the business textbook industry but it’s really a bad deal for our students in this day and age,” Bloomberg said. The mayor also said the city will use a $36 million federal grant to enlist highly skilled teachers to work in low-performing schools and mentor fellow instructors. ” New York City is … laying the foundation to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start college or a career,” Bloomberg said. The mayor said the city wants to use a four-tier rating system to determine whether a teacher gets tenure, and said that beginning this year, only teachers rated “effective” or “highly effective” will be awarded lifetime job protection. Tenure would be awarded only if a teacher has made an impact on student achievement, he said. “Just as we are raising the bar for our students through higher standards, we must also raise the bar for our teaches and principals — and we are,” the mayor said. Bloomberg has proposed ending automatic teacher tenure in recent years. The state Legislature amended the law earlier this year to add student test scores and performance as criteria in evaluating teachers. Tenured teachers can be dismissed for incompetence or insubordination under the law but have due process rights. “If the mayor wants to change seniority he will need to talk to the Legislature,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers , the city teachers’ union. Mulgrew said that tenure decisions are arbitrary. “Most teachers would welcome an objective tenure-granting process based on agreed-upon standards,” he said. The partnership with IBM for a high school-college hybrid will build on work that the company is already doing in community colleges, said Stan Litow, vice president of corporate affairs for IBM. “We have every confidence that large numbers of those kids would be able to assume entry-level jobs at IBM and other IT companies,” Litow said. Earlier Monday, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker said about $40 million has been raised so far to match the $100 million donation to the city’s school system from Facebook ‘s founder Mark Zuckerberg . Booker appeared in Manhattan with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Zuckerberg at NBC News’ “Education Nation” Summit. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON — Students enrolled this semester in “Education in Black America” at Howard University got their reward Thursday morning for slogging to campus instead of sleeping in: About 10 minutes into class, singer-songwriter John Legend strode in. No introduction needed. “Surprise, surprise,” Legend said, as cell phones came out and cameras flashed. “I’m glad you didn’t skip class today.” Legend, 31, was guest professor as part of an mtvU program called Stand In , in which big names such as Bill Gates and Madonna show up unannounced and teach a class on a subject they care about. For Legend, a Grammy Award winner who grew up in poverty, that subject is education reform — a key theme of the just-released Waiting for Superman documentary, for which he wrote a song. So it made sense to arrange with professor Greg Carr to appear in Carr’s class, which was discussing the education of ex-slaves when the knock at the door came. Equal access to quality education is “the civil rights issue of our time,” Legend told students. Noting that next week marks the 53rd anniversary of the day nine black students were escorted by federal troops into the all-white Little Rock Central High School , he said “minorities today are still fighting for access to quality schools.” He warned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” decried high dropout rates at schools in black and Latino neighborhoods, and, responding to one question, suggested that merit-based admission programs can perpetuate inequities. “(You can’t) break that cycle of poverty if you only educate the ones who have been best-educated already,” he said. “I think you can have a better education no matter who you are.” Carr called the session “a candid exchange between a group of black students and a performer with a global profile who also shares their experience.” Students said Legend’s appearance was a great way to start the day. “What he said is extremely key,” sophomore marketing major Stephen Baiyewu, 19, said after class. “John Legend is one of the most respected African-American R&B artists.” And here are two of many tweets that circulated throughout the morning: • @ATLsBishopCrazy day, MTVU in the classroom, John Legend teaching…cant ask for much more. •@johnlegend: Had a great time @ Howard. Thanks to Prof Carr and his students. Great discussion. And yes they were surprised.

PHOENIX — A promise kept is a precious gift. And then it becomes a responsibility. That transformation is happening this week at Grand Canyon University here for 15 incoming freshmen. They are at the school because 10 years ago a promise was made to them. VIDEO SERIES: Arizona Republic shows lives changed At the time, they were third-graders at Granada Elementary School in west Phoenix. Many were poor, and most of their families probably didn’t consider college an option. When university officials brought them and their parents together to promise the students that they could go to the college for free, none of them really understood what it meant. Now, it is the students’ time to fulfill that promise. A teacher gunned down “Sydney’s Kids” were named after Sydney Browning, a Phoenix native and a Grand Canyon graduate. On Sept. 15, 1999, she was sitting in Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth when a gunman walked in and started shooting. Browning was the first of seven to die. In life she was committed to educating the less fortunate. She taught at Success High School, a Fort Worth public school that brought former dropouts back to the classroom. Sydney’s Kids were chosen to honor her. Two days before the shooting, a group of students from Granada Elementary visited GCU to sing Happy Birthday for the school’s 50th anniversary. The students impressed GCU administrators who, the next year, made them a promise: If their grades and test scores were good enough to get in, they would go to the university free. Armando Rivera was one of those students. Now 18, he remembers the parents being more excited than the children. “Honestly,” he says, “at the time, I didn’t understand it.” On Thursday, freshmen Jessica Reyes, Cameron Stafford and Daron Beck chatted in Daron’s dorm room. Jessica, like Armando, plans to be a doctor and will major in biology. Daron will study business. Cameron is thinking of business or marketing. They are all aware that being one of Sydney’s Kids comes with responsibility. “It’s a special gift,” Cameron says. “Now, I have to fulfill it.” Some kids can’t be found On freshman registration and move-in day, faculty and school administrators helped freshmen move into their dorms. Among them were people who helped make the promise and keep it. Joyce Hatch is GCU vice president of financial aid. “I was here when they came and sang,” Hatch says. “I was here when the promise was made.” For a while, the promise seemed in doubt. In the early 2000s, GCU was in dire financial shape. It severed its ties with the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention. In 2004, a venture capital firm bought GCU and turned it into a for-profit institution. But GCU remained committed to Sydney’s Kids. Three years ago Jennifer Hatch, Joyce’s daughter and an admissions counselor, began looking for them. Of the 60 students offered the scholarship, 15 are taking advantage of it. One more will start next semester, and a 17th will enroll next year. Some of the other students hadn’t kept up their grades. The rest moved away or just fell through the cracks. GCU was unable to find some of the students. The promise is still open to them.

If community colleges were to find all the formerly enrolled students whose academic records qualify them for an associate degree and retroactively award them the credential, then the number of associate degrees awarded in the United States would increase by at least 12%. This compelling projection by the Institute for Higher Education Policy is one of the primary reasons why it is working with the Lumina Foundation for Education to roll out the three-year, $1.3 million Project Win-Win. This initiative will financially support 35 community colleges and four-year institutions in six states — Louisiana , Missouri, New York , Ohio , Virginia and Wisconsin — so they can track down and retroactively award qualified students associate degrees who, for whatever reason, never received one. It also will help these institutions identify students who have recently dropped out who are “academically short” of an associate degree by nine credits or fewer and re-enroll them to finish a degree. ON THE WEB: Movement, but miles to go MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Why reverse transfer? “Project Win-Win has the potential to make a considerable down payment on increased degree completion goals set by state governors and the Obama Administration,” said Michelle Asha Cooper, IHEP president, in a statement. Last year, nine of the project’s institutions ran a pilot of this program during a seven-month period; they awarded nearly 600 associate degrees and identified almost 1,600 students who were just shy of earning one. The pilot, however, revealed a number of difficulties that institutions face when attempting to retroactively award degrees. “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Stephanie Tarver, dean of enrollment management at McNeese State University, which awards associate degrees as well and was part of the pilot program. “We were kind of bumbling around in the dark a bit. When you pull data, it doesn’t always match up like you thought it would. You have to have a lot of staff to dedicate to a project like this to keep it going.” Then, even when candidates for degrees and those just shy of them were identified, reaching them proved just as challenging. “At that point, we don’t have as much control as we do in the other areas because these students have been out for a while,” Tarver said. “We didn’t know if the contact information we had for them was accurate. We didn’t know how to get accurate information without spending lots of money to find it. Also, when we finally did make contact, some of the students were leery of us. ‘You’re calling me out of the blue and saying I’m qualified for a degree and want to offer it to me? What’s the catch?’ ” Eventually, though, McNeese awarded about 15 associate degrees, out of approximately 150 former students who met degree requirements. Officials also tracked down about 300 students who were just short of graduation and are in the process of helping those who wish to complete find a way to do so. “A lot of the students who dropped out of school didn’t realize just how close they were to finishing,” Tarver said. “The success stories we’ve had are truly heartwarming, especially for those who didn’t realize they were qualified for a degree. We made an immediate impact on their lives. Rarely have I felt we’ve impacted students as we did through this project.” Though many of the institutions participating in the project had never before made efforts to retroactively award degrees, a few of them have been doing it for a while and have found ways to integrate this into regular degree audits for current students. Anna Flack, registrar at Suffolk County Community College, in New York, noted that her institution has made it a point to search for these “lost graduates” at least once every year for the past decade. “We did this on a small scale,” Flack said. “It was really part of office procedure. {hellip} We made it part of the daily responsibilities of the degree audit staff.” With students who are just a few credits short of earning an associate degree, Flack said, the college has adopted a no-pressure approach in approaching them. “We’ve just sent letters to students, saying that can finish if they’d like to,” Flack said. ” ‘Here are the different ways you can reach that degree.’ There’s no convincing, no strong-arming, no sales pitch. ‘We just see this, and we’d like you to know about it.’ ” Those pushing the project at the national level argue that, despite some of the challenges in the degree audit process, this is a relatively easy way to boost graduation rates around the country. “This is an issue that hasn’t been raised,” said Cliff Adelman, senior associate at IHEP. “We’re saying to these institutions, ‘Hey, guys, you haven’t paid attention to people based on your criteria who’ve crossed the degree threshold. You’ve been asleep at the wheel.’ There’s all this talk about awarding these degrees, but they’re just making a lot of noise. This is low-hanging fruit.”

ATLANTA — The oppressed conservative student is a regular theme in the right’s critique of higher education. You know the stories — mocked for displaying the American flag or a Ronald Reagan bust, shouted down for suggesting that that Iraq war is just, always in fear of earning a low grade for criticizing affirmative action or some other widely held belief among the left-leaning campus majority. Research presented here Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association affirmed that many conservative students feel that way, but also that many do not — and that the latter group in fact thrive on the very campuses that tend to be portrayed as hostile to them. ON THE WEB: New view of faculty liberalism MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: The liberal (and moderating) professoriate The difference, the research suggests, isn’t the relative size of the conservative minority or the commitment level of the more liberal majority. Rather, campus characteristics — many of them most commonly associated with small liberal arts colleges, and harder to pull off at large universities — may be the determining factor. In fact, one suggestion from the research that might distress fiscal conservatives is that low student-faculty ratios may contribute far more to the comfort of conservative students than would efforts to promote ideological “balance” on a syllabus or in a department. The study presented here was conducted by Amy J. Binder, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, and Kate Wood, a graduate student there. They did in-depth interviews with conservative students at two colleges that they named only in general terms — “Eastern elite,” a small private institution, and “Western public,” a large university. Both are institutions that have been identified by conservative critics as being particularly left-leaning. At both institutions, they sought out as interview subjects the students who are members of conservative groups or who are visibly conservative, and also “in the closet” conservatives — by asking the conservative student leaders for the names of those who had indicated their agreement but who were not involved in public campus discourse. The conservative students at Eastern elite were under no illusions that they were anything but an extreme minority — and the institution’s reputation is such that some were discouraged by friends back home from even enrolling. But almost uniformly, they were happy. They identified their professors as being liberal, but admired them nonetheless. In fact, as Wood noted here, “they viewed the experience of being in the minority as a positive one” in teaching them to examine and defend their beliefs, and “almost every single one said that they received a better education” by being in the extreme minority, a finding “in contrast to the conservative critique.” Further, she said, “not a single one of them said that they regretted not going to a more conservative school.” The students at Eastern elite were clearly aware of the conservative critique and many times answered questions about possible bias by saying that they had heard about that elsewhere but had never experienced it themselves. At Western public, in contrast, many conservative students did feel that they were the victims of bias in interactions with students and faculty members. The research focuses on student perceptions, not the reality of what went on in the classrooms. So Wood said it wasn’t clear whether the bias actually took place, but she said that the researchers wanted to see why it was that some students perceived fairness and challenge, while others felt a bit abused. So what were the qualities that made some conservatives feel so contented, even in their minority status? They were many of the same qualities that elite liberal arts college advocates talk about. “They were proud of their institution. They saw their peers — liberals and conservatives — as future leaders of the country,” and that made the conservatives want to be part of the community and part of the conversation. They also felt that they had very close relationships with faculty members with whom they disagreed on politics. “They viewed their faculty members as professionals, as experts in their fields, as people who would never be biased” based on a student’s politics, Wood said. One key measure of the extent to which conservative students felt comfortable at the college, she said, was that the most popular majors for conservative students were identical to those for liberal students (and all students). There were a small number of courses that conservative students tended to avoid, Wood said, citing “critical gender studies” as one. She also noted that the college has policies that make it easy for students to change schedules at the beginning of the semester, and that this seemed to relieve any students who might be worried about a professor’s politics. It’s not that they left classes they signed up for, but the knowledge that they could try something and change their minds was reassuring, she said. Much of this related to “very small class size” and to a sense that all students and faculty members were part of a common community, and wanted to disagree with one another respectfully. As a result, Wood said, while the conservative students generally said that they didn’t hold back their views, they didn’t describe going to class looking for a fight — and they talked about wanting to disagree with professors in respectful ways, since they felt treated with respect. In contrast, she said, at Western public, with larger classes and much less faculty-student interaction on an individual basis, students were more likely to say that they were the victims of bias — but also that they didn’t really know the faculty members. And at Western, students talked about “trying to get in fights” with professors in class, of “trying to catch their professors in the act of liberal indoctrination.” Another difference Wood noted relates to the role of faculty members on both campuses who were in the conservative minority. In the close-knit environment of Eastern elite, these faculty members were visible on campus, taking part in the debates, organizing lectures and so forth. At Western public, she said, there was a similar cohort of right-leaning faculty members, but they were far less active. The implication of the findings, Wood said, was that colleges of all sizes should focus on the elements of community and civility that seem to make it possible for disagreement at Eastern elite to be welcome in ways that don’t belittle those in the ideological minority. She noted that some elements present at Eastern elite — such as its prestige and traditions — aren’t things that colleges can up and create. “But it’s clear that access to faculty members makes a huge difference, and that anything that creates smaller pools of students” — so that people know one another — has a real impact. Sarah S. Willie-LeBreton, associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, was the respondent to the paper, which she praised. She noted that much of the public discussion about conservative students focuses on incidents that take place at certain campuses or claims made by various groups. “It’s nice that somebody is finally asking the students themselves” in a comprehensive way, she said. For faculty members, the research is an appropriate challenge, Willie-LeBreton said, to “celebrate our conservative students’ sense of minority status and to think about what can be learned from that.” Willie-LeBreton said that Eastern elite sounded like it shared many values with Swarthmore, and that she thought that “taking all students seriously” was a big part of a faculty member’s job. But she said that she worried that in much of higher education today, “it’s hard for professors” to engage with students “when faculty members have been marginalized” through larger class sizes that hinder close student interaction.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The D.C. Public Schools are firing 241 teachers and warning more than 700 other employees that they could be fired in the next year if their performance doesn’t improve. The firings announced Friday total 302 school system employees, including the 241 teachers. They come largely as a result of the first year of a new teacher evaluation system, though 76 teachers were fired for problems with their licenses. The evaluation is based largely on five classroom observations of teachers and their students’ standardized test scores. Those found “ineffective” on a four-tier system were fired. Washington Teachers’ Union President George Parker says the union will challenge the firings for performance. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Slow readers of the world, uuuuuuuu…niiiiite! At a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more meaning and pleasure out of the written word. Thomas Newkirk isn’t the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called “slow reading” movement, but he argues it’s becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible. “You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute,” he said. “That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good.” Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly “taste” the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they’ve become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books. READING: Proficiency at 4th grade linked to nation’s success COLLEGE: One-third need remedial reading, math “One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he’d come to a word and it would almost act like a hyper link. It would just send his mind off to some other thing,” Newkirk said. “I think they recognize they’re missing out on something.” The idea is not to read everything as slowly as possible, however. As with the slow food movement, the goal is a closer connection between readers and their information, said John Miedema, whose 2009 book “Slow Reading” explores the movement. “It’s not just about students reading as slowly as possible,” he said. “To me, slow reading is about bringing more of the person to bear on the book.” Miedema, a technology specialist at IBM in Ottawa, Ontario, said little formal research has been done on slow reading, other than studies on physical conditions such as dyslexia. But he said the movement is gaining ground: the 2004 book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Changing the Cult of Speed sprang from author Carl Honore’s realization that his “rushaholism” had gotten out of hand when he considered buying a collection of “one-minute bedtime stories” for his children. In a 2007 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , the executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press describes a worldwide reading crisis and calls for a “revolution in reading.” “Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don’t even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words,” Lindsay Waters wrote. Though slow, or close reading, always has been emphasized at the college-level in literary criticism and other areas, it’s also popping up in elementary schools, Miedema said. Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher at Mast Way Elementary School in Durham, N.H., has her students memorize poems upward of 40 lines long and then perform them for their peers and parents. She does it more for the sense of pride her students feel but said the technique does transfer to other kinds of reading — the children remember how re-reading and memorizing their poems helped them understand tricky text. “Memorization is one of those lost things, it hasn’t been the ‘in’ thing for a while,” she said. “There’s a big focus on fluency. Some people think because you can read quickly … that’s a judge of what a great reader they are. I think fluency is important, but I think we can err too much on that side.” It’s all about balance, said Patti Flynn, an assistant principal in Nashua, N.H., and mother of a 10-year-old girl. Her school has offered, and her daughter has participated in, numerous reading challenges that reward students for reaching certain milestones — a pizza party for a class that reads 100 books, for example. Though such contests may appear to emphasize speed rather than reading for pleasure or comprehension, they also are good incentives for children who weren’t motivated to read, she said. The challenges have encouraged parents to make reading a priority at home, Flynn said. “The goal shouldn’t be to be whipping through a certain number of pages, the goal should be to make sure kids are gaining some conceptual understanding,” she said. Her daughter, Lily, said she considers herself a “medium-speed” reader and had to increase her speed to finish about 10 books for her classroom’s 100-book challenge. But she said she enjoyed the process and feels like she understood and remembers what she read. “It was fun,” she said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

LOS ANGELES — The class of eighth graders at a Los Angeles middle school tap their rulers and nod their heads to the rhythm of the rap video projected on a screen. It’s not Snoop Dogg or Jay-Z . It’s their math teacher, LaMar Queen, using rhyme to help them memorize seemingly complicated algebra and in the process improve their grades. “It gets stuck in your head,” says Cindy Martinez, a 14-year-old whose math grade went from a C-average to a B. Queen, 26, is now known at Los Angeles Academy as the rap teacher, but his fame has spread far beyond the 2,200-student school in this gritty neighborhood. He’s won a national award and shows teachers and parents how to use rap to reach children. “Math is a bad word in a lot of households,” he says. “But if we put it in a form that kids enjoy, they’ll learn.” Queen is doing what many veteran educators have done — using students’ music to connect with them. Where teachers once played the rock n’ roll tunes of “Schoolhouse Rocks” to explain everything from government to grammar, they now turn to rap to renew Shakespeare or geometry. “Rap is what the kids respond to,” Queen says. “They don’t have a problem memorizing the songs at all.” Queen’s math raps came about by chance. Two months after starting at LA Academy in 2007 — his first teaching job after graduating from college — he was stung when kids told him his class was boring. They told him he resembled singer Kanye West and challenged him to rap. Little did they know Queen has been rapping since the seventh grade. Back then, he’d throw together rhymes as he walked home from school in Carson, a city neighboring Los Angeles. His students’ challenge on his mind, Queen pushed aside work on his lesson plans and wrote a rap song ‘Slope Intercept.’ Word of his rapping soon reached the school’s main office. Eyebrows raised, Principal Maria Borges went to investigate, and came out smiling. “It engages the kids,” she says. “Kids seem to know all the rap songs, but they can’t seem to remember different math rules.” None of his raps are in the Top 40, but “Mean, Median, Mode and Range,” “Polynomials,” and “Quadratic Formulove Song” are chartbusters here. “Some kids who aren’t even in Mr. Queen’s class go around singing his songs,” says Kejon Closure, 13, who went from a C-average to an A. In the raps, Queen defines a math concept and works through sample problems step by step. He follows up with more traditional class work on the whiteboard, maintaining a fluid banter with his students. Queen also tries to inspire them. His lyrics exhort students “to be a math sensation,” “to get As on your papers,” and even “be respectful. Listen to your parents.” Sometimes the students appear in the videos as a reward for good grades and behavior. Queen says making learning fun is key for kids who often seem burdened with adult problems — there wasn’t enough food to go round at breakfast, they couldn’t sleep well in overcrowded homes or they have to serve as translators for Spanish-speaking parents in difficult circumstances. When they leave those troubles at home, they arrive at a school that’s more fortress than learning sanctuary. The campus is surrounded by a steel-bar fence and padlocked gate. Teachers conduct uniform checks to make sure students are not wearing local gang colors of red or blue. “I try to get them to leave their problems at the door,” Queen says. There was a point last year when he thought he might not be able to continue at LA Academy. He was laid off as an untenured teacher, but he returned to the school as a long-term substitute to continue to teach his students as he hoped to get his staff job back. In April, he won a national award for outstanding math achievement from Get Schooled, a pro-education initiative launched by media giant Viacom and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s also been honored by school district and county educators. He’s now hoping to make rap math a business and launched a website, MusicNotesOnline, with a colleague to market his rap CD and DVD, and expand the use of rap in education to other academic subjects. During a recent class, Queen dons dark shades, sets his laptop to play a driving hip-hop beat and starts rapping about solving equations as he grooves up and down the aisles. “Let’s talk about slope intercept. I don’t mind if you interject, Just don’t disrespect. I say, you have a question for me? What’s y equals mx + b?” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.