Schools can teach using mobile devices

On a recent morning, my eighth-grader grabbed her cellphone as she was leaving for school. In my house, this calls for an explanation. She told me in a rush: "We can use them in art class. We listen to music, and we look up images."

With that, she was gone.

This is a big change from two years ago, when her teacher summoned me to the school to personally retrieve my daughter's phone. He had confiscated it after she was caught with it a second time.

Cellphone bans in school are widespread. A friend told me about a deli that makes a good living holding cellphones for kids while they are in school, for $1 a day. Kids want their phones, and schools want them phone-free. At least, that's what the rule seemed to be until the other morning at my house.

A couple of days later, I received an email from a publication called Education Week, saying that it would be hosting an online chat with two school administrators who were deploying BYOD - bring your own device. It appears that my daughter's teacher is not alone in inviting technology into the classroom.

One of the first to try it was the Forsyth County School System in suburban Atlanta, which allows students to use their own Wi-Fi-capable devices, such as iPods, Kindles and iPads. Students use them to take notes, conduct research, produce videos and access online apps. Here in New York, my daughter is taking photos of an art project as it progresses.

It sounds chaotic - and potentially exclusionary for kids who don't have any D to BYO. That can lead to envy and, worse, unequal opportunities to learn. Each school district must judge those perils for itself. The Oak Hills district in Ohio works with a local vendor to provide low-cost refurbished devices for kids who don't have them.

With that caution in mind, BYOD seems like an amazing opportunity to reach kids where many are already - in front of a screen - and help them explore the promise and dangers of our digital age.

First, the dangers. Students could be accessing inappropriate content online. But this could happen outside of school as well. Forsyth has set up a Wi-Fi network that works like one in a coffee shop, with filtered Internet access.

Another danger: Students can use devices to look up test answers and commit other creative cheating. According to Education Week, the George C. Marshall High School in Fairfax County, Va., came up with color-coded zones, where different cellphone use is allowed. A green zone might be the cafeteria, which indicates general and open use. In blue zones, like classrooms, the devices are permitted for instruction only. In yellow zones - hallways and non-BYOD classes - devices must be silent and out of sight. And red zones mean devices are strictly prohibited; usually, these are test areas.

Might BYOD contribute to cyberbullying? That's possible. But, more optimistically, having the devices on students' desks might spur a classroom discussion of appropriate "digital citizenship." What are inbounds behaviors when you're online? What's polite? What's safe? What won't come back to bite you in 15 years when your employer-to-be performs a search on your name?

That's one promise of BYOD. But the greater good will probably come when a teacher throws out a question and the class works together to research the answer. That's a lesson in collaboration. It's dynamic and engaging, and it offers invaluable lessons for students about which online sources are reliable.

My daughters' teachers tell them not to trust anything on Wikipedia. Frankly, I think Wikipedia is usually pretty credible. It's some of the other stuff - conspiracy theories and gossip - that's more treacherous.

If we use it to teach students to approach the digital ocean of information with skepticism, the risks of BYOD will be well worth it.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

A homeless shelter in the Hamptons?

The Hamptons and the homeless - two things that don't seem to go together.

And, indeed, the presence of a homeless shelter in Hampton Bays, in the former Hidden Cove Motel, has been under attack almost from the time it opened in October 2011.

But this 28-unit shelter has by many accounts been a good neighbor. It is turning people's lives around. And it seems fair that even this playground for the wealthy should hold up a corner of the social safety net.

With the retirement last week of Gregory Blass, Suffolk County's social services commissioner, Hidden Cove lost a tireless champion. The Town of Southampton has been dragging its feet over simple repair permits, Blass said in an interview, and then claims that the shelter violates zoning codes. "It's like clipping the wings of a bird and scoffing at its inability to fly," he said. The town's supervisor, Anna Throne-Holst, was unavailable for comment. A local organizer, Michael Dunn, has put together the Concerned Citizens of Hampton Bays to fight the shelter, according to online reports. Dunn did not respond to efforts to reach him.

Hidden Cove is one of 54 homeless shelters in Suffolk County. Its residents are often single mothers - often fleeing domestic violence - with children younger than 5. They typically stay four or five months before moving into permanent housing.

Daphne, a real estate agent who didn't want her last name used, lived at Hidden Cove this fall with her daughter for 63 days - she counted the days until she could return to a more secure life. The pair moved to Long Island from Florida in June 2011 and were living with Daphne's husband in his aunt's house. He abandoned Daphne, and his aunt said she had to leave.

With no family nearby, Daphne, 47, turned to her pastor, and he referred her to Suffolk County. Her daughter is now enrolled in high school as a senior and plans to graduate this spring.

"The workers at Hidden Cove kept encouraging me and my daughter," Daphne said. "They helped us in every way that they could." She wants to return the generosity, and is looking for a business partner to launch a service helping homeless people find permanent homes.

Another former Hidden Cove resident, Tanya Haynes, lost her job when her child-care provider couldn't care for her son, now 5. The boy has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Haynes said, and the child-care center kept calling her to come and get him. Because of the continuing absences, Haynes lost her job as a supervisor at Starbucks; then, she couldn't pay her rent.

The caseworkers at Hidden Cove helped Haynes find medical care for her son, and counseling for both of them. They are stable now, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Patchogue. The boy's father lives outside the country.

Haynes had never accepted public assistance before; she goes to church and doesn't drink or smoke. "I never wanted to be on social service. It's shameful," she says. "I want to give my son a better life than I had."

The Hampton Bays school district says it can handle "the ebb and flow of enrollment" that students from Hidden Cove represent, without extra cost. Police calls have reportedly fallen since the days when Hidden Cove was a motel. So, what's the objection to this center of charity? "Some people don't like to see black people pushing baby carriages on the street," says Mary Castro, a neighbor who supports the shelter. I hope the opposition to this good place is not truly that petty.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Helicopter parents need some grounding

Remember the expert advice that parental involvement is the key to kids' school success? Apparently, involvement can go too far.

A new survey of 128 guidance counselors, school psychologists and teachers asserts that many parents are overly engaged in their kids' schooling and, generally, in their lives - and it's hurting the children's maturity and courage. Many parents today are guilty of "overparenting," according to the study out of the Queensland (Australia) University of Technology, which was highlighted in The Atlantic magazine.

It's not a big study, but it raises intriguing questions about how "excessive" parenting affects children. The authors, who are psychology and education experts, find that "an extreme attentiveness to children and their imagined needs and issues" results in kids failing to learn independence, confidence or the skills to bounce back after a defeat.

This will not come as news to many educators, especially those who deal with families at upper socioeconomic levels, where the Queensland study says overparenting is most prevalent. Among the parental coddling cited is cutting up a 10-year-old's food, forbidding a 17-year-old to ride a train alone and rushing to school to deliver a forgotten lunch, assignment or gym clothes.

Survey respondents also listed these sins: taking the child's word against the teacher's, demanding better grades and doing the child's homework.

This list is probably sounding uncomfortably familiar to many parents, but surely it's a matter of degree. Are you dropping off a forgotten lunch a couple of times during the school year or delivering takeout to the child's class on demand? Is the child 6 or 16?

Helicopter parents who hover, and lawn-mower parents who remove any barrier or discomfort for their kids, are in danger of robbing their children of learning how to solve their own problems and deal with not getting what they want. According to the study's authors, they risk bestowing their offspring with "poor resilience, a sense of entitlement, high anxiety levels, poor life skills, and an inadequate sense of responsibility."

Most parents, I think, hew to a commonsense middle ground. We let our kids fall down on the playground. We let them drive, even though it's dangerous. But it's not hard to see how we ended up "overparenting" - or, as my parents would have said, being overprotective.

One factor is the still-wrenching cultural divide over whether parents should stay home to raise children. Stay-home parents feel they must do more for kids, perhaps to justify their choice. Some working parents do more, too, when they are anxious to prove they care about their kids. Half a century of expert advice on how to be a better parent, along with mass media that magnify danger, also contribute to overparenting.

Also, it's hard to simply follow our parents' example because the world has changed so much. The study's results are another reflection of parents' trying to cope with the dizzying changes. Most of us do find our center.

However, the ones who are still cutting up their kids' meat are easy to mock. And the researchers indulge in a little educator-on-parent hostility.

"A campaign to the school to make sure their child is in a specific class the following year" was cited as one example of overparenting - a characterization that could rankle parents here who want access to teacher evaluation data so they can do that very thing - as was arranging meetings with school officials "when most issues are normal developmental sequences."

Both sides, parents and educators, would probably do well to generate a little more compassion for each other. After all, our goal - kids' success - is the same.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Inaugural: Obama needs to address unemployment

Taking on the president's jobs performance is becoming a regular gig for Jack Welch. He sent a Twitter message after Barack Obama's inaugural address on Monday, saying the president is apparently "comfortable with high unemployment," because he failed to talk enough about jobs in his speech.

You may remember that Welch, the former General Electric chairman, claimed that the Obama administration had cooked the books in September, when the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent - below 8 percent for the first time in four years, conveniently just before the election.

For Welch to now champion jobs with such verve, he must be working off some bad karma from his GE days, where he pioneered the concept of firing the bottom 10 percent of workers every year. Or maybe it's politics.

Either way, Welch was wrong in September, but his point is well-taken this time. There's nothing more important than bringing back jobs, and Obama should spend a lot more time thinking and talking about it.

Two stories from earlier this month illustrate the influence of employment on the economic health of every other sector. The first was "Painful drop in home loans," a report in Newsday on Jan. 11 that the number of Long Islanders getting home loans has fallen by nearly two-thirds since 2005. Federal housing data show that homeowners borrowed just $12.1 billion in 2011 to purchase, refinance or make improvements to homes, compared with $31.8 billion six years earlier.

While it's important that homeowners are taking on less debt, I remember how busily Long Islanders were spending that money back in 2005: putting in swimming pools, landscaping, adding on a bedroom or a deck. All of that spending meant jobs for someone - our neighbors.

In fact, the U.S. economy is largely driven by consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of economic growth. You might say consumers are the real job creators. But if consumers are going to keep up their end, we have to be in a good financial position. For most people, that means paid employment.

Another story in Newsday, right next to the housing report, was "Tuition increases slowing." Moody's Investors Service surveyed nearly 300 colleges and universities and found that the schools can't increase tuition at previous rates because students are no longer clamoring for their services. Growing numbers of high school graduates are choosing more affordable community colleges, enrolling part time or skipping college altogether.

Moody's thinks that the poor employment outlook for college graduates since the 2008 financial crisis is responsible for lower enrollment. But I have to wonder if disillusionment with degrees didn't begin 20 years ago or more, when midcareer workers were laid off without regard to how many letters they could tag after their signatures. They are the parents of today's graduating generation.

If there's no implicit promise that pursuing education will get you somewhere, why invest the time and money?

Recently, I saw a man with a sandwich board outside of Penn Station, advertising that he could repair computers on the spot for a fee. Are we becoming a country of people toting our businesses around on our backs?

In his inaugural, the president promised to build roads, bridges, electric grids and digital lines. He referred to harnessing the sun, wind and soil to fuel cars and run factories - which, despite Welch's tweet is a jobs agenda. I hope Obama is indeed "bold and swift" in fulfilling these and other job-creating ideas, before my kids have to don a sandwich board and head for Penn Station.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

U.S., New York sharpen focus on mental illness

For those of us who care about decent care for mental illness, it's been a very good week.

The New York State Legislature bolstered what was already one of the strongest assisted outpatient treatment laws in the country, Kendra's Law. Outpatient treatment is part of the safety net that the United States failed to adequately construct and fund when it began closing psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s - and many mentally ill people end up homeless, abusing drugs, arrested or committing suicide.

Kendra's Law provided for court-ordered, intensive outpatient supervision, to ensure that mentally ill people continue to take prescribed medication. However, in some cases, court orders lapsed without review, or didn't follow people who moved to a different county. Those problems have been resolved.

The law was named for Kendra Webdale, who in 1999 was pushed off a subway platform into the path of an oncoming train. Two subway pushes last month - the killings of Ki-Suck Han and Sunando Sen - reminded New Yorkers of the need to close the holes in Kendra's Law.

Also on Tuesday, the State Legislature placed stronger supports beneath mental health professionals who are treating potentially dangerous patients. A new law directs therapists to report patients they deem a possible threat to themselves or others, and those patients must surrender any guns and permits.

Therapists already had a duty to warn potential victims, in accordance with the 1974 Tarasoff decision, but the threat had to be very specific. Tuesday's vote in Albany may broaden therapists' license to speak up without fear of retribution.

Tatiana Tarasoff was killed by a University of California student in 1969, after the student confessed his murderous wish to a therapist at the campus counseling center. Campus police were notified, but no one told the young woman - with tragic results. Most states, including New York, have since adopted this ethical standard.

The new laws from Albany were, clearly, a reaction to the Newtown, Conn., school shootings. In recent mass murders, the perpetrators' mental problems were often known to family, neighbors and counselors. Yet they slipped through holes in our safety net.

Likewise in response to Newtown, President Barack Obama yesterday signed 23 executive actions into existence, five of which relate to mental illness. Among them, the president's office will release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement officers.

Three further executive actions relate to funding for mental health care, including finalizing regulations covered under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Preventing and treating mental illness on par with physical illness is crucial, and it's the test of a civilized nation. Health insurance companies, take note.

Finally, the president called for a "national dialogue" on mental health, to be led by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Congressional cooperation will be needed for other action recommended by the White House: Obama proposed spending $50 million to train 5,000 mental health professionals to work with young people in communities and schools. The president's plan notes that 75 percent of mental illness appears by age 24.

This funding has the potential to help a great many people who may never be tempted to commit mass murder. It's exciting - and civilized - that we are finally ready to grapple with this painful affliction.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Readers' rebuttal: Paycheck Act a good first step

By KRISTIN ROWE-FINKBEINER Executive Director, MomsRising.org

Regarding "Fair pay for women?" [Anne Michaud, Opinion, Nov. 29], President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, and many thought the fight for gender equality was won. It's not. Today, on average, women working full-time earn only 77 cents to a man's dollar.

Wage and hiring discrimination is real; and it's most serious for mothers. While most women without children earn 90 cents to a man's dollar, mothers earn only 73; less, if they're mothers of color. Since four in five women have children by the time they're 44, most women will face this kind of discrimination.

This discrimination can't fully be blamed on mothers' career paths. Research shows that in cases where women and men have the same qualifications and jobs, women - particularly mothers - get paid less than men. A Cornell University study found that even with identical resumes, mothers are not only less likely to be hired, they are offered $11,000 lower starting salaries than non-moms. There's real discrimination here.

The Equal Pay Act was a good start, but it's not enough. The Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen current law by increasing penalties for equal pay violations, prohibiting retaliation against workers who ask about wage practices or disclose their own wages, empowering women to negotiate for equal pay, and creating stronger incentives for employers to follow the law. There's nothing radical here.

Women make up half the labor force. Unfair pay practices have serious ramifications for them, their families and our economy. The Paycheck Fairness Act could help remedy this.

By KARIN ANDERSON Flushing, NY

I know that one argument for why women are paid less is because they gravitate toward professions that pay less. From that perspective, sexism and inequality appear not to be in play.

However, you could say that we are socialized from a very young age as women to have specific interests and skills (such as, to help others, to be empathetic, nurturing). The result being that we gravitate toward certain career choices (social work, elementary school teacher, nurse, nonprofits). Yes, these are personal choices we make when pursuing our degrees and careers, but so much of these choices were pre-determined by how so many of us were socialized from the beginning.

Many of these fields were historically considered "women's work." It was assumed that women's incomes weren't necessary, rather that they provided extra pocket change. The consequences of this archaic social order - men as bread winners, women as dependents - have lasted through until today.

From that perspective, I would argue that women are not making poor choices in pursuing careers that pay less. Rather, the solution is to reconsider the value of those careers themselves. Perhaps they warrant higher pay now.

By SUSAN F. FEINER Professor of Economics Professor of Women and Gender Studies University of Southern Maine.

Anne Michaud misconstrues the issue - "real paycheck fairness"? Instead of what, fake paycheck fairness?

First, the column does not point out that the pay gap - 77 cents on the dollar - only compares the earnings full time, full year workers. That excluses fully 50 percent of women. If we compare earnings of all working men (age 24 to 40) and all working women (age 24 to 40) we find women earning only 62 cents for every dollar earned by men. Yikes!

Sure, some of the pay gap is due to labor market segregation: the conscious and unconscious behaviors that crowd women into traditional women's jobs. These jobs have low pay (relative to required training and education) because women do them. If these jobs paid more, more men would apply.

Yes, jobs with predictable hours pay less. Unpaid domestic responsibilities still fall primarily on women. (Boss to worker: "Hi, I know it's 2:30 p.m. Friday, but there's an emergency. Be in Timbuktu Sunday." Worker to boss: "Sure thing, I'll give the kids my AmEx card and catch the next plane." Not.)

Affordable child-care is unquestionably a great policy. Yet, we've known for decades that readily available child care pays for itself in lower absenteeism and reduced turnover.

Women need the Paycheck Fairness Act because employers embrace the gender status quo - they favor men in hiring, promotion and earnings. That's the real issue in fair pay for women.

Originally published on Newsday.com; 59 shares on Facebook, 9 on Twitter

Out-of-work plastic surgeons a hazard

I've read that elective plastic surgery has taken a big hit during this recession, but I didn't realize that the surgeons have resorted to trolling for work in their old specialties. The problem is, they may no longer be as current as they should be. I have to have a haywire gland (a parathyroid) removed from my neck. The hospital directed me to their ear, nose and throat surgeon. But even as he was giving me the surgeon's name, the medical director said I might want to get a second opinion -- and he offered the name of a second ENT surgeon. I thought, "Whoa, that's weird."

So, I checked out the doctors on New York State's physician website, and I found that the first doctor described his practice entirely in terms of facial plastic surgery. He didn't even mention ENT work. So, I asked if he did the minimally invasive type of surgery I was looking for. He told me he did not, and then started talking on and on about the different types of scars. Again, a red flag went up for me. This guy was all about the surface.

I made some more calls and discovered that the second ENT surgeon doesn't accept my insurance. So, I ended up finding a third surgeon, one who has devoted himself to this kind of operation, both as a student and now in his specialty practice. I'm not very happy with the hospital staff who, essentially, threw me to my own resources. I'm sure there are rules and professional courtesies involved about who gets a referral, but I can't see where this process has the patient's best interests at heart.

Two days later, the first ENT called me to schedule the surgery. I told him that I had chosen someone else who offered the newer technique. For one thing, it means the difference between going under general anaesthesia or having a local pain blocker. "It's all marketing!" he practically shouted into the phone. When I argued with him, he offered to repeat what he had just explained to me, "but this time very slowly." Charming.

I have to think there was karma at work here.