Republica Press

Your Business & Political News Source

REPUBLICA PRESS
Your Business & Political News Source

Education (Secondary)

The Mayor, the Teacher and a Fight over a ‘Lost Territory’ of France

by

TRAPPES, France — It all began when a high-school teacher warned that Islamists had taken over the city. The teacher went on TV, issuing alarms from inside what he called a “lost city” of the French Republic. In Trappes, he said, he feared for his life.

“Trappes, it’s finished,” the teacher said. “They’ve won.”

The mayor, a strong believer in the Republic, saw the teacher on television and didn’t recognize the city he described. He knew his city, west of Paris and with a growing population of immigrants and Muslims, had problems but thought it was being falsely maligned. The mayor also happened to be a Muslim.

“The truth doesn’t matter anymore,” he said.

For a few weeks this winter, the fight pitting the mayor, Ali Rabeh, 36, against the teacher, Didier Lemaire, 55, became a media storm that, beneath the noise and accusations, boiled down to a single, angry question that runs through the culture wars rippling through France: Can Islam be compatible with the principles of the French Republic?

Lupin.” But Trappes also saw about 70 of its youths leave for jihad to Syria and Iraq, the largest contingent, per capita, from any French city.

article about Mr. Lemaire, who said he was quitting because of Islamists.

Within a few hours, a conservative politician eyeing the presidency tweeted her support for Mr. Lemaire and “all those hussars on the front line in the fight for the Republic.” Next, the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, attacked “certain elected officials” for failing to protect the teacher from Islamists.

That the words of a virtually unknown teacher resonated so much was a sign of the times. A few months earlier, an extremist had beheaded a middle-school teacher for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on free speech. President Emmanuel Macron was now pushing a bill to fight Islamism even as he pledged to nurture an “Islam of France.”

Mr. Lemaire’s words also resonated because of the outsized role in France of public schoolteachers, who are responsible for inculcating in the young the nation’s political values and culture. In the Republic’s mythology, teachers are the “hussars” — the light cavalry once used for scouting by European armies — fighting to preserve the nation’s sanctity.

In the article, Mr. Lemaire said he had been under police escort for months. Trappes’s mayor, he said, had called him an “Islamophobe and racist.” He said he was waiting for an “exfiltration” from deep inside “a city lost for good.”

Overnight, the soft-spoken, longhaired teacher, who said he preferred curling up with Seneca than going on Facebook, was issuing dire warnings on top television news shows.

“We have six months to a year,” he said, “because all these youths who are educated with the idea that the French are their enemies, they’ll take action one day.”

Mr. Lemaire arrived in Trappes, a banlieue, or suburb, in the outer orbit of Paris, two decades earlier. Once a village that grew around a millennium-old Roman Catholic parish, Trappes is now a city of 32,000.

Mr. Lemaire’s high school, La Plaine-de-Neauphle, stands at the heart of an area built to accommodate immigrant workers from France’s former colonies in the 1970s — a mixture of rent-subsidized high-rises, attractive five-story residences and a constellation of parks. The mosque is nearby. So is a market where vendors offer delicacies from sub-Saharan Africa and halal products.

Parti républicain solidariste, which espouses a hard line on France’s version of secularism, called laïcité. He now favors taking girls away from their parents, after a second warning, if the children violate laïcité rules by putting on Muslim veils during school field trips.

“We have to protect children from this manipulation,” of being used “as soldiers or as ideologues,” he said.

remarks to the newspaper Le Monde, the local préfet, the top civil servant representing the central government, praised Mr. Rabeh’s administration for its “total cooperation” in combating Islamism. The préfet also refuted the teacher’s claim to having been under a police escort.

The teacher’s story began wobbling. He admitted to the French news media, as he did to The Times, that he had “not received explicit death threats.” He had also accused the mayor of calling him a “racist and Islamophobe” in an interview with a Dutch television network.

But the network denied the mayor had said any such thing.

letter to the students at the teacher’s high school.

“Don’t let anybody ever tell you that you’re worth nothing and that you’re lost to the Republic,” he wrote.

debate was scheduled that evening between Ms. Le Pen and Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister leading the government’s crackdown on Islamism. Hours before the debate, he announced that the teacher would be granted police protection.

That evening, Jean-Michel Blanquer, the national education minister, issued a statement supporting the teacher. He also accused the mayor of trespassing into the high school to distribute tracts — the letter — that morning. “Political and religious neutrality is at the heart of the operation of the School of the Republic,” the minister said.

The city officials at the school that morning told The Times that no copies were distributed inside. The regional education office and Mr. Blanquer’s office refused to make the school principal available for an interview. The minister’s office declined to comment.

The trespassing accusations led to such an avalanche of threats against the mayor that he, too, was put under police protection — a shared destiny, for a while, for the two men of Trappes, who had each lost something.

The teacher was forced to leave the school where he had taught for 20 years and, despite his criticisms of Trappes, said “you really feel you’re on a mission.” He said he should have been more careful with the facts and had made “many mistakes,” but stuck by his interpretation of Trappes as “lost.”

His words, he said, had led to a “clarification of positions today in France.”

The mayor questioned the very Republic that once inspired him. He had believed that “the people who embody the Republic will come, the government will eventually express its solidarity with me.”

“Stunned,” he said, “I find that’s not the case.”

He declined his worried father’s request to resign.

“For a moment during the crisis, I told myself, well, if this is the Republic, I’m abandoning the Republic, just as it’s abandoned me,” Mr. Rabeh said. “But the truth is they’re not the Republic. The kids of Trappes are the Republic.”

Gaëlle Fournier contributed research.

View Source

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Italy’s Problem With School Dropouts Goes From Bad to Worse in Pandemic

by

NAPLES — Francesca Nardi never liked school, or thought she was particularly good at it, but with the help of teachers and classmates she had managed to stick around until 11th grade. When the pandemic hit, though, she found herself lost in online classes, unable to understand her teacher through the tablet the school gave her. She was failing, likely to get left back, and planning to drop out.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon she paused from chatting with two friends, who had already dropped out, near her house in the projects of Naples’ eastern outskirts.

“It’s better if I just work,” Ms. Nardi, 15, said. “And not waste another year.”

Even before the pandemic, Italy had among the worst dropout rates in the European Union, and the southern city of Naples was particularly troubled by high numbers. When the coronavirus hit, Italy shuttered its schools more than just about all the other European Union member states, with especially long closures in the Naples region, pushing students out in even higher numbers.

While it is too early for reliable statistics, principals, advocates and social workers say they have seen a sharp increase in the number of students falling out of the system. The impact on an entire generation may be one of the pandemic’s lasting tolls.

three times longer than France, and more than Spain or Germany.

And experts say that by doing so, the country, which has Europe’s oldest population and was already lagging behind in critical educational indicators, has risked leaving behind its youth, its greatest and rarest resource for a strong post-pandemic recovery.

“We are preparing badly for the future,” said Chiara Saraceno, an Italian sociologist who works on education.

Italy’s prime minister, Mario Draghi, allowed all Italian high school students to go back to school in person for at least half of their classes starting on Monday. Finishing the academic year in class, Mr. Draghi has said, should be a priority.

“The whole government thinks that school is a fundamental backbone of our society,” said Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza. “The first place where we will invest.”

But a good deal of damage has already been done.

Throughout much of the last year, the government argued that keeping high schools closed was necessary to prevent infection on the public transportation that students took to and from class.

Elementary schools were allowed to open more often, but the country’s insistence on closures, especially of middle and high schools, experts say, risked exacerbating inequalities and the country’s profound north-south divide. National and regional officials drew sharp criticism, and even the education minister who was in office then argued that schools should have opened more.

Mr. Speranza acknowledged that schools had paid “a very high price in these months.”

Schools around the southern city of Naples have remained closed longer than the rest of the country, in part because the president of the Campania region, Vincenzo De Luca, insisted they were a potential source of infection. At one point, he mocked the notion that children in his region were “crying to go to school.”

In Naples, the dropout rate is about 20 percent, twice the European average, and in the city’s outskirts it is even higher. Teachers there have struggled to keep students interested in school, and worry that months of closed classrooms would shut students out for good.

As schools closed Francesco Saturno, 13, spent his mornings helping in his grandfather’s fruit shop, sleeping in or glued to his PlayStation. He only twice logged on to his online class.

His mother, Angela Esposito, 33, who herself dropped out of high school, worried that he might leave school and follow in the footsteps of his father, who earns tips of loose change for babysitting parked cars in Naples.

“I am scared that if he doesn’t go to school he is going to get lost,” she said. “And getting lost in Naples is dangerous.”

In Italy, it is illegal for students below the age of 16 to drop out of school, and the local prosecutor for the minors’ court, aware that social workers are swamped, asked school principals to report dropout cases directly to her.

“I am really worried,” said the prosecutor, Maria De Luzenberger. In the last month, about a thousand drop out cases from Naples and the nearby city of Caserta have piled up on her desk, she said. That was more than in all of 2019. “I didn’t expect such a flood.”

Colomba Punzo, the principal of Francesco’s school, said dropouts had tripled in her primary and middle school during the school closures. She scrambled to find an alternative, and organized in-person workshops every morning to get Francesco and other at-risk children back into the system.

Ms. Punzo said policymakers underestimated how closing schools in neighborhoods like Ponticelli meant cutting “the only possible lifeline,” for the children. “When the school is open you can grab them and make them come, when the school is closed what do you do?”

In Naples’ Scampia district, known across Italy as a tough place plagued for years by the Camorra mafia, teachers at the Melissa Bassi High School had made significant progress in getting local children into school through art projects, workshops and personal tutoring.

The school’s principal said half of its students stopped following classes when they moved online. He said they gave cellphone SIM cards to those who could not afford Wi-Fi and offered evening lessons to teenagers forced to work as the pandemic hit their families’ finances.

But the challenge was enormous. Some of the neighborhood’s most neglected housing projects lack cellphone coverage, and children are often crammed with multiple family members into a few rooms. Teachers hoped most of the students would return if and when schools reopened, but they feared those who fell behind won’t see the point of going back.

“They are so discouraged,” said Marta Compagnone, a teacher there. “They think the bets are off.”

Hanging out with his friends on the steps of a square below the “Sails,” a huge triangular housing project a few blocks from Melissa Bassi High School, Giordano Francesco, 16, said he often fell asleep, grew bored and frustrated with the online classes he followed on his phone. He got into arguments with teachers because he often logged off to help his grandfather, who has Alzheimer’s disease, eat or use the bathroom.

His mother, who left school at 10 and lost her job as a theater cleaner during the pandemic, asked him to finish the school year. He said he would, and then drop out afterward.

His girlfriend, Marika Iorio, 15, standing next to him, said she intended to graduate, become a psychologist and live a different life from her father, who cannot read or write. But she was struggling to follow school online and failing her classes, too.

“I am scared I might not make it,” she said.

View Source

Pandemic Helps Stir Interest in Teaching Financial Literacy

by

In the latest round of legislative proposals, some states are merely encouraging the teaching of financial skills while a few would make the subject a graduation requirement. Ohio, for instance, is considering a proposal that would require high school students to pass a half-credit class in personal finance in order to graduate. The class must be taught by a teacher trained in the subject matter.

The bill would also create a fund to help pay for training to teach the subject, said State Senator Steve Wilson, a Republican and former banking executive who co-sponsored the bill. He said he was hopeful that the bill would be voted out of committee this month.

“Kids come out of school having no clue about financial literacy,” Senator Wilson said. “You go out into the world greatly disadvantaged.”

Many financial literacy advocates consider a full-semester course the gold standard for personal finance instruction. Rebecca Maxcy, director of the Financial Education Initiative at the University of Chicago, said many courses focused mainly on skills, like writing a check or filing taxes. While those lessons can be helpful, she said, it’s important for courses to include discussions of how personal values and attitudes about money influence behavior, as well as an examination of the financial systems and potential barriers that students will encounter in the world of money.

Questions like “Who benefits when you open a bank account?” can prompt meaningful discussions, she said.

Some curriculum options, however, offer more condensed, basic instruction.

Everfi, a digital instructional company, offers a free seven-session program for high school financial literacy. Students take interactive, self-guided lessons in topics like banking, budgeting and college financing.

Sidney Strause, a freshman at Marshall University in West Virginia, said she had taken Everfi’s course as a junior in high school. The lessons were assigned as part of another course she was taking, and typically took 45 minutes to an hour to complete.

View Source

Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy