Leading More Parents to Be Teachers’ Allies

teacherEvery now and then someone says something that really sticks with you. About a year ago, I had a conversation with Harriet Sanford, president and CEO of the NEA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the huge, nationwide teachers union. The foundation has made Milwaukee a major focus in recent years, giving more than $2 million to Milwaukee Public Schools, generally for developing the skills of teachers in low-performing schools.

Sanford was describing how things were going in other cities where the foundation was involved. She was enthusiastic about the impact in Seattle of a program in which teachers worked to get parents more involved in schools.  It was having documentable positive effects on how kids were doing.

I said that I thought a lot of teachers do what they can in school to meet kids’ needs, but basically throw up their hands when it comes to doing something about kids’ lives at home or motivating parents to do a better job of being allies of their children’s success in school.

Sanford said she was convinced that things could be done, that they didn’t cost a lot, and they could be as simple as having teachers pay visits to children’s homes, just to establish rapport and give some tips on what helps get a kid ready for school.

It may make me sound naive, but this really had an impact on my thinking about teacher-parent relations. I just had kind of written that off. But maybe we don’t need to despair about this, and maybe schools in Milwaukee that have been too passive about reaching out positively and firmly to parents.

All of which is to say I was very pleased to see the Journal Sentinel series this week, “Beyond the Bell: Making the Home-School Connection.”

Continue ReadingLeading More Parents to Be Teachers’ Allies

A Decade-Old Statute Pays Dividends for REIT Investors and Their Attorneys

Perhaps real estate investors and their attorneys have reason to be cautiously optimistic: economic reports released this week indicate signs of life in the real estate market.  As reported by the Associated Press, the National Association of Realtors saw increases in pending home sales for the ninth straight month.  And for the first time in six months, construction spending saw an increase.  Optimists say these numbers, in conjunction with recent reports that home prices are climbing, indicate long-term recovery for both the residential and commercial real estate sectors.

Yet many analysts argue that these spikes are temporary.  The growth in construction spending amounted to a measly 0.04%, and the rise in pending sales contracts over the last nine months is attributable to the homebuyer tax credit, which the Obama Administration and Congress recently extended.

I suppose time will tell which analysis is correct.  But while commentators continue to debate, real estate investors have shifted their focus from traditional residential and commercial endeavors to a sector less affected by the downturn: healthcare properties.

Continue ReadingA Decade-Old Statute Pays Dividends for REIT Investors and Their Attorneys

Are the Court’s Unexpected Sixth Amendment Revolutions Coming to an End?

bastilleThis is the sixth and final in a series of posts reviewing last term’s criminal cases in the United States Supreme Court and previewing the new term.

When it comes to the constitutional rights of criminal defendants at the Supreme Court, the conventional story of the past half-century goes something like this: Responding to the embarrassing state of criminal justice in the American South in the civil rights era, the activist Warren Court led a revolution in defendants’ rights.  The Court held that most of the basic Bill of Rights protections applied to the states, liberally construed the scope of those rights, and adopted new exclusionary rules to enforce the rights.  The activism of the Warren Court provoked a popular backlash, however, and a series of Republican presidents succeeded in moving the Court to the right.  The Court’s hard-core conservatives  have pushed aggressively to overturn landmark Warren Court precedents, while the more moderate conservatives have charted an unpredictable path, caught between their skepticism of the Warren Court agenda and their reluctance to overturn established precedent.  Meanwhile, the liberals have been on the defensive for a generation, able to do little more than occasionally preserve the gains of an earlier era.

What is one to make, then, of the twin Sixth Amendment revolutions of the past decade? 

Against all expectations, two of the Court’s hard-core conservatives (Scalia and Thomas) joined with a subset of its liberals to expand the Sixth Amendment rights to a jury trial and to confront accusers.  Both revolutions overturned settled law and opened many new avenues for defendants to challenge their convictions and sentences. 

But now there are good reasons to wonder whether the revolutions are over. 

Continue ReadingAre the Court’s Unexpected Sixth Amendment Revolutions Coming to an End?