Seattle Public Schools

A group of activists and parents has put together a fairly active blog to discuss Seattle Public Schools.  From their banner:

Joining together across Seattle to fight for high quality public schools that educate all students to become passionate, lifelong learners.

Not necessarily directly relevant if you live on Mercer Island, but interesting reading, and points to the type of content that would make a good similar effort for Mercer Island.  Anybody want to start one?  I'll host!

Bottled Water vs Tap

A four-year study by the NRDC (whoever they are) concludes that bottled water is mostly good stuff, but rarely better than tap water. They claim that the water from your faucet is produced under more stringent rules than the stuff that comes in bottles. For example, whereas city water must be tested 100 times per month, bottled water plants need test only once a week.

Why do we think bottled water is better? Marketing executives at Pepsi and Coke are trying to sell you a healthy alternative to soda, so of course they'll advertise it as great-tasting and good for you. They're not trying to compete against tap water, though they don't mind if you somehow get that impression. But don't be fooled.

There are good reasons to drink bottled water, such as the convenience while traveling. But at home or at a restaurant, it makes much more sense to get regular, plain ole tap water.

[for more details, see this CNN story]

Luthar featured on KING5

Seattle NBC affiliate KING5 has a short news segmentt about Suniya Luthar's presentation to Mercer Island parents last week.  Nothing new in the broadcast, though it's always nice to see our school on TV.

I wonder how they got the video clip of the student smoking marijuana?  Did reporter Deborah Feldman ask around until she found a teenager willing to light up on camera?  Was he hard to find?  Will she (or anyone) help the kid get treatment or counseling?  That sounds like a much more interesting story to me because it points to an inconsistency in the way we think about drugs, versus other vices, in schools.  What if, instead of a pothead, the segment showed a kid shooting heroin?  Or brandishing a gun or a bomb? 

Head lice

This five-minute podcast from Sound Medicine at Indiana School of Medince should be mandatory listening to everyone with a child enrolled at Mercer Island elementary schools. Based on new, systematic research by Richard J. Pollack and other epidemiologists from Harvard, scientists have concluded that:

• Lice spread only by head-to-head contact -- not from sharing hats or combs.
• Personal hygiene has no affect one way or another on incidents of infestation
• Even school nurses generally have only a 50% accuracy rate when diagnosing an infestation.

Here's what the Harvard School of Public Health says:

• Sending children home in order to reduce transmission of lice is "virtually always counter-productive."
• Head lice spread far less easily than cold or flu virus.
• "We are unaware of any convincing data that demonstrates that enforced exclusion policies are effective in reducing the transmission of lice. "

Here's a data sheet with recommendations for how to manage a head lice infestation at school. Basic idea:

1. Don't bother with the nits; thoroughly remove live lice with a louse comb every day or two for a week.
2. Try chemicals if that doesn't work.

Mercer Island and Suniya Luthar

Here are my big takeaways from the Luthar talk on Monday night:

When it comes to risky behavior like cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs, Mercer Island kids versus national averages are:

• Better in 8th grade, but much worse by 12th grade than other schools
• Boys are the main driver of the poor stats.

As to causes and solutions, you have to take all these statistics with a huge grain of salt, but for what it's worth, Luthar's data seems to show:

• Boys benefit from good parental relationships and a strong sense of consequences for bad behavior.
• Girls benefit from having close friends who don't criticize them.

"Overscheduling" is a myth: kids involved in back-to-back after school activities and academics in order to get into college are doing it because they want to, not because parents make them. The real issue? Kids turn to destructive behavior when they feel they are criticized for achievements beyond their reach.

The most disturbing results from her survey of Mercer Island compared the number of kids with significantly worse behavior than the average. Here, something terrible happens between 8th and 12th grade, because the number of kids who are way bad is much higher than in other communities.

Much of the time was spent interacting with the audience, asking for people's thoughts on the causes, but most of the comments were anecdotal and, I thought, basically wrong. For example: "Girls are judged by different standards than boys", which is no doubt true but why would that be any different here than anywhere else? 

She ended the talk by acknowledging that some of the research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, but then she added: "but believe me, they couldn't care less about this research".  If you want more research like this, she needs a donor, because the government is completely uninterested in helping communities like Mercer Island.  Meanwhile, she wants as many people as possible to fill her on-line survey: http://www.momsaspeople.com/

Tweens buying power

Apropos of the Luthar presentations is this NYTimes article from 4/22 about the huge increase of buying power among kids aged 8-15:

Wendy Liebmann, president and founder of WSL Strategic Retail, has studied consumer behavior in retail stores for 17 years for her How America Shops survey.  [She was astounded to find that] parents said 75 percent of their children under 13 had some say — always or occasionally — on the purchases of home décor for their own room. Forty percent had some say in the skin care products they used, 45 percent on hair care products, 65 percent on sneakers and 58 percent on jeans.

Maybe I'm too much of a "modern" parent because this doesn't seem out of line to me.  What's wrong with letting your kid pick their own sneakers?  My mom used to bring me to the shoe store and let me pick my own shoes -- within a specific price range and utility of course.

Are rich kids more stressed?

The Seattle Times writes (and Melissa blogs  at SaveSeattleSchools) about an upcoming study on anxiety among affluent kids, by Suniya S. Luthar, professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.  The study was paid for by a Department of Health grant to the Mercer Island Communities That Care, an initiative to reduce teen drinking and drug use in a project coordinated by Suzanne Tedesko on the Mercer Island City staff.  From the Times:

Results of a communitywide survey Luthar did on Mercer Island replicated many of her earlier findings on affluent youth and substance abuse. It showed a steep jump between junior high and high school in the percentage of students who used alcohol, cigarettes or drugs. A lack of contact with their parents contributed to distress among youth, according to the report.

Mercer Island High School students were far more likely to display anxiety, depression, withdrawal, trouble sleeping, social problems and rule-breaking behavior than the norm, the survey said.

Luthar is speaking Monday night at 7pm at the High School and I'll try to attend.  (She's also presenting in Bellevue on Tuesday, but instead of free you have to pay $20 -- I wonder if it's the same talk?)

I'm skeptical of the idea that Mercer Island kids are more likely to do drugs because they're burned out from all that overscheduling from their hyper-competitive parents who think getting into Stanford is the only thing that matters.  Why would kids today, whether affluent or not, be any more "overscheduled" than farm kids or those in hungry hunter-gatherer communities?

Fortunately, it looks like Dr. Luthar has read Judith Rich Harris and Steven Pinker, whose thesis is that stress within families matters much less than peer group influences.  In other words, parents' overscheduling is pretty inconsequential compared to, say, those friends from the Rave party you let your daughter attend.

So does Mercer Island have a drug problem?  Nationally, about 45% have never touched the stuff according to The National Center On Addiction and Substance Abuse. That same 45% claim not to have any friends who use drugs either.  In fact only about 17% of kids are considered "high risk" -- have used drugs in the past 30 days.  In their 2004 paper The High Price of Affluence, Luthar along with Chris Sexton, report findings from an affluent community that shows 50% never do drugs -- hey, that's actually better than the national average, though slightly worse than the less affluent school that the study used.

One interesting part of their 2004 study divided the students into self-identified peer groups (Populars, Jocks, Intelligent, Theater, Preppies, Independent, Druggies, and more).  Turns out that Populars are more likely to do drugs, which to me explains why it can seem like there is more substance abuse than there really is.  Unfortunately the paper I saw only describes the high level of the study; I'd love to see the actual data and understand this peer group division better.

I'll wait to hear more from Dr. Luthar, but after some reading I'm inclined to think that if your Mercer Island kid is involved in high-risk behavior, you need to know he/she is part of a small minority of students -- it's not "normal" or "typical", whether they are overscheduled or not.