SUMMARY:Personal finance guru Beth Kobliner thinks kids should be learning about money and key economic concepts early. She hopes to break the taboo of talking money with your kids with her new book, "Make Your Kid a Money Genius." Economics correspondent Paul Solman gets lessons on how to instill economic lessons in young people from Kobliner, as well as some actual kids.
SUMMARY: The battle over Common Core education standards is playing out across the country, but a new set of requirements for teaching science is creeping into curricula without the same fanfare. Some states are voluntarily adopting the practices, which emphasize more consistent science instruction as well as hands-on experimentation. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Education Week reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): For years, Common Core academic standards for math and English have been the subject of battles all over the country.
But there’s also a move afoot to set new standards for science as well, and a number of states are starting to adopt them voluntarily.
Special correspondent John Tulenko of Education Week reports.
JOHN TULENKO, Education Week: It takes just 10 minutes to cross through Gillette, Wyoming. This small city sits in the northeast corner of the state, surrounded by hundreds of miles of prairie.
But schools here in Campbell County are on the edge of something big, the next generation science standards.
CHRISTY MATHES, Sage Valley Junior High School: You are going to build a strand of DNA, and you are going to decode it and figure out what that DNA actually says.
JOHN TULENKO: For Christy Mathes at Sage Valley Junior High School, the new standards are about learning to think like a scientist.
CHRISTY MATHES: There’s a lot of really good stuff in them. Every standard is a performance task. It’s not, 'the child needs to memorize these things.' It’s the student needs to be able to do some pretty intense stuff. We are analyzing, we are critiquing, we are creating, we are actually doing the science.
JOHN TULENKO: Take today’s lesson on genes. Mathes had her students pick fictional 'Character Cards' with the name, height, hair and eye color, of each character.
CHRISTY MATHES: This is a secret. Just you and your group know.
JOHN TULENKO: In teams, they built a genetic model of their character’s traits and then the groups traded models.
CHRISTY MATHES: And then they’re going to figure out who you had based on what you code for.
SUMMARY: According to a new study, some 50 percent of all Muslim students in the U.S. have been bullied by their peers. In mostly-white St. Cloud, Minnesota — where thousands of east African refugees have relocated — the problem got so bad that Muslim students walked out of the city's high school en massè. John Tulenko of Education Week takes a look at the intersection of education and Islamophobia.
JOHN TULENKO, Education Week: Hafsa Abdi, who's 18-years-old, remembers well the day four years ago when she was first bullied for being Muslim.
HAFSA ABDI, Student, St. Cloud Technical High School:The last day of by eighth grade year, I was just going home, and then this boy — I think he was a year younger than me — he pulled off my hijab. And at the time, I was wearing a longer one, so it was more easy to kind of like pull off from the back.
And then I also had like a pin underneath to hold it in place. And then that kind of came loose. So, like, at the time I was just trying to think of like five different things at one time, like trying to get the pin to not stab me in the neck, and then turn around to see who this kid is.
JOHN TULENKO: In high school, the bullying continued, especially when she and other Muslim students would gather to pray.
HAFSA ABDI:Mostly, the upperclassmen, they would come into the bathroom sometimes and start fighting with the Somali girls that were trying to wash for prayer, and then when it gets reported, nothing would happen.
JOHN TULENKO: What would they say?
HAFSA ABDI: So they'd be like, oh, well, why are you making the bathroom dirty, you stinky Somalian or you terrorist or stuff like that, or go back to where you came from.
JOHN TULENKO:Where Hafsa comes from is Minnesota. She was born here, after her parents fled Somalia to escape civil war. Thousands of other East African refugees have also come to St. Cloud, changing the face of this mostly white, mostly Catholic small city.
WILLIE JETT, Superintendent, St. Cloud Area School District 742: My job is to make sure that all children, whether it's their children, whether it's somebody brand-new to the country, that they have the best tools available to be successful here in America, here within our community.
JOHN TULENKO: For superintendent Willie Jett, educating the new arrivals required changes across the board.
WILLIE JETT: What we have had to do is start from ground zero. You're trying to make sure that, (A) All the different languages within school are welcomed.
You're trying to make sure that you have interpreters. You're making sure that you're revamping teaching staff and support staff and the way that you hold conferences, the way that you send messages home. It's not what it was 20, 30, 40 years ago, even 10 years ago.
SUMMARY: The Dalai Lama had long kept up a demanding schedule, crossing the globe for speaking engagements until doctors recently told him to slow down. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro sits down with the 80-year-old spiritual leader to discuss his hopes for spreading peace and winning autonomy for Tibet, as well as why he says he’s not sure there’s a need for a next Dalai Lama.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): As Pope Francis visited the East Coast a few weeks back, another world religious figure, the Dalai Lama, was in Minnesota, where doctors at the Mayo Clinic advised him to cut short his own tour of the U.S.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro recently sat down with the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism at his exile home in India.
A version of this story aired on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.”
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): Until doctors recently told him to slow down, the 80-year-old Dalai Lama had kept a breathless pace. In just a few weeks last summer, he was at a music festival in England, a presidential library in Houston, and a sold-out stadium near Los Angeles.
There is perhaps no world figure today with a more diverse face of fans.
Why are you so popular globally? Why are you a rock star?
DALAI LAMA: I don’t know. I never pay attention about that, why people praise me, why, why.
CROWD (singing): Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And he said he’s not concerned about another matter that is many minds, who will succeed him, or, as he’s increasingly said in recent years, whether anyone will.
DALAI LAMA: Many people showing interest about the institution of Dalai Lama. For me, not much interest.
(LAUGHTER)
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That’s significant. Like the familiar laugh, his role as Dalai Lama — the world’s best known Buddhist leader — has been central to who he is, the reincarnation of Dalai Lamas going back six centuries, leader of a fabled once-upon-a-time country high in the Himalayas.
He fled with U.S. help to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Tibet’s annexation by Mao Zedong’s revolutionary People’s Republic of China.
Today, at his home base in Dharamsala, India, he still keeps a full schedule. It begins early each morning as a diverse crowd lines up for a chance to meet him.
Many are from the tens of thousands of Tibetans who followed him and settled in India, where the Dalai Lama set up a secular Tibetan government in exile and later took on a mostly ceremonial role.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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