"I Would Have Painted the Walls With My Blood"

The knock on the door came just before 6pm last Saturday. Tom and Jane Hollinghurst and their younger daughter Hannah, 11, were sitting beside the swimming pool behind their home.

It was the kind of balmy Florida evening that the British couple had grown used to in the six years since they emigrated from Derbyshire. The sprinkler system was spreading waves of mist over the lawn. Nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to learn.

Jane Hollinghurst answered the door. When the two uniformed officers asked her to confirm her name, she summoned her husband.

“I have to inform you of some terrible news,” said Deputy Jason Platt. “Your daughter Alexandria was involved in a shooting incident in the early hours of this morning. I’m sorry to tell you that she, Brandon Goode and a police officer were found deceased.”

Alex, as she was known, was 17 and had been counting the days to her 18th birthday and adulthood. A petite blonde with blue-green eyes and an academic record that guaranteed her a good university place, she was popular at the local high school in Davenport, near Disney World, where she had worked part-time.

The boys who tried to go out with her had soon realised that she was interested only in her boyfriend, Brandon, an intense youth with slicked-back hair who had just turned 18. To the dismay of Alex’s parents, the couple had become almost inseparable over the previous three years.

“He was a super smart kid,” said Dominic Russo, who had known Brandon since they were both 10. “He’d come in with a new dress shirt and tie on every day. I guess he wanted to be GQ. High-end clothes. Different.”

Last month, Brandon and Alex were stopped by police in his silver Isuzu Rodeo and arrested after glass pipes and cannabis were found. Brandon was held in jail overnight and Alex taken to a juvenile assessment centre. They were due to appear in court last week. After yet another ugly row with her mother — there had been so many about sex or alcohol or drugs — Alex was forced to hand her mobile phone to her parents.

Unbeknown to the Hollinghursts, it was not Brandon’s first arrest. Less than two years earlier, his mother Connie had walked into the living room to find Brandon, his head shaven, sitting on the couch. Blankets had been used to cover some of the windows.

As she approached him, Brandon turned around. His face was covered in black paint and he had an axe. Brandon jumped up and pinned her to the wall, demanding that she accept a divorce settlement from his father.

But Sheriff Grady Judd, trying to make sense of events last weekend declined to portray Brandon as anything like the character played by Woody Harrelson in the film Natural Born Killers, where a psychopathic couple embark on a spree of mayhem and murder.

“He wasn’t a thug,” the sheriff said. “I consider him a child in search of direction in life. The incident with the axe was a divorce thing. He violated the law by being in possession of marijuana but he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the criminal type that we see so often. This just does not fit the mould.”

THE Hollinghurst family emigrated to the US when Alex was 11. Andrew Cartledge, her primary school headmaster in Hadfield, Derbyshire, remembered “a great child” with an infectious smile. 

RealClearPolitics – Articles

"I Would Have Painted the Walls With My Blood"

Great Walls of America ‘could stop tornadoes’

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Great Walls of America ‘could stop tornadoes’

This week in the War on Workers: Teachers protest "data walls" that shame students

Over the past year, grade school students in the low-income city of Holyoke, Massachusetts, have faced having their names and standardized test scores posted in classrooms on “data walls,” for all their classmates to see. Horrible, right? But it shouldn’t be unexpected, as educational policy pushes standardized tests to the center of what goes on in schools, and as test scores are used for ever more punitive purposes. The story of how the data walls came to light is  particularly revealing, though.

Teachers and parents, outraged about the data walls, went to a school committee meeting to complain; at the meeting, the schools superintendent insisted that students’ names should never be used, and suggested that he’d be cracking down on individual teachers who were doing this bad thing. That contradicted testimony from a parent, Paula Burke, who said she’d directly requested that the superintendent “send a clear directive to ALL principals and teachers regarding the sharing of private student information,” but “This has not been done.” But it raised the very real possibility that teachers would be scapegoated for a practice to which they had first drawn attention. But then, Sarah Jaffe reports:

In response to his comments, the teachers released copies of a PowerPoint presentation given to teachers and paraprofessionals for kindergarten (yes, kindergarten) through third grade at Kelly Elementary School in Holyoke on October 11, 2013—at which Superintendent Paez delivered the welcoming remarks. The slides, provided to In These Times by teacher activists, clearly show sample data walls with students’ first names and in some cases, last initials.

Yes, the practice that the superintendent was all disapproving of in front of reporters and the school committee was drawn directly from a training he introduced. Whoopsies! But if teachers weren’t organized to fight back against practices that hurt their students and retaliation against themselves, this would be a different story. Already, the decks are stacked against teachers fighting back:

“The data walls really speak to a bigger problem,” Kaeppel says. The battle against data walls is just one fight in a broader war—everywhere, testing is replacing teaching time, and test scores are used to pressure students, to determine whether teachers can keep their jobs, and to rate schools as successes or as “failures,” with dire consequences. [Teacher Agustin] Morales points out that his students in Holyoke spend 27 days out of the 180-day school year taking standardized tests rather than learning. [...]

The constant exhaustion means that the union must prove to its members that a fight is worth the effort. That’s why [Educators for a Democratic Union, a progressive caucus within the Massachusetts Teachers Association] is trying to build solidarity through concrete victories—like the effort to fight the data walls in Holyoke. Kaeppel, who was one of [Barbara] Madeloni’s students at UMass, says that it seemed like a winnable fight to the Holyoke EDU members and their supporters from outside of the district, and has served to catalyze some parent support. Administrators, she says, assume that the lower-income parents in Holyoke are not involved with their kids’ schooling and won’t challenge school practices, but they got a surprise when parents and teachers spoke together at the school committee meeting.

But however outgunned by test-crazy politicians and billionaires, teachers and parents are there, in kids’ lives. The need to fight back is so obvious.

(Disclosure: My father is a member of EDU and has been involved in the campaign against Holyoke data walls. And background: I’ve written about Barbara Madeloni in the past.)

Continue reading below the fold for more of the week’s labor and education news.

Daily Kos

This week in the War on Workers: Teachers protest "data walls" that shame students