TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Brown v. Board of Education National Historic site will display a black doll used in a series of famous race studies to mark the 59th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended legal segregation in public schools.

In the years before the May, 17, 1954, ruling, husband-and-wife psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark presented children with a black doll and a white doll as part of a series of social science experiments. The black couple then asked the children which doll was the nicest, smartest and prettiest. The Clarks said the system of racial segregation at the time was the reason most chose the white doll.

The doll, which was donated to the historic site last year, will be on display from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday. Eventually, the National Park Service plans to place the doll on permanent display after securing funding for an exhibit that will safeguard it and educate the public about the research, superintendent David Smith said.

The Clarks testified about their research in a South Carolina school desegregation case. That case was combined with other desegregation cases from Topeka, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C., which were argued collectively before the Supreme Court.

The doll research influenced the court, with Chief Justice Earl Warren writing that separating children “solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”

Even today, the doll studies have remained relevant. In 2005, teen filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the experiment in Harlem, N.Y., as part of the short documentary “A Girl Like Me,” finding the preference for the white doll persisted. After Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president, ABC’s “Good Morning America” tried another version of the experiment.

“If we could pick one object to symbolize the essence of Brown v. Board of Education, we would choose this doll,” Smith said in a news release. “Tangible artifacts such as this doll make the story real and believable.”

Also Friday, the Brown site will highlight several initiatives it’s undertaking to teach the public about the case and the civil rights movement. Those efforts include bus tours of Topeka sites tied to the Bleeding Kansas era and the civil rights movement.

The Brown site is located in the former all-black Topeka school where the lead plaintiff’s daughter and another plaintiff’s child were students.
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Mr. Mumford, who worked in the Memphis City Schools district for more than two decades, initially refused a settlement offer on conspiracy and aggravated theft charges. But he pleaded guilty to the two counts of a 63-count indictment in February, and in Federal District Court on Monday, Judge John T. Fowlkes of the Western District of Tennessee handed down the prison sentence and ordered him to pay a $167,339 fine.

Prosecutors said that for 15 years, Mr. Mumford had doctored driver’s licenses and enlisted teachers to impersonate others in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee at exams that many states require for teaching licenses.

A sweeping federal investigation found that Mr. Mumford’s scheme involved 36 people, including Mr. Mumford’s son, Clarence Jr., who had a stand-in take a test for him, and Cedrick Wilson, a former wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers who worked as a substitute teacher in Memphis. Between 1995 and 2010, prosecutors said, the senior Mr. Mumford collected more than $120,000.

At the hearing on Monday, two witnesses told Judge Fowlkes that they had paid Mr. Mumford thousands of dollars for someone to take a test on their behalf. Another witness, Devin Rutherford, the head coach at White Station High School in Memphis, said he had taken tests for others and been paid by Mr. Mumford.

Mr. Mumford is the ninth defendant in the case to be sentenced. Three others, including Mr. Mumford’s son, are awaiting sentencing. The longest sentence other than Mr. Mumford’s was an eight-month term given to John Bowen, a substitute teacher from Memphis who took several exams on behalf of others.

Coleman W. Garrett, Mr. Mumford’s lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

In a telephone interview, Edward L. Stanton III, the United States attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, said that Mr. Mumford was motivated by “greed and financial gain.”

“We believe his brazen conduct spoke volumes about his disregard for the educational system,” Mr. Stanton said.
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Buena Vista schools have been closed for five days already, and on Monday, the district’s website stated that the school would be closed until further notice. For good reason, this decision has parents, and the community, up in arms.

The problem in Buena Vista is that the school district, educating approximately 450 kids, is out of money. All the teachers have been laid off and a financial emergency has been declared. The district has suffered from declining enrollment, which, in turn, has led to a loss of $3 million in state funding since 2010.

In an effort to keep schools open, teachers said they would work without pay. This is not possible under Michigan law so educators have been left in limbo. To make matters worse, the staff has also lost their health insurance.

The Buena Vista School District website states that they consider it their “highest calling to be entrusted with the care and education of the community’s children.”

This sounds nice, but what about the students left hanging with unfinished class work? This lingering question has yet to be answered.

In the midst of the chaos, parents have been trying to transfer their children to other districts. Given the school year is almost over, it’s not the most opportune time for kids to switch schools. Some nearby districts are looking at every student on a case-by-case basis.

The Buena Vista School District isn’t the only district in Michigan—or across the country—that is having financial trouble. The public school financial crisis looms in almost every state.

Michigan’s Pontiac School District was nearly in the same position as Buena Vista. On Friday, it couldn’t make payroll. Over the weekend, however, the state accepted a hastened reworked deficit reduction plan created by the Pontiac school board.

In Arkansas, two schools—the Helena-West Helena School District in the impoverished Delta region and Pulaski County School District in the Little Rock area—were told Monday that they would remain under state control due to lack of funds.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest school district, high deficits have caused the district to request cash from the state. Without the money, the schools could be in jeopardy during the 2013-14 school year.

“If these dollars don’t come to the district—and soon—we may face the real prospect of not seeing school doors open in any meaningful way this fall. If that sounds scary, it should,” Anthony Williams, a Pennsylvania state senator, wrote in a column for The Philadelphia Tribune. “No one I know wants Philadelphia to have the distinction of having the largest U.S. school district to declare bankruptcy.”

In Pennsylvania, urban school districts like Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Reading, and York lost 10 times more in state aid than affluent school districts in recent years. About $860 million in school funding cuts will likely result in more distressed school districts.

“In 2011, Gov. Tom Corbett slashed nearly $1 billion from Pennsylvania’s public schools, creating a school funding crisis that is getting worse every year these unprecedented cuts are not restored,” the Pennsylvania State Education Association states on its website.

Mike Crossey, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, has blamed ideological politics for the funding crisis.

“If the governor was serious about addressing the school funding crisis he created two years ago, he would target sustainable funding to our students rather than use their education as leverage to promote his ideological agenda,” Crossey said in a February news release.

Regardless of politics, in Michigan, state and local education officials met late Monday to try and figure out a plan for Buena Vista students. One possibility? Officials may try to use federal funds to run summer camps to help students make up missed class work.

Regardless of what happens this summer, Buena Vista’s website states that, at this time, it’s impossible for them “to predict whether the District will be in a position to enroll students next year.”

One good piece of news: At least seniors will be able to graduate in June.
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Invoking emergency powers under Greek law, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has threatened teachers with arrest and dismissal if they begin a planned walkout on Friday that would disrupt university entrance exams, as he tries to show Greece’s foreign lenders that Athens is sticking to unpopular reforms.

This is the latest in a string of anti-austerity strikes since the country adopted severe budget and wage cut measures as part of its international bailout in 2010.

But fewer and fewer workers have been heeding trade union calls to down tools because the strikes have failed to stop the government from implementing austerity measures and increasingly impoverished Greeks cannot afford to lose more wages.

“This is our response to the government’s authoritarian policies against high-school teachers,” public sector union ADEDY said in a statement, demanding a meeting with Samaras.

“These decisions are creating an explosive situation in the education sector with the victims being the teachers as well as students and their parents.”

Teachers, doctors and local administration workers are to rally in central Athens around 0700 GMT (3 a.m. EDT). Municipal and local tax offices are expected to be shut during the 24-hour strike by ADEDY.

The union is also planning a four-hour work stoppage on Thursday in solidarity with protesting teachers. The country’s largest private sector union, GSEE, will join the stoppage on Thursday.

The conservative-led coalition wants teachers to put in two more hours of work each week to reach the average levels of high school teachers’ working hours in Europe, and transfer 4,000 of them to remote parts of Greece to plug staffing gaps.

These measures would allow the government to dismiss about 10,000 part-time teachers when their temporary contracts expire, teachers’ union OLME said, calling for the 24-hour strike on Friday and rolling strikes next week.

The government invoked emergency powers on Sunday to block the teachers’ strike, using a law that allows it to forcibly mobilize workers in the case of civil disorder or natural disasters.

Police started distributing the orders on Monday, forcing teachers to go to work on Friday or face arrest and dismissal.

GSEE and ADEDY represent more than half of Greece’s workforce, which has been shrinking rapidly, reflecting the pain caused by the crippling recession after years of austerity.

“We are protesting against a government that continues its anti-democratic slide by implementing the usual, cruel measure of precautionary civil mobilization, with which it has replaced dialogue,” GSEE said.

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Harry Papachristou; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
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The Mill Creek Community School Corp. said the four — three men and a woman — were back in the classroom Tuesday, but won’t return to their coaching roles.

School officials said an investigation into the May 1 incident in which the coaches made students “bear crawl’’ — do laps hunched over on their hands and feet, causing some students to have blisters on their hands — was completed Tuesday.

“After gathering and investigating facts surrounding the incident that occurred, it has been determined that there was no intent to cause harm to students,” the school corporation said in a statement.

Sean Adams, Rosie Fakes, Josh Hagonow and Nicholas Puckett resigned their coaching jobs after the school corporation asked them to do so, said Linda Stinson, executive assistant to the school superintendent.

But following an investigation, school officials said “there was no evidence that :the extracurricular incident that occurred would carry over to the classroom.”

In a statement released shortly after the incident, the school district apologized to the students’ parents and assured them that officials “do not condone, nor will tolerate” such behavior from school employees. The coaches had been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

Students on the track team were split on the decision Tuesday afternoon.

Sophomore Mac White, 16, said media focus on the incident meant the teachers’ resignations as coaches “had to be done.”

But 18-year-old Eli Harrison, who did the punishment May 1, disagreed.

“They still shouldn’t have lost their coaching jobs, because the punishment wasn’t that severe,” he said.

According to Tuesday’s statement, the teachers will focus on “moving forward on effective teaching and student learning.”

The quiz, dated Feb. 28 and titled “Dinosaurs: Genesis and the Gospel,” was posted to Reddit’s r/atheism forum by user Puskunk on April 21. Puskunk claims the quiz is from a private religious school in South Carolina but doesn’t identify the institution because “it is a small school and I don’t want any publicity that might reflect badly on the kid” who took the test.

The student evidently scored 100 percent on the test, answering “False” to statements such as “The Earth is billions of years old” and “Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago,” among other bizarre questions.

The photo sparked a huge debate on the r/atheism thread. Many Redditors question whether the test is real; others claimed they had been taught similar lessons by creationists.

Snopes.com, a site that often works to verify or debunk viral pictures and videos, said the photo is “probably” legitimate, but further evidence “remains to be seen.” The quiz’s content seems, however, to line up with the views of creationist groups like Answers in Genesis, which produces an educational DVD with the same title as the quiz.

A reader even emailed Snopes to say that the quiz belonged to his 10-year-old daughter. “She will not be attending the school next year,” he wrote.

The reader also sent in a picture of the back of the quiz, which included this question: “The next time someone says the earth is billions (or millions) of years old, what can you say?” Answer: “Were you there?”

While creationism has not historically been a part of the public school science curriculum in America, a 2012 Gallup poll reported that 46 percent of Americans said they believe in creationism. Even as some states weigh whether to allow creationism in public school text books, scientists have been ramping up their criticism of the belief.

Scientist and entertainer Bill Nye weighed in, telling the Associated Press in September: “The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It’s not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.”

One person who would doubtless be upset about the quiz is Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, who has said teaching creationism is akin to a mild form of child abuse and that it mirrors the tactics of the Taliban.