Day: August 31, 2019

  Maplewood High in Nashville is the only school in the nation with its own Firestone Service Center, and company officials say they had a constructive purpose in mind when they created it. Firestone spokeswoman Emily Weaver addressed Firestone’s intentions in an email Friday with The Tennessee Star. “One of the biggest challenges facing today’s workforce is the technical skills gap, partly created by a lack of accessible education opportunities for youth. To combat this challenge, Bridgestone Americas and Firestone Complete Auto Care are currently creating new pathways for students to explore automotive career paths through the centers at Maplewood High School in Nashville and East High School Community Learning Center in Akron, Ohio.” “With these institutions, Bridgestone and Firestone Complete Auto Care have developed a program that allows students to acquire specialized skills through enhanced automotive curriculum and the opportunity to shadow alongside highly skilled Bridgestone and Firestone Complete Auto Care employees. The goal is to provide students with the skills they need to not only be employable, but to be prepared for their personal and professional journeys. As a part of this, Bridgestone seeks to enrich the lives of those interested in an automotive career through training programs…

  Traditional methods of punishing public school students who act out in class oppress blacks and Latinos, according to a New York City-based education official who defends a much softer way of teaching them discipline. That person, Kesi Foster, said as much in a scholarly journal in 2015. And that’s the same soft approach members of the Metro Nashville Public School System use for their own minority students. As The Tennessee Star reported this week, Nashville officials use this method, Positive and Safe Schools Advancing Greater Equity, or PASSAGE for short. But, as of Friday, those same Nashville officials had yet to describe precisely how they discipline minority students under this program. Metro Nashville Schools’ spokeswoman Dawn Rutledge had yet to respond to our requests for comment. Members of the Metro Nashville School Board also had yet to respond. Much of the material available online about PASSAGE is long on jargon and short on specifics. But the same scholarly journal Foster wrote for, Voices in Urban Education, seems to give some insight as to how school officials in other cities administer PASSAGE. Christopher Marti, a Denver-based middle school science teacher, seems to say he and colleagues take a more politically…