Anthony J. Alvarado, the former chancellor of the New York City public-school system, has been named assistant to Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the aft announced last week.
Mr. Alvarado resigned in May 1984 after less than a year in the New York post, in the wake of findings that he had unethical financial dealings while in office.
Mr. Alvarado, who was a dark-horse candidate for the city’s top school post when he was picked in 1983, had previously served as a community-school superintendent in East Harlem. He was known as a dynamic innovator.
Since his resignation, Mr. Alvarado has been educational director of the Consortium for Worker Literacy, a New York-based operation for union members and their families.
At the 610,000-member aft, Mr. Alvarado will be responsible for edu-cation policy and the development of reform initiatives, according to the union’s announcement.
Terrel H. Bell, the former U.S. secretary of education, has agreed to serve as chairman of the 1986 National Commission on the Future of State Colleges and Universities, a panel established by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities in conjunction with its silver anniversary.
The months ahead will thus be busy ones for the former education chief, who continues to teach at the University of Utah and has also agreed to head a commission sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals to examine the characteristics of the effective school principal.
Thousands of New York City teachers hired last summer to offset anticipated shortages lack the requisite educational background and need additional training, accordinginued on Following Page Continued from Preceding Page
to the director of a union representing the city’s school principals.
Ted Elsberg, president of the 4,000-member Council of Supervisors and Administrators, said at the organization’s annual convention late last month that the board of education should hire more assistant principals to help “prepare and supervise” inexperienced teachers and should increase funding for staff-development programs.
Because most of the new teachers are unprepared, Mr. Elsberg said, they place an “unfair burden” on principals.
The board “searched across the country and Europe to fill 6,000 vacancies,” he said, but “filling classrooms is one thing. Creating competent professionals is another.”
I.J.K. Wells, supervisor of West Virginia’s segregated black school system from 1931 to 1951, has been named a “Distinguished West Virginian” by Gov. Arch A. Moore Jr.
Although he found the segregationist system distasteful, Mr. Wells said, he worked to make the best of it. He said his efforts were aided by the state’s “liberal attitudes and its people’s love of freedom.”
West Virginia was the first state to appoint a supervisor of black schools.
Since those days, Mr. Wells has worked to stimulate interest in African culture and now devotes most of his time to anti-poverty organizations.
If telephone “hotlines” exist for every need from magazine subscriptions to travel information, there should be a reliable, national phone line for youths who are “a step away from suicide,” the head of a youth-suicide-prevention group told federal lawmakers recently.
Alfred DelBello, former lieutenant governor of New York and co-chairman of the National Committee for Youth Suicide Prevention, recommended establishing such a national hotline in remarks last month before the House Education and Labor Committee’s subcommittee on elementary, secondary, and vocational education.
Meeting in Yonkers, N.Y., the subcommittee heard testimony on two proposals before the Congress aimed at reducing the nation’s rate of teen-age suicide.
According to Jay Butler, press secretary for the committee, a bill introduced by Representative Gary Ackerman, Democrat of New York, would require the U.S. Education Department to set up a three-year, $30-million grant program for suicide-prevention programs in schools. A second bill, introduced by Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, would establish a commission to study teen-age suicide.
Scott D. Thomson, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, has suggested that the nation’s film industry be taxed to pay for drug-education programs in the schools.
“The entertainment industry created the psychology of drug use. Now they can help schools to defuse the time bomb of drug abuse,” Mr. Thomson wrote in an editorial in the October issue of the nassp’s monthly newsletter, NewsLeader.
Asserting that entertainment-industry leaders “are hiding behind a big fig leaf of innocence,” Mr. Thomson said that a number of “drugel10lchic” films aimed at young audiences “seduce” the nation’s youths into drug use.
“The ‘soft’ use of drugs by entertainers in glamorous settings impresses young minds more surely than would bright marquee lights which proclaim, ‘Do drugs,”’ Mr. Thomson wrote.
Unless educators resist the growing movement to allow uncertified individuals to become teachers, they will be “overrun” by the unqualified, according to Arthur E. Wise, director of the Rand Corpora4tion’s Center for the Study of the Teaching Profession.
At a recent meeting of the North Carolina chapter of Phi Delta Kappa in Raleigh, N.C., Mr. Wise said “lateral entry” programs, which allow professionals in other fields to teach without professional training, jeopardize the status of trained and certified teachers.
The North Carolina Board of Education approved such a plan last August, but required as a condition for continued employment that participants enroll in a teacher-education program.
Mr. Wise called for the creation in every state of professional-standards boards for teachers similar to those in the medical and legal professions.
Charles Carney, a sophomore at the Cumberland Regional High School in Upper Deerfield Township, N.J., will not be able to return to his school’s all-girl field hockey team this fall, a state administrative law judge has ruled.
In September, school officials asked the boy to give up his spot on the girls’ varsity hockey team after the state education department suggested that allowing high-school boys to play on all-girl teams would harm the quality of girls’ ath-letic programs. Last year, the boy had played left wing for the girls’ junior-varsity team.
In a hearing this month, the judge denied an appeal by the American Civil Liberties Union that he be allowed to play, saying the boy would not suffer “irreparable harm” if he were sidelined until a January hearing on the case. The aclu is contending that the youth is being discriminated against on the basis of sex.
Although a federal judge ruled in her favor, her coach did not, so Jacqueline Lantz, the Yonkers, N.Y., high-school junior who wanted to play varsity football, has been sidelined for the rest of the season.
The judge hearing her discrimination suit against the state education department--over a rule barring boys and girls from competing together in certain contact sports--held last month that she must be allowed to practice with the team. But he said the ruling did not affect her ''eligibility.”
Meanwhile, after she had participated in five days of “noncontact” practice, the coach said she had not won a place on the team.
The New York State Board of Regents is expected to consider the merits of the sports rule in December.
