Sept 15/10 - Grading Teachers, AIDS in Saskatchewan, Peak Fish

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Whole Show Blow-by-Blow

It's Wednesday, September 15th.

The French Senate passed a bill banning the burqa-style Islamic veil.

Currently, the government's fear is that under every Burqa.... There's a Roma.

This is The Current.

Grading Teachers

Everyone wants a teacher like Linus' beloved Miss Othmar ... a teacher who inspires his or her pupils and instills in them a love of learning. But many children have sat in classrooms with teachers who don't make the grade. And so some education reformers are making the case that students should be graded on their classroom performance, teachers should also and on public record.

A series of articles published in the Los Angeles Times have opened up a heated debate on the subject in the United States. The newspaper used a statistical approach called "value-added analysis" to rate 6,000 elementary school teachers based on their students' results on standardized tests from one year to the next. We heard from L.A. Times reporter Jason Feltch.

California teachers' unions were so upset with the Times series that they called for a boycott of the newspaper. But others, including President Barack Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan, say grading teachers may not be such a bad idea.

Parents in Canada seem equally divided on the issue. Our producers stopped by schools in St. John's and Toronto as parents were picking up their children to quiz them on the subject.

We wanted to pick up this debate with our two guests. Peter Cowley is the Director of School Performance Studies for the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. And Mary-Lou Donnelly is the President of the Canadian Teachers' Federation in Ottawa.

Obviously, the people most affected by teachers are the students themselves, so we wanted to give a couple of elementary school students in Toronto a chance to weigh in too.

Well, no doubt many of you have strong feelings about whether or not teachers should be graded, so let us know what you think about this story.

PART TWO

AIDS in Saskatchewan

We started this segment with the voice of the new face of HIV AIDS in Saskatchewan. A young Aboriginal woman. Saskatchewan's rate of new HIV infections is double that of the rest of Canada. And it is affecting young people of Aboriginal descent. It is a shift Grant Devine warned about two decades ago when he was premier of the province, attending a meeting of First Nation chiefs.

A wake up call Grant Devine says led to action... economic development, land claims settlements, improvements to health care. But he admits there is far more work to do and what has been done by governments and native organizations has not helped everyone.

Krista Shore went from being a woman deadened by her diagnosis, to an outspoken activist, an advocate and educator in the HIV AIDS movement. But before contracting HIV she was one of the vulnerable ones Grant Devine talked about...the kind of person Dr Johnmark Opando sees too often. He is the deputy medical health officer for the Saskatoon Health region.

Krista Shore had a baby. And then a few years later, another. She also continued to inject drugs. A life already out of control spiraled further. Relationships crumbled. She was stabbed. But she struggled to hang on to the little bit of dignity she felt she still had. And then one day, she went to church.

And suddenly, it all mattered. Krista picked herself up, got help from friends and counselors. She went to social services and got on welfare. Everything was looking up. She started to take care of herself ... going to the dentist, the optometrist .. and the doctor.

Krista wasn't worried...she says even when she was high she was careful never to share dirty needles. And now she had stopped using. But she didn't know her partner at the time was HIV positive. Her test came back. And once again her life fell apart. And so ... for the second time in her young life ... Krista Shore found herself crawling up through a well of the darkest despair. A single mom with two kids, and now HIV positive. She sought help, counseling and support, from the All Nations Hope Aids Network, an organization for Aboriginal people. And in time she realized it didn't have to be a death sentence.

And that is precisely what she has done, becoming an advocate and activist. Then Krista became pregnant again. And her immediate fear was that she would transmit the virus to her child. She won't. The science has advanced to the point that when doctors know a woman has the virus, they can usually help her bring a healthy virus-free child to term.

The challenge, of course, is to reach other young First Nations women who are caught up in their own, traumatic life experiences and may not know, or may be afraid to know what they are risking. Those are the women Dr. Johnmark Opando and the others at the Saskatoon Health Region are trying to help.

Dr. Johnmark Opando is the deputy medical health officer for the Saskatoon region.
He can talk about the wider statistics and the efforts to help women live with the virus, and raise healthy children. And if .. for every one of those statistics, there is a story .. then Krista Shore's story is proof that the statistics don't have to be bleak.

And .. Krista Shore also let us know she is 18 weeks into her fourth pregnancy and all is going well.

Articles: First Nations conference exposes 'hidden epidemic' of HIV / Cash for HIV strategy in Saskatchewan absent; support groups disappointed

PART THREE

Peak Fish

We started this segment with a scene in 1992 when then-federal Fisheries Minister John Crosbie was confronted by protesters in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland .. after the government announced a moratorium on the northern cod fishery.The once-teeming stocks of cod that had fueled an entire economy and way of life for centuries had crashed catastrophically.

The collapse of the cod fishery was just one of the more spectacular examples of fish stocks that began an inexorable decline more than twenty years ago ... around the time that some scientists say the world passed what they call "peak fish".

And as Paul Greenberg sees it, if the world keeps feeding its seafood craving the way it has, it could spell the end of fish as a wild food. Paul Greenberg is a life-long angler and the author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, and he joined us from New York.

Last Word - Bieber Promo

Well, demographers in Canada are preoccupied with our aging population, but Canada's hottest export right now isn't even old enough to vote. But that hasn't stopped teen pop sensation Justin Bieber from having an impact on politics.

We'll be looking at the Stratford, Ontario heart throb's strange entry onto the U.S. political stage later this week on The Current, and we ended the program with the Current's producer, Howard Goldenthal, to explain what's in store.