The most shocking thing about sexual relationships between students and teachers is how ordinary they seem to be

 

It's a staple of the metro section, the teacher apprehended for sexual conduct with a student. Sometimes it's assault, sometimes statutory rape. If the teacher is a woman, and preferably a blonde--that is to say, "a babe"--the story will fill hour after titillating hour on Inside Edition and CNN.

 

While the sensationalism may seem rank, the sheer multitude of claims suggests that teachers are engaging in sexual behavior with their pupils as a matter of course. An Education Week survey of media and databases back in 1998 counted 244 such incidents in a six-month period. (That organ, not unreasonably, favors the term "abuse.") Yet the Seattle Times uncovered 159 incidents involving school athletic coaches over a decade, in Washington state alone. Meanwhile, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer revealed dozens of sex-abuse reports in state and national schools for the deaf. Unreported cases, one presumes, dwarf these numbers.

 

Media stories about this obviously common phenomenon tend toward the sober, the salacious, and the hysterical. What makes BBC Radio 4's recent half-hour documentary on the subject extraordinary, then, is how nonjudgmental reporter Rosie Goldsmith chooses to be. (A British survey suggested that one in twenty students has had sexual relations with a school instructor.) Not all of the four or five speakers in "Married to Teacher" look favorably on what occurred--but then a few of them decidedly do. One of the more plaintive, and typically thoughtful, comments comes from a man who recalls that the relationships he had after an affair with his 42-year-old art teacher struck him as "childish." He wasn't devastated, just cheated out of the dizzy experiences of youthful romance.

 

Perhaps the most radical thing about this radio piece is that it presents teacher-student affairs as something that happens all the time--not a freakish aberration of the five o'clock news. You can listen to the story here (look in the middle/left-hand column for "Married to Teacher").

Who will the DFL back to take on St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly?

The DFL convention is tomorrow morning at Arlington High School. By most accounts the contest between Ramsey County Commissioner Rafael Ortega and former city council member Chris Coleman remains a toss up.

Coleman has garnered support from many of the city's political heavyweights, most notably former mayor George Latimer and retired police chief William Finney. The conventional wisdom from the outset has been that Coleman stands the best chance of raising sufficient cash to go toe-to-toe with Kelly in November.

Ortega has countered by tacking to Coleman's left, running on a populist, progressive message. His lefty rhetoric is undoubtedly more in tune with most of the DFL faithful who will be attending tomorrow's convention. Ortega seems to have picked up momentum as the campaign has progressed, handily defeating Coleman at the final ward convention.

The Pioneer Press had a nice rundown of the race in today's paper. I'll have a post-mortem in next week's City Pages.

The price of intensive therapy? Astronomical. Of banning eyeliner? Why, nearly free!

The PiPress's homepage today carries a contradictory pair of disjointed messages about teens and violence. The top tale, complete with a full-color photo of a sneering young goth, announces that White Bear Lake has "drawn the line" on eyeliner.

A White Bear teenager's heavy use of eyeliner at school this week pitted him against school administrators who argue that the look is a distraction to learning and could be interpreted as violent.

A little further down the page, we hear--finally--about the precarious state of Red Lake High School shooter Weise's mental health and the absolute lack of help he got for his extensive problems. 

One area that federal authorities will not be investigating, though, is the adequacy of the mental health care that Weise received, Heffelfinger said. Family members and psychiatrists have said Weise's life was one risk factor piled atop another, and that he should have had intensive therapy.

Online, he had written about being physically and verbally abused as a child, and family members have said they knew of some of it. As a youth, he had been moved from the reservation to the Twin Cities and back again. In the short span of 19 months, he lost his father to suicide and saw his mother placed in a long-term care facility after suffering brain damage in a car crash.

He attempted suicide last summer, and after being diagnosed with depression, he was prescribed Prozac, an antidepressant. Cook said Weise's daily dosage was doubled to 60 milligrams a day ? considered a heavy dose for an adolescent ? two weeks before the shootings.

Just in case you haven't gotten your daily dose of cognitive dissonance.
 

Health insurers lagging behind the rest of the S&P

Five years of "expanding margins" for shareholders in appear to be coming to a halt. It seems that the industry, which miraculously has flourished even as health care costs have skyrocketed, can't come up with enough new enrollees to keep passing out fat dividends to shareholders. One of the bellwethers, according to the New York Times: Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth.

UnitedHealth, the second-largest managed care company, reported that it had added fewer members in the first quarter than it forecast. Some investors paid more attention to that than to the 41 percent profit increase UnitedHealth reported for the quarter.

UnitedHealth was showing the effects of a national trend. Although 175 million Americans are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance, further declines in manufacturing jobs and a spotty economic recovery have braked increases in enrollment. And by the latest count, the number of people without health insurance has risen to 45 million.

Lest you fret over what this means for CEO Bill McGuire (who is, after all, earning $124.8 million this year), there's some good news: Congress' passage of Medicare drug coverage is expected to open up a whole new revenue stream.

If you still think obesity, smoking, and a sentimental inability to pull grandma's plug are behind the health care funding crisis, read this.

But if you're one of the poor working saps who has no insurance, well...okay--it's not good news, but there's a glimmer of hope. Read this.

Al Franken buys Mill City condo; eyes 2008 "Purple State" Senate run 

Salon's got a rambling interview with the comic today in which he and various pundits handicap his chances of unseating Republican Norm Coleman. The talking heads like his chances; but then, apparently, they liked Howard Dean's chances, too.

"He has national reach; his name and who he is will attract small contributors and large contributors from all over the country, so a lot of little folks too," says Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. "In that way he's like the Dean campaign because he's really somebody that can energize not just Minnesota but around the country, to get involved and contribute."

Yes, you have to sit through a brief ad to get a site pass. Is it worth it? You decide.

Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak on pot smokers [via the Strib]: "You're paying to put a bullet in the head of a kid in north Minneapolis."

Just give me the numbers, would ya?

The death rattle of mainstream media hasn't reached deafening levels quite yet, though recent studies showing the steady decline in viewership/readership of the blogosphere's main target (the maligned "MSM") is causing bloggers to run victory laps around their laptops. According to a recent study published in the Wilson Quarterly (via Buzzmachine), daily newspaper circulation dropped from 62.3 million in 1990 to 55.2 million in 2003. Young people, apparently, are yawning over the content or have jumped ship for the internet: Thirty-nine percent of 30-49 year olds claimed they read a paper yesterday, while only 23 percent of 18-29 year olds put their nose in a paper.

The current edition of the Carnegie Reporter reveals that between 1997 and 2000, the percentage of 18-24 year olds who say they read yesterday's paper dropped by 14 percent. This could be why the Pioneer Press, whose daily circulation reached an all-time low  of 186,635 in 2002, abandoned its quest to convert the coveted and increasingly disinterested young adult market into daily readers and instead is charging after married women by offering, among other things like lifestyle stories, companies more opportunities to advertise. It's a known fact, after all, that when companies have more opportunities to smother them with advertising, all women celebrate by reading newspapers and throwing catered Pampered Chef parties. Let's open the windows so we can hear the constant clamor of advertising coming from outside! Yea!

Yet if readers are leaving behind newspapers in record numbers, it's not because they no longer trust journalists, as much as bloggers would like to believe that's the case. In a study recently released by the Missouri School of Journalism's Center for Advanced Social Research, 62 percent of people surveyed believe journalists are credible, though 74 percent say journalists favor one side when covering politics. (Couldn't the real problem of mainstream media be that journalists are forced to "pretend" that they don't have an opinion for the sake of standards that no longer apply?)

Part of the appeal of blogs, aside from offering instantaneous news and commentary, is that most of the writers aren't shy about their affiliations or motivations. (And as we know, some of them are so closely tied to certain parties that they've actually been paid to blog.) While there are no numbers to show how much time 18-34 year olds are reading blogs for news, the same study in the Carnegie Reporter says that 18-34 year olds spend 130 minutes a week reading online news. Still, that doesn't mean offering more online content is the cure for ailing daily papers: Twenty-one percent of 18-29 year olds admit to getting their news from the Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. And really, if porn qualifies as "internet news," then Paris Hilton talking about current events (losing her dog is "news," after all) on Saturday Night Live is, like, totally investigative reporting and stuff.

Is the American press wearing a blindfold? Is the European press anti-Zionist?  

From Donald Macintyre in today's edition of the Independent (U.K): "Israeli settlers poisoning our sheep, say West Bank farmers"

Earlier in the month, the story actually warranted balanced coverage in the Jerusalem Post.

For a long and somewhat useless parsing of the NYT's coverage of the Israel-Palestine Bed-In, check out Daniel Okrent in last Sunday's Op-ed section.

(To offer the briefest and most subjective answers to the two questions posed in the subhead above: Yes, and yes.)

A few years back Hannah Allam was covering cops and courts for the Pioneer Press. Since the invasion of Iraq she's been reporting from the war zone for Knight Ridder, filing some of the most compelling--and forthright--Baghdad dispatches. (Here's a particularly swell example.) She was recently interviewed by Brooke Gladstone, of public radio's "On The Media." Here's a choice tidbit:

Read the whole transcript.

A bigger menace than drugs and alcohol?

That seems to be an emerging consensus. Exhibit one: The Pi Press reports that University of Minnesota researchers have found that sober people punching buttons on their car radios or talking on cell phones perform worse in driving skills tests than drunks. Exhibit two: The Guardian reports that  "the distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers."