Stephanie Banchero and Darnell Little:

irls in Illinois grade schools outperformed boys on every state achievement exam last school year, according to a Tribune analysis, a twist in performance that has perplexed state officials and educators across the state.
Historically, girls have scored higher than boys in reading and writing, while boys did better on the science and some of the math exams.
But while Illinois’ boys showed modest increases in most subjects and grades in recent years, girls have progressed much more rapidly, according to the 2007 Illinois State Report Card data made public Wednesday.

WKOW-TV:

Parents face challenges every day. Thats why 27 News created the Parenting Project. Its a resource of information for parents of children of all ages. Each week, the Parenting Project provides useful information from experts, professionals, and other parents. Learn about everything from teething… to teenagers… to recall alerts…to how to find more time in your busy day.

Watch the report: video or listen via this mp3 audio file.

Joe Richman:

What is it that makes us who we really are? Our life experiences or our DNA? Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were born and raised in New York City. Both women were adopted as infants and raised by loving families. They met for the first time when they were 35 years old and found they were “identical strangers”: they had been separated as infants as part of a secret research study of identical twins designed to examine the question of nature verses nurture. “When the families adopted these children, they were told that their child was already part of an ongoing child study. But of course, they neglected to tell them the key element of the study, which is that it was child development among twins raised in different homes,” Bernstein said. The results of the study, that ended in 1980, have been sealed until 2066 and given to an archive at Yale University. Of the 13 children involved in the study, three sets of twins and one set of triplets have discovered one another. The other four subjects of the study still do not know they have identical twins.

Will Okun:

“C’mon, Nick, it’s nothing bad. I just want to tell your parent what a great job you are doing thus far,” I confided.
“Well, you are going to have to tell me,” Nick asserted. “There is no one here but me. I am my own parent.”
Nicholas Bounds is one of the top students in my Senior English class. He attends school every day, and often arrives to our first period class early. He works dutifully in class and faithfully completes his homework every night. He writes with honesty, intelligence and intensity. He scored a 23 in Math on the ACT. Nicholas is a shining star in the otherwise stormy night of black male education in the West Side of Chicago.
Nicholas Bounds also lives in a homeless shelter for teenagers. Every day, he leaves the shelter at 7 a.m. for school and arrives back at 11 p.m. after his part-time job at U.P.S. He was telling me the truth; he has been his own parent since he was 15 and in the eighth grade.

Vanessa O’Connell:

Aryana McPike, a sixth-grader from Springfield, Ill., has a closet full of designer clothes from Dolce & Gabbana, Juicy Couture, True Religion and Seven For All Mankind. But her wardrobe, carefully selected by a fashion-conscious mother, hasn’t won her friends at school.
Kids in her class recently instructed her that she was wearing the wrong brands. She should wear Apple Bottoms jeans by the rapper Nelly, they told her, and designer sneakers, such as Air Force 1 by Nike. She came home complaining to her mother that “all the girls want to know if I will ever come to school without being so dressed up.”
Teen and adolescent girls have long used fashion as a social weapon. In 1944, Eleanor Estes wrote ““>The Hundred Dresses,” a book about a Polish girl who is made fun of for wearing the same shabby dress to school each day. The film “Mean Girls” in 2004 focused on fashion-conscious cliques among high-school teens. But today, guidance counselors and psychologists say, fashion bullying is reaching a new level of intensity as more designers launch collections targeted at kids.

Jeff Zaslow:

Last month, a boy asked my 16-year-old daughter to his school’s homecoming dance. She agreed to go, bought a new dress and made a hairdresser appointment.
The boy never bought tickets to the dance. Neither did his friends. They decided that attending homecoming wouldn’t be cool, and instead planned to just dress up that night, go out for dinner and then hang out with their dates at someone’s house.
My daughter was disappointed, as were her girlfriends. They would have loved to have been taken to the dance, to show off their dresses, to see and be seen.
At 6 p.m. on the night of the boycotted dance, about a dozen of these girls and their dates gathered in one boy’s backyard so a mob of parents could photograph them. I found it dispiriting. My heart went out to those girls — all dressed up with no place to go. Couldn’t we, as parents, have demanded that the boys take our daughters to the dance? Why did we stand there, clicking our digital cameras, saying nothing?
I live in suburban Detroit, but this phenomenon is playing out elsewhere in the country, too — a telling example of the indifference with which young people today view dating, chivalry and romance.

Chico Harlan, Hector Emanuel, Peter McBride:

NINE TEENAGERS STUFF THE LAST FIVE ROWS OF A BOEING 737, listening to the plane’s mechanical orchestra — the whistle of its warming engines, the hum of its slow taxi — scanning for alerts of doom. Eight of them have never flown before. All of them spend their days behind the barbed-wire fences of Oak Hill, the decaying youth detention center in Laurel reserved for the District’s worst male juvenile offenders.
Yet at 4:30 on this August morning, a white-painted Oak Hill bus with grated windows deposited the teens at Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport. For the next eight days, freedom will supplant regimen in their lives. No 7 a.m. wake-up calls. No sudden lockdown searches for contraband. No mandatory lights out. The teens will land in Phoenix and begin an adventure both ambitious and risky: In the wilderness of Arizona and Utah, they will pitch tents, hike canyons, leap from cliffs and paddle through rapids. The teens, some of whom can’t swim or have never seen mountains, will enter a different world. And then they’ll return to their own.

John Ensslin:

Denver Public Schools high school health clinics should be allowed to dispense contraceptives if the individual schools approve, a report on the system recommended Monday.
Birth-control options would include condoms, the morning-after pill and contraceptive pills. They would be dispensed with a parent’s approval.
A 21-page report by a task force studying Denver’s school- based health clinics makes several recommendations on expanding services provided by the 20- year-old system run with Denver Health. They include:
• Hiring more school nurses and part-time case managers.

Mark Perry:

Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
–Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943)

Catherine Donaldson-Evans:

Parents in Connecticut might be the ones getting the report cards if a proposed plan makes the grade at a Manchester public school district.
Steven Edwards, a Republican member of the Manchester Board of Education who’s up for re-election Nov. 6, wants parents to be evaluated on a handful of what he says are objective measures — including whether their children have done the homework and eaten a good breakfast.
“I tried to design something modest [measuring] things that virtually everybody would agree parents should do to help their kids,” Edwards said. “We don’t have our staff making any subjective evaluations.”
The idea has angered parents, and the local PTA vows to fight the plan.

Tyler Cowen:

This new Cato book is a good introduction to the empirical literature on vouchers and charter schools. For my taste it places too much weight on standardized tests, but admittedly that is the main way to compare educational results over time or across countries. I believe the lax nature of government schooling in the U.S. often leaves the upper tail of the distribution free to dream and create, but I would not wish to push that as an argument against vouchers. If you’re interested in bad arguments against vouchers, and their rebuttals, Megan McArdle offers a long post.

Pat Curtis:

Culver say nearly 50 percent of American high school graduates that want to pursue higher education, have to take a remedial course when they get to college. “In Iowa, we’re much better than that,” Culver said, “we do very well in terms of preparedness, but I want to be the best. One way I think to get there is to encourage districts across the state to adopt the core curriculum standards.”

Alexandra Rankin Macgill:

Parents today are less likely to say that the internet has been a good thing for their children than they were in 2004. However, this does not mean there was a corresponding increase in the amount of parents who think the internet has been harmful to their children. Instead, the biggest increase has been in the amount of parents who do not think the internet has had an effect on their children one way or the other. Fully, 87% of parents of teenagers are online — at least 17% more than average adults.
Parents check up on and regulate their teens’ media use, not just in terms of the internet, but with television and video games as well. However, those rules lean slightly more towards the content of the media rather than the time spent with the media device.

Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Jonah Rockoff and James Wyckoff: 227K PDF

No Child Left Behind, state assessment-based accountability policies and new routes into teaching have all had profound effects on the labor market for teachers. In this research we explore the how the distribution of teacher qualifications and student achievement in New York City have changed from 2000 through 2005 using data on teachers and students. We find: the gap between the qualifications of New York City teachers in high-poverty schools and low-poverty schools has narrowed substantially over this period, the gap-narrowing associated with new hires has been driven almost entirely by the substitution of teachers entering through alternative certification routes, for uncertified teachers in high-poverty schools, these changes resulted from a direct policy intervention eliminating unlicensed teachers, and perhaps most intriguing, much larger gains could result if teachers with strong teacher qualifications could be recruited.

http://www.caldercenter.org/.

Rama Lakshmi:

Neelamdevi Thakur lives in a working-class slum and earns a living washing dishes in middle-class homes twice a day. In the past year, two of her five children, who attend an affluent private school, have returned home speaking words that she had never heard from her other children, who study in government schools.
They have begun speaking English.
They point to the vegetables in their meal and say “turnip,” “cauliflower” and “radish” in English, a language that for many Indians denotes social status and opportunity. They sing nursery rhymes in English and refuse to take the tortilla-like Indian bread called roti to school for lunch, instead demanding sandwiches and noodles. The children, ages 5 and 7, now want to cut a cake on their birthday, like the other children in their classes.
“I don’t understand what they say, but my chest swells with pride every time they speak English. Their life will be far superior to mine,” Thakur said, wiping her moist eyes with the edge of her blue floral sari. She compares the two with her 12-year-old son, who attends a government-run school in the neighborhood. “He comes home with bruises, scars and broken teeth. His teachers are either absent or sit in class knitting sweaters,” she said.

Susan DeFord:

At schools across Maryland, educators and motor vehicle officials have teamed up to enforce a new state law that is the latest strategy to deter habitual truancy.
The measure, which took effect Oct. 1, denies a learner’s permit to students younger than 16 who have more than 10 unexcused absences during the prior school semester.
Whether they are in public or private school or are home-schooled, teens must submit a certified, sealed school attendance form as part of their application. The Motor Vehicle Administration will not accept forms from students if there is evidence of tampering or alteration, agency spokesman Buel Young said. The law probably will affect thousands of teenagers: In the last budget year, more than 14,500 16-year-olds earned provisional driver’s licenses.
A teenager must be at least 15 years, 9 months old before applying for a Maryland learner’s permit, and the driver must hold that learner’s permit for at least six months, Young said.

Tracy Jan:

Jairon Arias missed more than 40 days of school in the third grade, and when he did show up, he arrived one or two hours late. His classmate Cristian Posada was a recent immigrant from El Salvador and spoke limited English. Joel Ramos, the son of Salvadoran immigrants, also struggled with reading and writing because of his limited vocabulary.
All three were chosen at the beginning of the last school year as they entered the fourth grade to participate in a school system experiment to boost state test scores among Latino and African-American boys, the lowest achieving groups in the Boston public schools. Principals at 44 elementary, middle, and high schools chose 10 academically struggling boys to keep close tabs on through the school year.
The students in the so-called “10 Boys” clubs received extra tutoring, attended group lunches, and went on outings with their principals, with the goal of creating camaraderie and a support network that would help them score at the highest levels on the MCAS tests.
The program appears to have helped to bridge a persistent achievement gap between white and Asian students and their black and Latino peers, according to tests results released yesterday by the state Department of Education.

Clusty Search: 10 Boys Boston.

Stella Chavez:

A 7-year-old boy in Duncanville gets in trouble for telling a classmate to wear a darker shirt because he can see her bra strap. The school suspends him and labels the incident as sexual harassment.
In Keller ISD, school officials catch an eighth-grade girl holding hands with a friend and tell her to stop.
From bans on hugging to labeling comments as sexual harassment, schools are cracking down on anything that smacks of sex. Critics say teachers and administrators have become too fearful of lawsuits and have stopped letting kids be kids.
Recent precedent-setting lawsuits have made it clear that school officials must respond to complaints of student-on-student sexual harassment or face possible court action.
“I think it’s the kind of world we live in today, but you would hope that common sense would prevail,” said Jeff Horner, a Houston attorney who represents school districts.

Sam Roberts:

About 4 in 10 immigrants are moving directly from abroad to the nation’s suburbs, which are growing increasingly diverse, according to census figures released yesterday.
The Census Bureau’s annual survey of residential mobility also found that after steadily declining for more than a half-century, the proportion of Americans who move in any given year appears to have leveled off at about one in seven.
“For blacks, especially, it mimics the 50s-style suburban movement, most pronounced for married couples with children, owners and the upwardly mobile,” said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer.
Dr. Frey’s analysis of mobility patterns found that while Hispanic and Asian immigrants were more likely to settle first in the nation’s cities, “after they get settled, they follow the train to the suburbs.”

Yvonne Bynoe:

Could my son be accused of sexual harassment? He’s a good boy. He likes watching “Thomas the Tank Engine” on television and playing “Simon Says.” Like many 3-year-olds, he’s very affectionate. Unfortunately, hugging his teacher may get him suspended from nursery school.
I doubt that it will happen to my son. But the frightening fact is that it could. I recently learned that children nationwide, some of preschool age, have been suspended from school or taken to jail after being accused of sexual harassment. In their zeal to avoid lawsuits, educators seem to be ignoring important information, such as whether the accused child intended to commit a crime or even knows how to pronounce the word “harassment.”
Sex education tends to be controversial, partly because parents have such varying and often strongly held beliefs about how, when and even if the topic should be introduced to their children. But if schools have the authority to brand a 3-year-old a sex offender, they also have the responsibility to provide parents with clear guidelines about appropriate physical conduct.
It’s great that we are more aware than ever about sexual harassment in schools. But it is a terrible mistake to permanently label children who are barely out of diapers.

Todd Richmond:

In Wisconsin, the review found the licenses of 251 teachers were revoked during that five-year period for offenses ranging from overdue taxes to sex with students to drunken driving. The 44 sexual misconduct revocations represent 18% of those revocations and only a fraction of the 100,000 or so licensed educators who worked in Wisconsin classrooms each of those years.
By comparison, 26% of the nearly 10,000 teacher license revocations the review identified nationwide during that span were for sexual misconduct.

Jeff Opdyke:

It’s official: Parents hated homework as kids, and now they hate their kids’ homework.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the ridiculous amount of homework my son has these days — and the toll it is taking on our family time.
My inbox has since filled up with more than 1,000 emails from parents, teachers, principals and guidance counselors who unleashed a cumulative “thank you.”

Ian Shapira:

Charonda Godette and her mother are staring at a sheaf of black-and-white test reports in their kitchen, frustrated by a blunt indictment repeated over and over: “Fail/Does Not Meet.” In her first three years at Potomac Senior High School in Prince William County, the 17-year-old has flunked a slew of Virginia Standards of Learning exams: Earth science. Algebra II. And geometry — three times.
What also confounds Charonda and Carole Godette is something the reports omit. They do not show the number of correct answers required to pass the exams.
“If I know how many questions I need to get right, I can push myself more,” Charonda said. “You have to have a good plant in your mind that you have to do this to pass.”
With more students taking more achievement tests than ever, one of the most influential but cryptic factors driving results used to rate schools for the federal No Child Left Behind law and enforce state graduation standards is the passing, or “cut,” score. Numerous Washington area students and parents said in interviews that they do not know the cut scores, information they say would help them understand the test more and help them do better. Often, the benchmarks turn out to be lower than they might have guessed.
It also turns out that Virginia publishes and explains its cut scores on a Web site of which the Godettes were unaware. Virginia officials acknowledged that the information can be hard to find but said it is useful to parents who might be confused about the exams.

Doonesbury.

Dave Zweifel:

My assignment earlier this week was to “help” Marquette Elementary School Principal Andrea Kreft run her school.
No doubt I got in the way more than I helped, but for me it was an eye-opening experience that I highly recommend to others. The occasion was the Foundation for Madison Schools’ fourth annual “principal for a day” event. Dozens of local business, media and government people spent a morning with a Madison elementary, middle or high school principal to get a firsthand look at what goes on in their schools.
The experience demonstrated just how little so many of us really know about today’s schools and the challenges their students and staffs face.

Youtube.

Jim Wooten:

“Systems, I am convinced, are not afraid of accountability,” he said. How much control the local boards exercise depends on how much responsibility for doing their jobs they’re willing to take. If they fail, they risk losing authority over nonperforming schools. My preference, but not a part of the commission’s expected recommendations, would be that parents be given the full state funding share to buy the services their children need from any competent and willing provider of education services.
Alford’s panel is also attempting to determine precisely how much a quality education should cost and what portion should be borne by locals and by the state. Now it’s about 55-45, state-local.
The public education and funding model does need to change. As Alford noted, the current system was designed for a homogenous world that no longer exists. Georgia has 180 school systems and three times that many critical problems with them. The solution is statewide standards and local control, with accountability and consequences, even down to the individual school level.

Amy Hetzner:

The Menomonee Falls School Board held a closed-door session Monday to talk about the impact that decision might have on its continued involvement in the Chapter 220 integration program. The board met with attorney Steven Rynecki to talk about the potential risks for the program, board Vice President Anne Weiland said. As part of the 31-year-old Chapter 220 program, racial minorities living in Milwaukee can attend 23 suburban school districts and white students from those districts attend Milwaukee Public Schools.
“Our goal really was for him to give us his legal opinion as to how that case might or might not affect our own program, who potential litigants might be against our school district, what the likelihood of success might be if we were sued,” said Weiland, who also is an attorney. “Those were kind of classic legal opinions.”

Jan Hoffman:

Sorting fact from fiction, tragedy from comedy, fever from fevered performances is the venerable part of a school nurse’s job. But as childhood and adolescence have become increasingly medicalized, and schools have been mandated to accommodate students with an array of physical and psychological challenges, the school nurse’s role has expanded exponentially.
Now in her seventh year in this affluent suburb 20 miles west of Manhattan, Mrs. Palmieri regularly confers with the school’s social worker, guidance counselors, psychologist. A registered nurse with certification in school nursing, she is a front-line medical manager, first responder, diagnostician, confessor, shrink. She coordinates tutors for the housebound and leads Lunch Bunch sessions for girls to discuss puberty. Every year, she checks all students for height, weight, vision and scoliosis. Upon request, she checks for lice.
The lone nurse for 1,100 sixth, seventh and eighth graders, Mrs. Palmieri is also a comfort zone. At 52, this mother of four adult children has a plain-spoken, savvy warmth that calms these awkward, goofy fawns.

Peg Tyre:

For a while it seemed as though Forest Brook High School in Houston was a shining example of school reform. In 2005, after years of rock-bottom test scores, results shot up: 95 percent of eleventh graders passed the state science test. Administrators praised the hard work of the teachers. The governor awarded the school a $165,000 grant. But that same year, the Texas Education Agency hired a company called Caveon Test Security to ensure that the state’s standardized-test results were valid. Caveon—along with an investigative series by The Dallas Morning News—found a host of irregularities at Forest Brook. The state eventually cleared the school’s administrators but made sure last year’s testing was monitored by an outside agency. The scores at Forest Brook plunged Last year, only 39 percent passed science.
It’s a jarring but common story. While there have always been students who crib an answer or two, lately teachers, principals and school administrators are being snared for gaming—and sometimes outright cheating on—standardized tests. Under the six-year-old federal education-reform law No Child Left Behind, scores on statewide exams have become the single yardstick by which school success is measured. Struggling schools are being penalized—and some are even slated to be taken over if tests scores fail to rise. Teachers are under pressure to show that kids are learning more, and if they do that, even by fudging the results they can help their borderline school survive. Nowhere is that pressure more intense than Texas, the state that was the incubator for the federal law. In 2005, Caveon found that 700 public schools had suspicious test scores—and though all but a few schools were cleared, the state education commissioner resigned amid the controversy and new testing regulations were put in place.

Channel3000.com:

WISC-TV sports anchor George Johnson was principal for a day at East High School.
Johnson said playing principal was a unique and eye-opening experience.
Johnson said that he was surprised to see that when the national anthem was played, none of the students stood up during it.

Alan Borsuk:

Before your very eyes, ladies and gentleman, see the Incredible Shrinking School System.
Well, maybe it’s not incredible. But it is certainly shrinking.
It also continues, bit by bit, to become a district where the faces of the students are those of minority children.
Official attendance figures for this fall, released by Milwaukee Public Schools officials, show that the enrollment in the traditional MPS schools is down for at least the ninth year in a row.
Since 1998, the number of students in elementary, middle and high schools has declined from 96,942 to 81,381, a 16% drop.
Between a year ago and now, the drop was 3,522, or more than 4%.
Even the alternative and “partnership” schools that contract to educate MPS children – generally run by nonprofit organizations – have had declining enrollment over the past nine years.
Notably, one area showing increases is charter schools not staffed by MPS employees but authorized to operate by the Milwaukee School Board. They had 68 children in 1998 and 3,090 this fall.

Alan Borsuk:

So how much will teachers be paid in MPS under the contract proposal almost sure to be ratified by teachers and the School Board? When agreement between the bargaining teams was announced, we reported that the salary schedule for teachers would increase 2.5% this year and 2.5% next year, but we didn’t give details.
So here are a few:
Under the agreement, a starting teacher with only a bachelor’s degree will receive $34,858 in salary this year, up from $34,008 a year ago. A year from now, the figure will be $35,729.
A teacher with a master’s degree in the seventh year of working for MPS — a farily typical situation — was paid $48,350 a year ago. This year that will be $49,559 and next year it will be $50,798.
The highest possible straight-pay amount for a teacher in MPS would be someone with a master’s degree and 32 additional credits who is in at least the 16th year of teaching. Last year, such a teacher would have been paid $69,400; this year, the figure is $71,135; next year it is $72,913.

Diana Jean Schemo:

As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction.
For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.
For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.
But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.

Jacquelyn Mitchard
There have been a few people, in a life cram-jammed with the opposite message, who have told my second son that he was smart.
One of them, Donna Mahr, a math tutor in our tiny town, was the first.
She died just a couple of days ago.
…
How many lives did she transform?
How big are the boundaries of the universe? For every child she believed in, she gave comfort to a family whose heart was broken at the core. She gave hope to a family who knew, who KNEW, that their son or daughter had gifts that didn’t fit the traditional mold….
Despite the best efforts of the rather nice public school system in our town to prevent this, our son graduated with a low B average, in part because of Donna Mahr, who was an angel before she ever got her wings.

Jennifer Smith Richards & Jill Riepenhoff:

How can a child rapist still have a teaching license?
Why is a teacher who married his student still in the classroom?
How can a man who has been on trial four times for molesting children be allowed to teach?
The answer is simple and stunning: Ohio’s system to punish rogue teachers is flawed at all levels — school, district and state.
It puts the rights of teachers before those of students. It hides information from parents and potential employers. It allows secret deals with troubled teachers.
A 10-month Dispatch investigation, a first-of-its-kind analysis of the system, found that 1,722 educators have been disciplined since 2000 for everything from shoplifting to murder. Two-thirds were allowed to return to the classroom or start school jobs.

Via Mike Antonucci.
More here.

Leo Casey:

The defense of public education is not the defense of the status quo in public schools.
This is an important and essential truth that teacher unionists and other advocates of public education need to grasp. With very real enemies targeting education of, by and for the public, the temptation is to treat every criticism of public schools as a mortal threat, and to rush to the defense of ‘actually existing school systems’ and ‘actually existing schools,’ regardless of the merits of the criticisms. When we do that, too often we become apologists — unwitting apologists perhaps, but apologists nonetheless — for much of what actually harms public education, from dysfunctional bureaucracies and out of control testing to inept district leaderships and tyrannical school leaders.
The real defense of public education is the defense of the democratic educational values and vision which are central to the idea of public education. This is not some Platonic ideal: there are ample illustrations of that idea, those values and vision, in practice, and we should be highlighting and learning from those living examples. Moreover, when school districts and schools fall far short of that idea, we need to understand why, and figure out how they can be changed to realize the full potential of public schooling. In sum, the defense of public education demands of us a vision and a strategy for changing public schools and districts for the better, for the realization of the promise of public education — not an undifferentiated apology for whatever is.

Leo Casey:

The New York City Department of Education web site has had a dramatic facelift, with almost every new whistle and bell you could want.
If you want information and data on a school, you type the name into the conveniently located search engine, and it will take you to what is called a NYC DOE portal for that school. We searched Stuyvesant High School, and we were taken here. On the left hand side of the page there is a category “Statistics,” and if you click on it, it takes you to a page that has all of the DOE’s statistical reports. You can read the Stuyvesant High School’s Learning Environment Survey, its Quality Review Report, its School Report Card, its Budget, its Weekly Attendance, its Register, its Expenditure Report, its Galaxy Budget Allocations, its Table of Organization [with budget allocation], and its Building and School Facilities Report.
Everything you could want to know, right?
Well, we went looking for the most important statistic for a high school, its graduation rate. In previous years, the graduation rate was part of the school report card. But when you go to the School Report Card from this web portal, you find a truncated report, less than 1/3 the length of the old Report Card. Here’s the previous year’s Stuyvesant report card, with all of the graduation and drop out data on the last page. The new report card tells you what Stuyvesant’s students plan to do after graduation, just like last year’s report card does, but it manages to omit the information on how many students actually reach that goal.

Joseph Pereira:

Last spring, town officials in this affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary-school assignments for 38 streets — and sparked outrage. Some white families had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton’s lowest test scores.
Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I “just don’t feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school,” he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Mr. Keating says his effort wouldn’t have “much of a standing.”
Five decades ago, federal courts began forcing reluctant districts to use race-based assignments to integrate schools. But in June, a bitterly divided Supreme Court reversed course, concluding that two race-based enrollment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle were unconstitutional. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts declared.
Now, in an era when schools nationwide are becoming increasingly segregated, the ruling is affecting local school districts in ways large and small. Some districts are sidestepping the ruling by replacing measurements of race with household income. But many others, such as Milton, are adjusting their programs in the face of opposition that’s been emboldened by the Supreme Court decision.
In Georgia, the Bibb County School District, which encompasses Macon, has decided to abandon a balancing plan between whites and minorities at one of its top magnet schools next year. A broader school-board redistricting plan aimed at promoting integration is facing a host of opposition, including a threat of legal action by a lawyer citing the Supreme Court decision.

Samuel Freedman:

During my own 20 years of observing and writing about public education in New York, I’ve seen firsthand how exasperatingly difficult it has been for principals to oust abusive, incapable or negligent teachers who are protected by a powerful union. Instead, some principals would privately agree to swap problem teachers in a process known as “trading turkeys.” Others would offer such teachers a positive rating if they used their seniority to transfer to a different school.
The transfer rules were ended in 2005, under an agreement between the city and the teachers’ union. That same accord also slightly streamlined the process of bringing termination cases before an arbitrator. But I’ve also reported on examples of quality teachers persecuted by insecure or dictatorial administrators for being active in the union, speaking to the press or merely having independent views on curriculum. Not every teacher in the rubber room deserves the fate, even if some surely do.
Arbitrators and courts will weigh the evidence in each case. So why are those who have been charged, but not convicted, consigned to places like the eighth-floor room at 333 Seventh Avenue, which seem intended to mete out punishment long before any verdict has been issued?

Anneliese Dickman:

How many times have you heard of a lucky duck who wins the lottery, just to squander it all and return to his old work-a-day self? I’m sure those guys thought winning the lottery would turn their luck around forever.
Just like education reform proponents who are fond of calling school choice a “panacea” think that winning a voucher or attending a private school automatically results in a better student.
Well, there is new evidence that offering a choice isn’t, by itself, going to effect education reform. A newly released study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (authored by Julie Berry Cullen of UC-San Diego and Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan) attempts to focus on the “lottery” effect of school choice by tracking, over time, students who won the ability to choose their Chicago public schools in Kindergarten or first grade. By also following students who did not win, they are able to avoid what is the biggest hurdle to good research on the effect of school choice…non-random selection.
Here in Milwaukee vouchers are not awarded randomly to families. In our city, parents first must find a school, then apply for a voucher seat at that school. Only if there are more applicants than seats will random selection kick in, and even then, the student is only competing against the other students who have chosen that school…they are not in a pool with students choosing other schools. Not a random situation at all. (Which is not to say it isn’t in the students’ and schools’ best interests to operate the program that way, just that it is difficult to research rigorously due to this.)

“Madtown Chris”:

For those folks so enamored of the various suburban “great schools” you should make sure you look at the facts. Specifically, I’m pretty amazed at the relatively poor performance of Waunakee HS. It’s down in the 66th percentile statewide. That’s not terrible but it’s not a super-dooper school either. Contrast it with West HS which is in the 99th percentile statewide and, in fact, the 4th best high school in Wisconsin (according to my analysis, etc, etc)
Anyway for the most part, the high schools do pretty well. I would say anything above 80th percentile statewide is pretty good. Who knew that Wisconsin Heights HS was so good? I don’t even know where it is! It got on this list because the district was in the area. It probably helps that they only have something like 95 students in 10th grade.

Singapore News:

Singapore’s National Institute of Education (NIE) and Vietnam’s National Institute of Education Management have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to set up a centre to train education professionals in Hanoi.
Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Training Professor Dr Nguyen Thien Nhan and Singapore’s Education Minister and Second Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam witnessed the signing.
The Centre will focus on leadership training for Vietnam’s school principals, professional development for educational administrators and English language training.

Singapore Mathematics & Mathematics Education Academic Group.

Gerald Cox:

The reality is that more money and better teachers mean little to a black student if his or her parents do not instill a desire for knowledge and create a context for academic success in the home. To quote Wendell Harris, the education committee chairman of the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP, “We can’t keep making excuses for parents.” Rich school district or not, a child is only as good as the support his or her parents provide.
The number of black students admitted to our university will not substantially increase until black communities and families are unified in a determination to increase it themselves.

Paul Graham:

If the best hackers all start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. Most of these changes will be for the better. I think the experience of college is warped in a bad way by the expectation that afterward you’ll be judged by potential employers.
One of the most obvious changes will be in the meaning of “after college,” which will change from when one graduates from college to when one leaves it. If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree? We don’t encourage people to start startups during college, among other things because it gives them a socially acceptable excuse for quitting, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. Some of the most successful companies we’ve funded were started by undergrads.
I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I’m alarmed to be saying things like this, but there’s nothing magical about a degree. There’s nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. These can certainly affect your life—it’s hard to get into grad school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less.
As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will also start to matter less where they go to college. In a startup you’re judged by users, and they don’t care where you went to college. So in a world of startups, elite universities will play less of a role as gatekeepers. In the US it’s a national scandal how easily children of rich parents game college admissions. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by reforming the universities but by going around them. We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don’t beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.
The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps even the classes so much as the other students you meet there. If it becomes common to start a startup after college, people may start consciously trying to maximize this. Instead of focusing on getting internships with companies they want to work for, students may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders.

San Francisco Chronicle:

Geoff Caldwell,
San Francisco
I believe in the technical school method that the British and French use. Academics are not for all. I have had students who had exceptional skills in what we consider trade skills. They are probably making more money now than I do as a teacher. Fourteen should be the decision age.
Alejandro Macias,
San Francisco
Yes, because education is what allows them to stand out.
Peter Carey, San Bruno
Of course they should. I had to – why not them? The downside of an unhappy child does not outweigh the benefit of an education.

The Economist:

AS THE 58,000 pupils of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) begin a new school year, their teachers are adjusting to a controversial new boss. Michelle Rhee, a rookie superintendent, is an unusual choice to run one of the worst school systems in America. She is the youngest chancellor ever of DC’s public schools and the first non-black to run the system in four decades. But the most interesting aspect of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s choice is that Ms Rhee is an alumna of an outfit called Teach for America.
Only about half of Americans growing up in poverty complete high school, and those who do reach only an eighth-grade standard. In an effort to solve that problem, Teach for America (TFA) recruits top college graduates—usually people without teaching qualifications or experience—and asks them to spend two years teaching some of the nation’s poorest children. “We need fundamental systemic change and we believe our people can help be a force for that,” says Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder and CEO.