Susan Troller:

The backers of the Studio School were given permission by the Madison school board last year to pursue the planning grant.
Donahue said the proposed Studio School will focus on providing a school-wide, arts rich curriculum for elementary school students. It would be chartered with the Madison school district in a way similar to the district’s very successful dual immersion Spanish language school, Nuestro Mundo Inc., or its other charter school, Wright Middle School. Both schools focus on issues of multi-culturalism and integrating social action into the curriculum.

More on the Studio School.

Danah Boyd:

Facebook implemented a new feature called “News Feeds” that displays every action you take on the site to your friends. You see who added who, who commented where, who removed their relationship status, who joined what group, etc. This is on your front page when you login to Facebook. This upset many Facebook members who responded with outrage. Groups emerged out of protest. Students Against Facebook News Feeds is the largest with over 700,000 members. Facebook issued various press statements that nothing was going to change. On September 5, Mark Zuckerberg (the founder) told everyone to calm down. They didn’t. On September 8, he apologized and offered privacy options as an olive branch. Zuckerberg invited everyone to join him live on the Free Flow of Information on the Internet group where hundreds of messages wizzed by in the hour making it hard to follow any thread; the goal was for Facebook to explain its decision. In short, they explained that this is to help people keep tabs on their friends but only their friends and all of this information is public anyhow.

Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater:

Twenty-two year old Louisa Brayton stepped before her class of 12 students to begin the first day of school. It was not only her first day but also the first day for all of her students and more importantly the first day of school in Madison Wisconsin. It’s March, 1838 and school will be in session for only two months.
How times have changed! School now operates all year.
After school ended last June, over 4,000 children continued in school for the following six weeks. Some attended because they needed extended time to learn and to reach a level where they will be successful next year; others took courses to extend their knowledge in their area of interest. Many of the students who attended our morning summer program continued at school in the afternoon in recreation programs conducted by our own Madison School & Community Recreation (MSCR) department.

Linda Shaw:

Washington’s two newest online schools didn’t know how many students to expect when they announced they would open their virtual doors this fall. Leaders cautiously hoped for 250, maybe 300 as a start.
They were low — way low. As school starts, the two public schools are happily struggling to handle double and triple that number.
Insight School of Washington, the state’s first fully online high school, stopped accepting students after 650, and has 1,000 more who’ve expressed interest. The Washington Virtual Academy, a K-8 based in Steilacoom, has 652 students registered, and another 500 in the application pipeline.
It’s another spurt in the growth of online learning in Washington state, where more than 9,000 students took one or more online classes last year.
Going to school via computer is “not for most kids,” said Bill Finkbeiner, executive director of Insight School, a partnership between a Portland company and the small Quillayute Valley School District in Forks. “Most students are going to do better in traditional high schools. But there are a significant percentage of students who don’t fit in to a regular high school and, for many of them, this is a good option.”

Maria Sacchetti:

One Needham teacher gushed about the time a student worried that Australia would fall off the planet — and how that led to a lesson on gravity. A Brookline teacher banned the word “stuff” from her fourth-graders’ vocabulary. A young teacher, also from Needham, got personal, thanking parents for their support after her husband died.
Meet the newest group of bloggers drawing audiences online: teachers.
Teacher-generated blogs have been increasingly popping up from Needham to Martha’s Vineyard, many in the past year. Teachers at all grade levels reveal glimpses of themselves as well as the magical moments — and at times, difficult ones — that can happen in a classroom. Parents, in turn, scour the blogs, post comments, or borrow snippets to use as dinner conversation with their children.
As students head back to school this week, teachers are again typing dispatches during breaks at school, or from home in their pajamas.

Jon Hurdle:

Philadelphia on Thursday opened a public high school where students work on wireless laptops, teachers eschew traditional subjects for real-world topics and parents can track their child’s work on the Internet.
Called “The School of the Future” and created with help from software giant Microsoft, it is believed to be the first in the world to combine innovative teaching methods with the latest technology, all housed in an environmentally friendly building.
The school, which cost the school district $63 million to build, is free and has no entrance exams. The 170 students in the inaugural ninth-grade class were selected by lottery from 1,500 applicants.

Joanne says it’s New Tech with the same old curriculum.

Robert Samuelson:

If you’re looking for the action in education, forget the Ivy League. Talk instead to Anthony Zeiss, president of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. It has six campuses and 70,000 students taking classes in everything from remedial English to computer networking. With about 12 million students, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges help answer this riddle: Why do Americans do so badly on international educational comparisons and yet support an advanced economy?
At this back-to-school moment, the riddle is worth pondering. Those dismal comparisons aren’t new. In 1970, tests of high school seniors in seven industrial countries found that Americans ranked last in math and science. Today’s young Americans sometimes do well on these international tests, but U.S. rankings drop as students get older. Here’s a 2003 study of 15-year-olds in 39 countries: In math, 23 countries did better; in science, 18. Or consider a 2003 study of adults 16 to 65 in six advanced nations: Americans ranked fifth in both literacy and math.

Steve Dutch:

This Course Covered Too Much Material…
Great! You got your money’s worth! At over $100 a credit, you should complain about not getting a lot of information. If you take a three credit course and get $200 worth of information, you have a right to complain. If you get $500 worth, you got a bargain.

A story from Susan Troller and The Capital Times:

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Jay Matthews:

I read Stanford University educational historian David F. Labaree’s new book, “The Trouble With Ed Schools,” shortly after last week’s column scorching those same education schools. You would think his wonderfully insightful book, which is even harder on ed schools than I was, would make me feel good. Here is a distinguished education school professor who knows that world so well, and he is validating my opinions.
Instead, the book made me ashamed of myself. It was similar to the feeling of loathsome guilt I had when I was eight years old and beat up a five-year-old with a lisp next door who had annoyed me for reasons I no longer recall. Labaree succeeds in making American education schools such objects of pity, suffering from decades of low status and professional abuse, that you want to give the next ed school professor you meet a big hug and promise to bake her a plate of cookies.
That is not the worst part. In last week’s online column, and in a column in The Washington Post Magazine Aug. 6, I fussed over the failure of education schools to pass on tips from the real world of expert teachers working in inner city schools. I cited several methods used by famous teachers who have raised student achievement significantly. I decried the response from many ed school people: We can’t teach that until we subject it to thorough research.
But Labaree has gone a long way toward convincing me that ed schools are doing no such thing. He concludes, after an exhaustive examination of the birth and evolution of teacher training in the United States, that education schools have about as much impact on what happens in U.S. classrooms as my beloved but woeful Washington Nationals are having this season on the pennant race.
Teachers in training, he shows, are far more influenced by their memories of how their own school teachers behaved, and by orders and advice they get from supervisors and colleagues in the schools that eventually employ them. Rookie teachers are happy for the credential they get from ed schools that allow them to start earning a paycheck, but they don’t use very much of what they learn there, Labaree says.
At the heart of the book is a Frankie and Johnnie romance between two losers, ed schools and child-centered progressive education. Labaree notes several books that have decried the effect on public schools of progressive education, including the thoughts of theorist John Dewey. Then he asks a simple question: What evidence is there that many classroom teachers are actually doing anything that Dewey would want them to do? As the faculty lounge saying goes, Dewey advocates are supposed to act like a guide on the side, letting each student follow his or her natural instincts and curiosity, rather than a sage on the stage, dispensing wisdom which everyone must write down and memorize.

Alan Borsuk:

If your children are elementary school students in Milwaukee Public Schools, there’s a strong chance that Lisa Chatman or Mildred McDowell will be their librarian this year.
Don’t expect Chatman or McDowell to read stories to your kids. Don’t expect them to check out books, keep the shelves orderly or choose new books or other materials to purchase. In fact, don’t expect Chatman or McDowell to set foot in the building more than occasionally.
That’s because Chatman and McDowell work in central administration. To meet state regulations, they are listed officially as the certified supervising librarians at more than 60 elementary schools this year. But the hands-on work in the libraries will be done by paraprofessionals, aides, teachers or volunteers, often with limited hours and limited background in library work.

Marketplace:

As schools return to session, we get sent to the principal’s office to find out how hard his job really is.

audio

The Economist:

FEW children, in the developed world, spend their summer holidays bringing in the harvest. Yet the timing of the summer break dates from the days when child labour was too valuable to lose in the vital final weeks of the growing season. The roots of modern education, in Britain and elsewhere, lie in the half-hidden world of ancient schools.
Nicholas Orme’s previous book, a definitive history of English medieval childhood, disproved the notion that previous generations treated children as miniature adults. This one explodes some pervasive myths about their education. First, there was quite a lot of teaching available: it was not just confined to the rich and priestly. There were hundreds of schools in England, some in monasteries and cathedrals, others founded with individual charitable endowments, often with a large bunch of private pupils paying modest fees.

Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England by Nicholas Orme.

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V. Dion Haynes:

D.C. School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey is proposing year-round classes at five mainly low-achieving schools in an effort to give students more time in the classroom by shortening the long summer break.
The proposal, which is the school system’s first attempt to adjust the traditional calendar, will probably ignite a local and nationwide debate: Education experts extol the benefits of a year-round calendar, citing studies that show significant knowledge loss over the summer, but many parents argue that children need downtime.

Noah Mackert:

I teach a group of South Bronx sixth graders with reading and emotional disabilities. One day last year, I was having them write essays. Most everyone selects a topic — bring the troops home, stop pollution, don’t demolish Yankee Stadium — and most everyone gets to work. Katherine, on the other hand, pulls a Mickey Mouse bandanna over her hair, which violates the school’s dress code, and slumps in her chair.
I sit down next to her. What does she care about? Cats. What is she angry about? She doesn’t know. Then I have an idea. It’s my job to know what she’s been through; I ask her to tell me about when she was in foster care.
“They shouldn’t take kids away from their parents,” she says.

Jessica Vascellaro:

Ms. Adam is part of a backlash against programs that equip every student in a classroom with a computer. A few years ago, such programs, which aim to better engage and train students by giving them round-the-clock computer access, were introduced in schools across the country — often with encouragement from the large computer makers, such as Apple and Dell Inc., that win the contracts. But now, some parents and educators are having second thoughts over higher-than-anticipated costs and the potential for inappropriate use by kids. At the same time, there is a sense that the vaunted benefits of constant computer access remain unproven. The programs are increasingly under attack — and in a few cases are crumbling.

Congratulations! You have been selected to write 30 second radio ads for the MMSD to recruit families and students to the district’s schools. Remember, the ads should stress what’s unique about Madison schools, and what a student will get only in Madison, because all of the area’s suburban and private schools compete for the same students; so the ads should subtly contrast the MMSD with those competitors. The ads cannot just say, “Madison has excellent, dedicated teachers and staff,” because every school district probably says the same thing.
The ads need to target familes with students of various ages, so we need at least three ads, separately targeting elementary, middle, and high school. You might consider speciality ads for families from various cultures and races.
Post your ads (not lengthy discussions) as responses to this post.

Alan Borsuk:

The new episode, starring William Andrekopoulos and debuting in many schools near you on Sept. 5, will feature:

• Increased pressure on teachers, students and schools, as well as on the mission leader, to get better results from kids.
• More competition from schools outside MPS, including voucher and charter schools.
• Smaller staffs in many MPS schools, and a lot of nervousness at schools about how things are really going.
• A group of schools bearing the new label “SMAART” (and that’s not a compliment).

Ching-Ghing Ni:

If you think these children are victims of substandard public schooling, think again. Their parents paid to send them here to West Point, a popular boot camp named after the American military academy but designed to straighten out the “little emperors” of China’s one-child generation.
For more than two decades, China’s strict family planning policy has created a culture in which the coveted lone male heirs tend to run amok at home and in school because besotted parents forget to teach them the meaning of discipline.
One woman believes the only way to rein in all these spoiled boys is to stop sparing the rod. At Wan Guoyin’s West Point, every child knows the consequences of bad behavior.

Eugene Kane:

The report card has been bothering her all summer. Now that her daughter is scheduled to start her senior year at South Division High School, Sandra questions if she’s actually prepared to enter the last step of her public education.
“How can the system do something like this?” asked Sandra, who has two other children who also have attended MPS.
As a single mother who works as a cook, Sandra doubts her daughter is ready to enter the working world or attend college with grades like this.
For this beleaguered mother, something isn’t right.
“She’s just not up to par, but they’re promoting her anyway,” she said. “It’s scary.”
For proof, Sandra sent me a copy of her daughter’s report card from last semester.
It’s been a long time since I actually saw a high school report card, but I can understand Sandra’s dismay at the results. Out of five classes, her daughter received a “U” in all but one. The other grade was a “D,” which in my day wasn’t exactly something to write home about.

Andrew Rotherham:

While critiquing a cage-match point that my colleague Kevin Carey made Sherman Dorn raises an important and overlooked issue. When it comes to data in education there are really two problems. The first, pretty well known, is that there is a real lack of data to answer a bunch of important questions in a serious empirical way. Two great examples, the back and forth on charter schools and the fact that we have to debate roughly how many students graduate from American public schools and use estimates to figure it out. What other $450 billion dollar industry can’t give you a decent denominator on productivity?
But the second, which Sherman gets at, is that in some cases there is good data but no one is using it to ask and answer interesting and important questions…That’s a more overlooked and subtle problem of incentives and politics but it’s an enormous missed opportunity. What’s the point of putting these powerful state data tracking systems in if no one is going to use them to ask and try to answer, best we can, some tough questions…

More here. There’s been some discussion of these issues related to the recently released ACT scores.

John Taylor Gatto:

Saturation schooling, kindergarten through college, was a leadership response to the demands of a centralized corporate economy that replaced American/Canadian entrepreneurialism between 1880 and 1920.
What corporatism required was two things: A laboring mass – including a professional laboring mass of doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and schoolteachers – who did what they were told without question, and a citizenry in name only, one which defined itself by non-stop consumption, one which believed that choosing between options offered by management was what democracy was all about.
Lockstep schooling, driven by standardized testing, testing not to measure learning but obedience, was the mechanism used to drive out imagination and courage. It worked and still works superbly, but, like the little mill that ground salt when salt wasn’t needed, this brilliant utopian construction is about to kill us.
North American economies dazzled the world for centuries because they encouraged resourcefulness, individuality and risk-taking to dominate the marketplace, and these qualities were encouraged in everyone, not just in the elites.
Three North American commercial juggernauts are currently blowing away competition all over China: computer hardware and programming, fast food franchising and commercial entertainment (singing, dancing, story-telling, games and all the rest).
Each of these businesses is almost exclusively the work of dropouts, from college, high school and elementary school. They are erected from imagination. Our fast food franchises don’t really sell “food” at all, but two intense tastes – salty and sweet – surrounded by clean, well-lighted places and spotless toilets and primary colors. They sell a return to early childhood and its simplicities.

Ann Carrns:

More than half of 53 public schools expected to be open in New Orleans by early September — 31 schools — will be run independently under state and local charters issued to a dozen different organizations. Charter schools receive public funding and must meet public academic standards, but have great leeway in hiring staff, setting salaries, choosing a curriculum and managing daily operations. Some groups run the schools themselves, while others have hired private companies to do so. Proponents say charter schools’ independence fosters innovation and better academic performance, while critics contend that empirical studies don’t show charters to be superior to more traditional schools. Regardless of that debate, many people in New Orleans see charter schools as the key to a once-in-a-lifetime chance to remake New Orleans’s public education system, and to eke some good out of the horror that was Katrina.
“This is truly an opportunity to hit a restart button,” said Leslie Jacobs, vice president of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. “We’re taking advantage of that opportunity to design for the long term a very different model based on public-school choice.”

Juan Williams:

With 50 percent of Hispanic children and nearly 70 percent of black children born to single women today these young people too often come from fractured families where there is little time for parenting. Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the “bling-bling” of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.
In Washington, where a crime wave is tied to these troubled young souls, the city reacts with a curfew. It is a band-aid. The real question is how one does battle with the culture of failure that is poisoning young people — and do so without incurring the wrath of critics who say we are closing our eyes to existing racial injustice and are “blaming the victim.”

Via a Ken Syke email:

To support parent organizations in their work, the school district is now providing a vehicle to communicate with one another — an online forum. It’s meant to provide support and assistance so that you can communicate about whatever issues you wish.
It’s also something that you can use, or not use.
It is intended for those who are presidents of school parent organizations. This can be one, two or, in some schools, even more persons.
This is being sent to all persons whom the Public Information Office has as a “Parent Group President”. If you are not in that role this year, let us know and tell us the e-mail address for the current leader. We will be adding and deleting names as new presidents are determined.
Here’s how it will go from here.

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DPI Awards $4 Million in Charter School Grants
WCSA’s New Office — The WCSA is now located in a new office in downtown Madison. The WCSA’s new address, phone, fax and email is — Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, P.O. Box 1704, Madison, WI 53703 & Tel: 608-661-6946 & Fax: 608-258-3413 & Email: info@wicharterschools.org WCSA website: http://www.wicharterschools.org
WCSA’s New Directors & Officers — The WCSA Board of Directors has elected its officers for 2006-07 — President Tom Scullen, Appleton; Vice-President Barbara Horton, Milwaukee; Secretary Sandra Mills, Menasha; and Treasurer Jim Morgan, Madison. The WCSA is governed by a 12-member Board of Directors
State Legislature’s Special Study Committee on Charter Schools schedules initial meeting on September 26 —
Charter School to Focus on Health Science & Technology —

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Individual school routes are available here.

Yuki Noguchi:

Unlike their parents, today’s youth have grown up in the age of public disclosure. Keeping an Internet diary has become de rigueur; social lives and private thoughts are laid bare. For parents in high-profile positions, however, it means their children can exploit a generational disconnect to espouse their own points of view, or expose private details perhaps their parents wish they would not.
“All the things I’ve typed in my blog I’ve argued with my father about,” like whether mergers hurt customers, something Jared Watts said he thinks does inconvenience consumers. But publicly criticizing his company is not the same as a personal attack on the father who supports him “100 percent,” he said.

Thomas Reeves:

The voucher system is still fighting its way through state legislatures and the courts. The concept of giving school money directly to parents and letting them choose schools for their children breaks the well established precedent in this country of sending almost all children to public schools, where they were given courses in traditional subject matter and taught patriotic and moral values common to most American citizens. Indeed, there is a case against vouchers.

Eugene Kane:

ut Bill Cosby still cares about the issues he’s been talking about all over the country in a one-man campaign to send a message to African-Americans about personal responsibility, good parenting and the need for education.
Even when Cosby’s mainly in town to make people laugh, the plight of black America is never far from his mind.
But Cosby is also the recently outspoken social critic who has held community meetings in black neighborhoods across America designed to address nagging problems related to the under-performance of black students, black parents and black leaders in general.

Madison students continue to top state average
By TCT staff, news services
Madison high school students bested the state ACT test score average once again for the 12th straight year, with scores of African-American students rising at a greater pace than all other students.
ACT test score comparisons were released today.
According to the Madison Metropolitan School District, the composite score for Madison students was 24.2, or two points higher than the statewide average of 22.2 and more than three points higher than the national average of 21.1. A perfect score is 36.
African-American students in Madison scored an average composite of 18.8, a 6 percent increase from the 17.7 average in 2005, while Asian students had a 23.0 composite this year (22.1 in 2005) and Hispanic students a 21.8 composite (21.5 in 2005).
The big increase in black students’ scores closed the gap on white students’ scores locally, with the white students composite of 24.8, 24 percent higher than the black students composite, down from a 30 percent gap last year.

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Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin officials take pride in being at the top of at least one list nationally when it comes to putting “highly qualified” teachers in classrooms, but Wednesday they found themselves at the bottom of the list when it comes to meeting federal rules for doing exactly that.
U.S. Department of Education officials announced they had rejected as inadequate every one of the responses Wisconsin gave when asked how it was dealing with six general requirements for assuring that every child has a highly qualified teacher.
Wisconsin, Hawaii, Missouri and Utah were designated by the federal department as being at “high risk” of not meeting the teacher quality rules. The four states were ordered to redo their plans by Nov. 1, “including specific steps to ensure that poor and minority children are not taught disproportionately by less qualified teachers.”

Anne Marie Chaker has more:

It is a problem that increasingly bedevils school districts around the country. Nationally, the demand for teachers continues to rise in a number of fields, such as physics, math, chemistry and bilingual education. At the same time, a flood of experienced, baby-boomer teachers who entered the profession in the 1960s and 1970s are retiring, and relatively few new teachers are sticking with the profession. One analysis of Education Department data by Richard Ingersoll, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that 46% of new teachers leave the profession after only five years.
To help fill vacant teaching slots, a number of states are taking action, passing legislation with incentives to attract, train and retain more teachers. So far this year, 18 states, including Illinois, Connecticut, Virginia and Kansas, have passed measures encouraging teaching, according to the Education Commission of the States, which tracks education policy for state governments. The initiatives ranged from luring teachers out of retirement to offering scholarships to programs that forgive education loans. Tricia Coulter, director of the commission’s Teaching Quality and Leadership Institute, says legislative efforts gained momentum in 2000, with 21 to 42 state measures each year targeting teacher recruitment and retention.

Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater:

It’s almost here for our five year olds, the first day of school. They have looked forward to it with excitement and fear all summer. Some have asked repeatedly how much longer until it arrives and others have sat quietly hoping it will go away and their young lives will not change.
For all, there are wonders to be learned and fears to be overcome. There is a new person in their lives — the teacher. Although the persons will change over time the teacher will be ever present in their lives for the next 13 years. There will be teachers that they remember forever. Almost every one has teachers who create life changing experiences for him or her.

Milton Chen:

Another year has passed, and American schools are still captives of an outdated calendar. It’s mid-August, and the world of education is awakening from its three-month slumber. The seasons of schooling set the schedules for close to seven million K-12 educators and staff and fifty-five million students and families. Yet our schools and universities stand alone in hewing to a calendar with a long summer vacation added to holiday and spring breaks. No other sector of our society — government, business, transportation, health care, manufacturing — considers its year to be composed of 180 days or 36 weeks.
Add to this “outer limit” the “inner limit” of the 50-minute period of most secondary schools, and we have a pigeonholed system of schooling. This time frame was born out of the Carnegie Unit, which requires 120 hours of class time for high school courses. (Five such periods each week for 31 weeks achieves the 120-hour requirement.) The Carnegie Unit grew out of the early work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, endowed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1906, and surely it’s time for education to leave behind a 100-year-old idea.

Diana Jean Schemo:

WHEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers’ unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs.
But for many educators and policy makers, the findings raised a haunting question: What if the impediments to learning run so deep that they cannot be addressed by any particular kind of school or any set of in-school reforms? What if schools are not the answer?
The question has come up before. In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas.
To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families.
For years, education researchers have argued over his findings. Conservatives used them to say that the quality of schools did not matter, so why bother offering more than the bare necessities? Others, including some educators, used them essentially to write off children who were harder to educate.

More on the Coleman Report from Clusty.
Kevin Carey has some comments:

Schemo frames No Child Left Behind as one side of an argument between people who believe that factors outside schools affect students, and believe who don’t believe that factors outside schools affect students. There is no such debate. No reasonable person believes that students’ economic, social, and family circumstances are irrelevant to educational progress.
To say that NCLB “holds a school alone responsible” for student progress is to ascribe far more power to the law than it, or any law, could possibly have. There are whole worlds of responsibility for the dire circumstances of disadvantaged students who aren’t learning well. All No Child Left Behind does is create a system that identifies which schools those students attend, and insists that we should try to make those schools better.

Hara Estroff Marano:

Maaybe it’s the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruisin along the dirt path… at three miles an hour. On his tricycle
Or perhaps it’s today’s playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And… wait a minute… those aren’t little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves.
Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Presumably, parents now worry that school bathrooms are not good enough for their children.
Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational “accommodations” he was required to make for many of his history students, he was struck by the exhaustive, well-written—and obviously costly—one on behalf of a girl who was already proving among the most competent of his ninth-graders. “She’s somewhat neurotic,” he confides, “but she is bright, organized and conscientious—the type who’d get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu.” He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old “couldn’t see the big picture.” That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT.

University of Florida:

However, the trend once known as “mainstreaming”— widely considered the best option for such students – appears to have stalled in some parts of the country, the study’s authors report. And a student’s geographic location, rather than the severity of his disability, often determines how he will spend his school days, the researchers say.
“We’ve known for a long time that students with MR (mental retardation) are better off educationally if they can spend at least part of the day in a typical classroom,” said James McLeskey, chair of special education in UF’s College of Education and an author of the study. “We’ve found that there are still lot of students who could be included in the general classroom but aren’t included.”
Before the mid-1970s, most children with mental retardation were completely segregated from other children in the school system, if they were formally educated at all. Society widely viewed these children as uneducable, and those who did attend school were sent to institutions solely for children with mental retardation.

Jim Wooten:

School reform matters especially in Atlanta. The city may or may not be in the midst of a return-to-the-city movement. Certainly, condos and apartments are going up everywhere. But until the problem of a laggardly school system is cured, people with children won’t return, unless they have alternatives. Atlanta’s revival will be limited to the childless and to retiring baby boomers. I think that means, of course, some program of vouchers or tax credits that encourages new schools to be created by the private sector or by groups of educators starting their own.
It’s always necessary to try to improve the existing school system for parents who will always prefer to let government do it, who will choose to be uninvolved and are perfectly happy to hand Jimmy over at age 5 and check him back out at age 18, hoping he’s educated enough to get out of the house. The question for conservatives, though, is whether that’s enough. Can the model designed for a farm economy be fixed so that it serves most everybody? And if you’re open to reform, what’s the boldest reform you’d support?

Bob Sipchen:

This ugly two-story Lawndale strip mall seems better suited to selling kalua pork at the Hawaiian BBQ downstairs than to educating high school students. In fact, when I first walk into the standard-looking classroom on the second floor, not much education seems to be going on. Not that teacher Jeanett Hector isn’t trying. She’s picked a Stephen King teleplay for the class to read aloud, and she’s brimming with enthusiasm for it, certain that the 17 students slumping in their seats will get into it. At the moment, though, most of them are mumbling excuses and acting bored. Well aware that a reporter’s watching, Hector grows increasingly annoyed.