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Kerry is stressing college in speeches to minority groups. He's set to speak in Phoenix to La Raza. In Chicago, he promised a mostly black audience a million more college graduates in his first five years in office. "In the tradition of the famously long-winded Clinton, he spoke for nearly an hour" to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, reports Fox. Black voters liked Clinton -- but surely not for his tendency to go on forever.

The cost of college isn't the real barrier. The problem is that many students -- especially low-income blacks and Hispanics -- don't have the reading and math skills needed to pass college classes. If Kerry weakens the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind, he'll lower the number of college graduates, no matter how much he boosts scholarships or tutoring at the college level.

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F is for fatal

College professors in Baghdad fear that giving F's could be fatal, says the Globe and Mail. Recently, a professor was murdered; students believe he was shot in retaliation for a bad grade.

Death-threat letters have become commonplace this exam season, and there have been at least two other recent attempts on the lives of university officials.

In a wooden cabinet in Prof. Taleb's office, he keeps all the threatening letters sent to lecturers in his college. The pile is high and a number of them have bullets taped to them.

Students complain they miss class when they're held up at roadblocks and can't study because the electricity is erratic. And the dog ate their homework. So professors should pass everyone -- or the final really will be final.

A professor calls for hanging homicidal students.

Poliblogger is publicizing a book drive for Baghdad University's library, which especially needs math, science and medical texts. Books or checks payable to Books for Baghdad may be sent to Dr. Safaa Al-Hamdani, Department of Biology, Jacksonville State University, 700 Pelham Road North, Jacksonville, AL 36265.

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The behavior gap

Teaching social norms makes it possible for poor black students to do well in school, writes Abigail Thernstrom.

(Successful inner-city) schools combat what Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has called "the greatest problem now facing African Americans." And that is "their isolation from the tacit norms of the dominant culture." His statement is really the academic version of Bill Cosby's recent remarks in which he talked about black parents who are not parenting and about kids who can't speak standard English and who will be shut out of the world of economic success.

This is how the best inner-city schools I know address that "isolation from the tacit norms of the dominant culture." In addition to an academically superb program, they demand that their students learn how to speak standard English. They also insist that kids show up on time, properly dressed; that they sit up straight at their desks, chairs pulled in, workbooks organized; that they never waste a minute in which they could be learning and always finish their homework; that they look at people to whom they are talking, listen to teachers with respect, treat classmates with equal civility, and shake hands with visitors to the school.

These are skills as essential as basic math. Without them, disadvantaged children cannot climb the ladder of economic opportunity.

This only works if parents and students have chosen the school, Thernstrom writes.

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June 28, 2004

In fuzzy math, 55 percent = 33 percent

New York City's math tests produce fuzzy results, writes Andrew Wolf in the New York Sun. For example, two thirds of last year's fourth graders were on grade level in math, yet only 38.6 percent tested at grade level as fifth graders. What's going on?

Wolf offers a story problem: There are 84 questions on the Math A regents exam; the passing grade is 55 percent. How many questions must a student answer correctly to pass?

You say 47? Wrong.

The state education department has decreed that answering just 28 questions correctly earns you a 55 and a passing grade, even though that is only a real score of 33.3% . . .

Sixty of the questions on the test are multiple choice. Merely making random guesses will earn the average student 15 of the 28 correct answers needed to pass. Another 13 right answers and it’s on to Math B. Basically,a student who is able to correctly answer 13 questions, just 15% of the test, and making random guesses on the balance, can pass the test.

Wolf suggests letting an independent board test students and determine the passing grade, taking the job away from the city and state education departments.

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College is cheaper

College tuition at public universities costs students less, reports USA Today.

What students pay on average for tuition at public universities has fallen by nearly one-third since 1998, thanks to new federal tax breaks and a massive increase in state and federal grants to most students and their families.

Financial aid increased by 80 percent, with most of the benefits reaching middle-class families earning $40,000 to $100,000 a year.

While public university tuition increased by 18 percent since 1998, few students pay the listed tuition price, USA Today points out.

In 2003, students paid an average of just 27% of the official tuition price at four-year public universities when grants and tax breaks are counted. Students at private universities paid an average of 57%.

About three quarters of college students attend public universities.

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De-saffronising Indian history

When Hindu nationalists ran the government in India, they rewrote the history textbooks to deny non-Hindu influence on India's culture. Now that they're out of power, the textbooks are being re-rewritten, reports the Guardian.

The "saffronisation" of history, say critics of the last government, depicted India's Muslim rulers as barbarous invaders and the medieval period as a dark age of Islamic colonial rule which snuffed out the glories of the Hindu empire that preceded it.

Memorably, one textbook claimed that the Taj Mahal, the Qu'tb Minar and the Red Fort, three of India's outstanding examples of Islamic architecture, were designed and commissioned by Hindus.

The books denied India's history of migration, downplayed the evils of the caste system and even neglected to mention that a Hindu nationalist assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Via Brian, who includes a bonus photo of the Taj Mahal. I must learn how to do photos on the blog. Some day.

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Too good for the military

At a public high school in a Milwaukee suburb, the school newspaper turned down a military recruitment ad on grounds it violated the ad policy, which bans businesses and organizations "deemed destructive to the social, economic and environmental health of the earth and all of its inhabitants." Editor Bix Firer, 17, told the Journal Sentinel he didn't want Shorewood High's newspaper, Ripples, to help "warmongers."

Shorewood is a liberal town near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (Firer's parents are both UWM English professors.)

"At Shorewood," says Nick Pierson, who wrote for Ripples under the name "Mad Max," "everyone's got this mind-set that everyone's going to go to like a really high-level college and these very prestigious universities.

"A lot of people think the military is below them."

. . . Firer says he rejected the advertising money from the military in part because of the war in Iraq, which he says is further destablizing an unstable area.

He also says the military is "both classist and racist in its approach."

"I realize this is sort of absurd coming from a privileged, white male, but the recruitment sort of targets those with fewer opportunities," Firer says.

Well, the recruiter wanted to target Shorewood High students, but never got the chance to offer them a military option.

Mike Halloran, an English teacher and Ripples advisor, once taught at St. Francis High, which sends a comparatively high percentage of graduates into the military. He told the reporter that most St. Francis parents stressed a "sort of blind respect for authority." By contrast, "There are questioners (at Shorewood)," Halloran says.

I bet there are a lot of group thinkers at Shorewood.

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June 27, 2004

Three stalls and you're out

Learn by doing no longer is the policy in Carroll, Iowa. The school board fired its bus driver for letting students drive the bus. Children said she offered to let them bring treats on the bus if they didn't tell their parents.

After the meeting, (parent) Michael Heim said children were given three tries to successfully put the bus in gear. "It was three stalls and you're out," he said.

Lesleh Heim said one child became scared and asked to be let off the bus early. The Heims estimate that Rivers let the kids drive about five miles. Michael Heim said he had heard from school administrators that Rivers had already tried to apply for a bus driver position in another district.

She's accumulated numerous moving violations, so perhaps she thought the kids would be safer drivers.

Via Eduwonk.

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Weaving for college

Reform K12 has a heart-warming post on his inner-city charter school's valedictorian, who feared she wouldn't be able to pay for college.

Our valedictorian was a recent immigrant to the United States when she began as a freshman four years ago. She worked very, very hard to overcome her personal and language obstacles and earned excellent grades through her efforts.

She shared with us that when she was filling out college applications and student loan forms this year she had serious doubts that she and her family would be able to afford college, and she voiced her concern to her father.

He said, "Begin to weave, and God will supply the thread."

Weave she did, pouring her heart and soul not only into her classwork -- she's graduating with a 4-year GPA just shy of 4.0 -- but into the personal essays required for her applications.

She earned a full-scholarship to a top college.

Also check out the photo of a graduate who's heading for the Air Force.

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June 26, 2004

Valedictorian denied diploma

The valedictorian of Brooklyn's High School for Legal Studies was denied her diploma because she criticized the school in her graduation speech. Tiffany Schley, who's heading to Smith on a full scholarship, refuses to apologize, reports the New York Daily News.

Among her gripes: The school has had four principals in four years, overcrowded classes, a shortage of textbooks and other basic materials, unqualified teachers, unstable staffing and uncaring administrators who refused to meet with students to discuss the school's problems.

"They always want to keep the problems hush-hush, but what goes on in this school is real," said Tiffany, who was also the editor of the school newspaper, yearbook chairwoman and a member of the student council.

One teacher who attended the graduation said the audience was shocked by the speech.

"The administration was very nervous, but the students were definitely in support of her," the teacher said.

When Schley came to school yesterday to pick up her diploma with the rest of her classmates, she and her mother were told they had been disrespectful and were escorted out of the building.

If the school has taught its students anything about the law, I'm sure she'll get her diploma without having to grovel.

The High School for Legal Studies was created when a large, very bad high school was broken into small, specialized schools. While small schools are supposed to engage students and create a sense of community, many are faddish and unaccountable for results, opines Ryan Safer in the New York Post. He doesn't think much of the new "Peace and Diversity Academy," one of 70 small schools that will open this fall.

. . . there's the dingbat problem: The city's top advocate of small schools is the leftist group New Visions for Public Schools, which is concerned mainly with self-esteem and political activism. The group has gotten fat off of city contracts. It will run 43 of this fall's new schools.

. . . So many of the city's small high schools have been exempted from Regents exams, and allowed to judge students based on fuzzy "portfolios" of their work, that there's no test-score data to review. The best the city can point to: slightly above-average attendance rates.

Academically rigorous schools are "placed in neighborhoods where parents fully expect their children to go to college." The faddish schools end up in the Bronx and Harlem. For example, New Visions opened the Urban Peace Academy in East Harlem in 1993.

The school says it addresses "issues of peace and justice, wealth and power, racism and oppression and the creation of ourselves and our cultures." What's missing there? Hint: Fewer than half of Urban Peace Academy's class of 2003 met state Regents English standards and none met Regents math standards.

Some of the new schools that will open in a few months don't have principals or teachers hired yet.

Update: Valedictorian Tiffany Schley will get her diploma, without having to apologize for her graduation speech. The New York Daily News reports:

Before the ceremony, she submitted her speech to an assistant principal, as required, but he rewrote it and gave it back to her on graduation day, she said.

"He typed over it and had me glorifying the school," she said.

She stuck with her first speech, but couldn't finish giving it because the assistant principal cut the microphone -- before she got to her positive comments about the school.

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June 25, 2004

Why math matters

From Number 2 Pencil's education news round-up comes this sad story from the Times-Colonist of Victoria, British Columbia:

Confused about how to divide "kilos" of cocaine into ounces for sale, two teens from a Saanich private school turned to their math teacher for help, provincial court heard Monday.

An 18-year-old woman testified that a classmate -- when they were both Grade 11 students at St. Margaret's School for girls -- returned from the Thanksgiving holiday with a large quantity of cocaine which she intended to sell.

But the two girls, who cannot be named because they were under age 18 at the time of the alleged incident, were unsure of its value since neither knew how many ounces there are in a kilogram.

"She asked me and I didn't know. We were in math class so the teacher would know. So I asked," said the testifying student.

Police, who seized the cocaine from a school locker, said it was in two "bricks" weighing 0.468 and 0.506 kilograms. No word yet on how many ounces that is.

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Literacy arraigned

Thomas Sowell comments:

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like "arraigned," "curried" and "exculpate" meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

Thirty years ago, I worked as a flunkie for a woman who'd been hired to do an American history curriculum for California Youth Authority (juvenile prison) schools. Or maybe it was an ethnic history curriculum. Her committee of bosses never could make up their minds. I read a searing account of the Middle Passage, written by an escaped slave who'd survived the journey from Africa and later escaped and educated himself. My boss told me to rewrite it in simple words and sentences that CYA students could read. "They took us on the boat. They chained us. It was hot and crowded. Many people died." And so on. I suggested that students would get more from the passage if they struggled to read it in the original, but my boss told me none of the teen-agers, who'd received a free education from the age of five on, could hope to read language written by the self-educated former slave.

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Promise in Harlem

Instead of funding small-scale social programs, Geoffrey Canada decided to change the odds for poor blacks in Harlem Children's Zone, "an area with about 6,500 children, more than 60 percent of whom live below the poverty line and three-quarters of whom score below grade level on statewide reading and math tests." In the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough describes the zone's network of educational, social and medical services, which reach 88 percent of children in the 24-block core neighborhood. Services are being extended to a 60-block zone.

The organization employs more than 650 people in more than 20 programs; on a recent afternoon, I spent some time walking around Harlem, dropping in on one program after another. At Harlem Gems, a program for 40 prekindergarten students at a public school on 118th Street, Keith, who had just turned 5 and was missing a front tooth, sat at a computer working away at ''Hooked on Phonics,'' while Luis, a 19-year-old tutor, gave him one-on-one instruction. A few blocks up Lenox Avenue, at the Employment and Technology Center, 30 teenagers in T-shirts and basketball jerseys, all part of the organization's new investment club, were gathered around a conference table, listening to an executive from Lehman Brothers explain the difference between the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq. At P.S. 76 on West 121st Street, fifth-grade students in an after-school program were standing in front of their peers, reading aloud the autobiographies they had written that afternoon. And over at Truce, the after-school center for teenagers, a tutor named Carl was helping Trevis, a student in the eighth grade, with a research project for his social studies class, an eight-page paper on the life of Frederick Douglass. In a nearby housing project, a counselor from the Family Support Center was paying a home visit to a woman who had just been granted legal custody of her two grandchildren; in other apartments in the neighborhood, outreach workers from Baby College, a class for new parents, were making home visits of their own, helping teach better parenting techniques. A few blocks away, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 125th Street, construction was under way on the organization's new headquarters, a six-story, $44 million building that will also house the Promise Academy, a new charter school that Canada is opening in the fall.

Canada's main focus is improving the educational success of students. After trying to work within the existing public schools and seeing meager results, he's starting what will be a kindergarten-through-12th-grade charter school with an eight-hour school day, after-school programs and a longer school year. The school will run on the "no excuses" credo.

Here's Jay Mathews' story from the Washington Post on low-income D.C. parents with vouchers eagerly signing up their children for private schools.

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A husband for the teacher

Jim Miller links to a good news story about Iraqi schools: Teachers earn so much that they're hot marriage prospects. At one primary school in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, three teachers became engaged this year. The principal credits the raise in pay from $3 a month pre-war to $200 a month now.

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June 24, 2004

Child's play

Little Green Footballs links to a video on a Swedish Islamic site, Al Qaeda for Kids, which shows children playing Holy Warrior. They seem to be enacting the beheading of Nick Berg.

Last night I saw a performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). It's a Monty Pythonesque farce. The Titus Andronicus scene, a Julia Child parody, made fun of the play's gore: Titus, his hand chopped off, and his daughter, both hands and her tongue chopped, demonstrate how to behead her rapist and cook him into a pie. It wasn't funny. Way too close to recent events.

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The wrong blacks

While eight percent of Harvard undergrads are black, they're the wrong blacks, critics said at a black alumni weekend. According to Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, "the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples," reports the New York Times. Guinier herself is the daughter of a Jamaican father and a white mother.

If their figures are correct, affirmative action is helping students whose families didn't suffer from American slavery or segregation. And not just at Harvard.

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race.

In another survey, nine percent of college-age blacks describe themselves as of African or West Indian ancestry.

A Harvard sociologist quoted in the story says West Indian immigrants, are "less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race" because they come from majority-black countries. Gates points to cultural values.

"This is about the kids of recent arrivals beating out the black indigenous middle-class kids," said Professor Gates, who plans to assemble a study group on the subject. "We need to learn what the immigrants' kids have so we can bottle it and sell it, because many members of the African-American community, particularly among the chronically poor, have lost that sense of purpose and values which produced our generation."

Many academics want to duck the issue that Gates and Guinier have raised. If immigrants' children don't count, it's too hard to make the diversity numbers come out. Students of all colors from poor or working-class families rarely qualify for elite universities.

The Supreme Court ruled that racial preferences are OK to promote diversity but not to remediate past injustice, writes On David Bernstein on Volokh Conspiracy. Discriminating against immigrant blacks is probably illegal. Discriminations wonders if preferentialists are getting a clue that race is not a reliable proxy for diversity.

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Birthday cranks

To battle childhood obesity, a Massachusetts elementary school has told parents not to bring cupcakes on their child's birthday. Instead, the birthday boy or girl will get a cover for the back of the student's chair, a sash, a special pencil and a sticker with the school's mascot, the Happy Dragon. Preschool and kindergarten students will get to wear a birthday crown. Gosh, isn't it fun to be a kid?

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Down on happiness

Are you blue? Good for you. Happy people are not as nice as sad people, according to a study reported in the New York Times Magazine.

Warning: A commenter reports that the researcher says his study had nothing to do with happiness. Most research shows happy people are darned nice. And why shouldn't they be?

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June 23, 2004

Protest warrior

Annoyed by a Chomsky-loving teacher, 18-year-old Bryan Henderson launched Operation Tiger Claw: He put up satiric signs in the halls of his Princeton, WV high school expressing his conservative views. For example: "Except for ending slavery, fascism, naziism and communism, WAR HAS NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING."

On his site, Henderson describes his dogged attempts to defend his right to free expression and to stand up to students who accused him of racism and bias against Muslims. The principal ultimately decided he could hand out flyers but couldn't post signs, which seems a dubious distinction. The school year ended before the ACLU could make up its mind about getting into the case.

Henderson belongs to Protest Warrior, which is dedicated to making fun of "America-hating leftists."

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Charters profit school districts

In Oregon, some school districts are starting charter schools to meet special needs more efficiently. The Oregonian reports:

When Republican lawmakers tried to introduce charter schools to Oregon in the 1990s, they drew sharp resistance from public school leaders who saw charter schools as a drain on resources and competition for students. But as the movement has grown, some administrators have turned to charters to provide specialized programs. The prospect of up to $350,000 in federal charter planning and startup money for each school also helped.

Four charter schools that will open in Columbia County this fall illustrate the trend. Working with the Northwest Regional Education Service District, the Vernonia, Scappoose, Rainier and Clatskanie school districts decided to form two independent charters to attract home-schooled students and two small district-operated charter schools for students struggling in traditional high schools.

. . . Another public school consortium was responsible for the Center for Advanced Learning in east Multnomah County, which caters to students interested in engineering, health sciences or information technology careers. The school opened last year with the Reynolds, Gresham-Barlow, Centennial and Corbett school districts as owners-sponsors. Part of the districts' motivation was to relieve crowding at high schools.

School districts profit when charters educate students, such as home-schoolers and prospective drop-outs, who'd otherwise not be eligible for public funding. The marginal cost of new students is lower than the cost of educating them.

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Profiles of success

The U.S. Education Department profiles eight successful charter schools in a new report. The schools are: Houston's Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Academy; the BASIS School in Tucson, Ariz.; Gates Charter Language School in Lake Forest, Calif.; Oglethorpe Charter School in Savannah, Ga.; Arts and Technology Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.; School of Arts and Sciences Charter School in Tallahassee, Fla.; Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Roxbury, Mass.; and Community of Peace Charter School in St. Paul, Minn.

Successful charters are driven by a shared mission, the report says.

A strong, clearly articulated purpose focuses the work, creates a pervasive positive spirit, and promotes consistent expectations from class to class. Teachers are deeply aware that they are creating change, both for their students and also within the larger public school system. At a mission-driven school, it is easier to focus on what will enable students to reach the school's goals and objectives. A clear vision also makes it obvious when teachers are not in sync with the school program and empowers administrators and governing boards to hold the staff accountable.

As small schools of choice, charters create a strong sense of community.

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Once an SJ Mercury News columnist, I'm now writing School Work: How Two Grumpy Optimists Built a Successful Charter School. Read the blog, click the links below for my free-lance writing and support this site by donating through PayPal or Amazon or by using my book links to buy Amazon stuff.

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