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Elsewhere

Reason
"Threatened by Success" and "Watching the Numbers" about San Francisco school board's attempt to take control of an Edison-run charter school

TechCentralStation
"Vanishing Valedictorians" on schools without honors
"GI Joe College" about military e-learning
"Dumb but Pretty" about the evils of graphic software

San Jose Mercury News
"Rage, not logic" on Dworkin and McElroy books

Good blogs

Tim Blair
Moira Breen
USS Clueless
The Corner
EducationWeak
HappyFunPundit
Instapundit
Mickey Kaus
Ken Layne
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
PatioPundit
PejmanPundit
Damian Penny
Virginia Postrel
Samizdata
Rand Simberg
Natalie Solent
Spleenville
Andrew Sullivan
Tres Producers
VodkaPundit
Volokh Conspiracy
Dr. Weevil



Good books

cover
Educating
Esme: Diary
of a Teacher's...

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Charter Schools
in Action...


Comments by YACCS

 

 

 


Read my book
“Start-up High: A Charter School's Story” will follow organizers, teachers and students at Downtown College Prep, San Jose's first charter school. Click Mail List and I'll let you know when the book's published.



QuickReads


Saturday, July 20


End of history teaching
Inspired by a '98 Christopher Hitchens' column on Americans' ignorance of history (blogged by Natalie Solent), Andrea Harris, daughter of a junior high social studies teacher, analyzes why history is taught badly or not at all.
History is full of people of one race or ethnic group doing bad things to other races or ethnic groups. Telling kids about all these admittedly awful deeds is a minefield of possible self-esteem issues, not to mention having to dwell on them frays the diversity-shaved nerves of the recent School of Education graduate. I think these days most teachers basically give up and show their kids videos or let them surf the internet. When they can get them to sit down, that is.

Once the child is in junior high (or middle school, or whatever they are calling it now -- You Are Great and Smart Enough Already But We Want You to Still Be in School Because It's Fun! Really! school, probably) they have already had it subliminally inserted into their thought processes that History is like recess, only no one gets to run around and play; they are ready for the next stage, which is...

BOREDOM . . .

Funny and true. Read the whole thing, and read the Hitchens' piece too. It's funny and scary. Natalie is still fantasizing about how George III might have held on to the American colonies.



The drop-out game
Manual Arts High in Los Angeles boasts a near-zero drop-out rate. Yet the graduating class of 2001 represented only 37 percent of ninth grade enrollment four years earlier. What's going on? A fantastic LA Weekly article explains how California schools and school districts can use creative accounting to lower their official drop-out rates.
The adult-school dodge, which is permitted by California, but not by most other states, is especially noisome. An L.A. Unified adult school does not typically accept a permanent transfer unless that student is, by definition, a dropout. But that dropout isn't counted as one even though, in the end, few adult-school students ever graduate. Fewer than 4 percent of first-year adult-school students either complete graduation credits or obtain a General Educational Development (GED) certificate. (L.A. Unified didn't provide numbers beyond the first year.) . . .

The adult-school shift partly explains why the combined total of graduates and "official" dropouts (which should account for nearly all students) doesn't come close to equaling the number of seventh-graders or even the number of ninth-graders. A study out of the U.S. Department of Education, which analyzed California data from 1993 through 1995, estimated that doing nothing more than properly classifying adult-school transfers as dropouts would have raised dropout totals statewide 36 to 72 percent, depending on the year.

"Once that record request goes to an adult program," said one high-level district administrator, who asked not to be named, "that youngster no longer exists for accountability purposes.

Los Angeles Unified funds schools based on the October enrollment, and gives schools more than a year before no-shows are supposed to be reported. That gives a strong incentive to pretend that students are attending long after they've vanished. Crowded classes get smaller as students leave, yet the funding remains the same.


Friday, July 19


Foxed
Read QuickReads highlights on FoxNews.com. Or read them here.

I've been getting e-mail from Fox readers who object to the "pathetic weakling" sentence about John Walker Lindh:
Lindh will pay a high price for his stupidity: 20 years in prison. I predict he'll switch religions again. Why? Because he's the kind of pathetic weakling who needs God or Allah or Wotan to tell him what to think, and I don't think the prison Muslims will take to a white boy from Marin with a purer-than-thou attitude. Also, that type tends to be fickle. Hip hop to Allah, Allah to...Hitler, probably. But that's too prison-trendy, so he might go for Jesus or Dr. Laura. 

For example, John Maddocks asked: "Would I be right in assuming that you believe that as a Christian I am a pathetic weakling?"

No. The sentence doesn't work both ways. Weaklings may choose a Higher Power to think for them. That doesn't make everyone who believes in a Higher Power a weakling.

Obviously -- at least, I thought it was obvious -- most people aren't weaklings. Their religious beliefs are not randomly chosen. They don't seek to believe in order to be mindless servants of a mullah or minister. They don't switch religions to be different or to get a rise out of their parents. And most of them don't join a terrorist organization devoted to destroying their homeland.



Gadfly's sting
Education Gadfly's Chester Finn calls the American Federation of Teachers' report a "hatchet job on charter schools."
Its conclusion -- that policy makers ought to cease any charter-school expansion "until more convincing evidence of their effectiveness or viability is presented" -- is precisely the opposite of that reached in the recent Rand review of research on charters (and vouchers), namely that the evidence to date is so spotty that further experimentation is essential before any policy guidance can confidently be drawn. . . .

This "study" trifles with the truth. It stretches the facts about charter-school enrollments (which are more heavily minority and low-income than their states' student populations). It fibs about charter-school finances (which in most jurisdictions are far lower than the per-pupil allotments of conventional schools). It simply lies about charter-school innovation and experimentation (much of which involves staffing, compensation, and management, areas where the AFT does not want anything to change). It fudges about school accountability. It is disingenuous about the effects that charter competition is having on regular public schools -- as yet, few places have enough charters to pose much competition -- and it selectively reports the data on student achievement.

AFT complains that only 9 percent of charters have closed in 10 years, implying that indicates weak accountability. Finn asks: How many failing district-run schools have closed?



Having words
Brendan O'Neill sneers at bloggers' call for freedom in Iran. After all, we're just sending words of support, not machine guns. And most of us aren't professional journalists.

Pejman Yousefzadeh points out O'Neill's errors in fact and logic, which takes awhile. I think O'Neill has some reading comprehension problems too. Read Andrea Harris of Spleenville too.

IsntaPundit fisks another bit of O'Neill trollery (via Moira Breen). Like Muschamp (below), O'Neill sees symbolism -- a war to "reassert Western values" -- and misses the point.


Thursday, July 18


Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times' architecture writer, says this in a story on the rebuilding of Ground Zero:
"Nor will you find any sign of recognition [in the proposals] that Ground Zero has become a tragic symbol of the troubled relationship between the United States and the rest of the world."

Ground Zero is not a symbol. It is a historical site. Those buildings really fell. Those people really died. It was not a "troubled relationship" that destroyed the World Trade Center. Wahhabi Islamic fanatics crashed planes into the buildings.

A NY Post columnist says the Times has a conflict of interest because it owns office buildings that will compete with whatever's built at the WTC site. The larger the memorial, the less competition.



He's baaaaack
Ken Layne is back on the blog.



Let the students go
George Wallace demanded "segregation forever." Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's congressional representative, demands "no vouchers'' ever. Radley Balko's first-rate Fox column on proposed $5,000 vouchers for D.C. school children compares the two reactionaries.
Wallace barred low-income black kids from attending school with white kids in Alabama's better-staffed, better-managed white public schools. Norton is preventing low-income kids (97 percent of whom aren't white) from attending D.C.'s better-staffed, better-funded, largely white private and parochial schools.

Wallace served a constituency of slack-jawed, backward-thinking ignoramuses. Norton serves the teachers' unions.

And both looked a hopelessly failed and flawed system square in the kisser, and hadn't the courage to allow for change.

Balko points out D.C. spends 60 percent more than the national average on its public schools with worst-in-the-nation results. Dick Armey's federally funded voucher proposal would leave the district with even more money per student.





Less is more
Education Intelligence Agency spots a strange argument in the American Federation of Teachers' charter school report:
The report states, "Charter schools typically receive less total revenue per student than do their host school districts. The revenue gap, however, does not mean that charter schools are insufficiently funded to accomplish the mission set forth in their charter." It is interesting that AFT finds charter schools to be the only public schools in America that are sufficiently funded. This is a dangerous precedent for the union to take. Does AFT really mean that public schools should be funded to the extent necessary to "accomplish the mission?"

The union also complains that charter competition doesn't improve other public schools because districts compete via PR not education quality.



A person who is blind, but not disabled
Super-sensitivity has made writing standardized tests a nightmare, says June Kronholz of the Wall Street Journal.
 As cultural sensitivities expanded, so did the guidelines. States began commissioning their own tests, and setting up test-review boards that raised their own sensitivity concerns. In the 1980s, the elderly and disabled were included in the testing companies’ sensitivity guidelines, and in the ’90s, so were foreign cultures and alternative lifestyles. ETS guidelines caution against portraying the elderly as “dependent,” or a blind person as handicapped (the better phrase is “a person who is blind,” and they are handicapped only “when the physical environment in which they interact does not accommodate them,” say the ETS guidelines). ETS also warns of ethnocentrism, or assuming that Western culture or Judeo-Christian morals are the norm. ACT has guidelines on family structure: It urges test writers to show single-parent and one-child families. . . .

Even some positive stereotypes are forbidden. ETS warns against portraying Native Americans as “closer to nature than others,” the disabled as heroic, women as nurturing, or men as productive.

In my youth, I was a research assistant for a woman writing a U.S. history curriculum for the California Youth Authority (juvenile prison) schools. Everything had to be approved for sensitivity to blacks, Hispanics, Asians and women. The panel of multi-colored experts drove my poor boss crazy. And she didn't have to worry about gays, the elderly or the disabled in those benighted days.


Wednesday, July 17


Regulating vouchers to death
In "Accountability vs. Vouchers," John J. Miller describes how to make sure private schools refuse to participate in voucher plans.



Union vs. charters
The American Federation of Teachers doesn't like charter schools much. Go here for the union's report.

Pro-charter groups attacked the AFT's facts and objectivity:
"An AFT study on charter schools has about as much credibility as a Philip Morris study on smoking," says Lawrence Patrick, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

While the union claims to support charters, it only backs district-operated charters with union contracts -- about 15 percent of the total, the statement said. In dismissing charter schools, AFT ignored studies showing stronger academic achievement for charter students.
A California State University study determined that charter schools are more effective in improving academic achievement for low-income and at-risk students; in Chicago, charter schools performed better than traditional public schools on 80 percent of student performance measures; in Arizona, a statewide study of 60,000 youngsters found charter pupils outperforming traditional public school students.

Charter schools are more likely than other public schools to serve black and Hispanic students. The AFT interprets that as segregation.

For more on charter school research, see the Fordham Foundation.

The 10-year-old charter movement has expanded to 38 states and the District of Columbia; nearly 3,000 charter schools will be educating more than 600,00 students in the coming school year.



Sadism can be fun
Watch Charles Austin torture the tortured logic of Richard Cohen (via PatioMan).



Future Crooked CEOs of America
Ted Dinkel responds to the "Disabling the SAT" post on not-really-disabled students who get extra time to take college-admissions tests because, "They've simply got parents who know how to work the angles."
Is there any wonder then why children grow up to be corporate executives who are experts at cutting corners, creative accounting, lying to auditors, shareholders, etc when they've learned to work the angles from their parents?

Even worse, kids learn to lie to themselves to justify their actions.

Update: The SAT isn't a valid predictor of college performance when taken under non-standard conditions, such as time-and-a-half for disabled students, blogs test expert Kim Swygert on No. 2 Pencil.



Dream boy
John Walker Lindh was a "dream chaser" on a spiritual journey, says an AP story.
John Walker Lindh took a journey, first in spirit, then in the physical world, that will keep him behind bars for what's left of his youth.

He was a dream chaser from an early age. When he liked hip-hop in his early teens, he collected 200 albums. When he turned to Islam, he was transformed and went abroad, alone, to soak himself in the faith. All before age 18.

I particularly object to descriptions of Lindh as smart, introspective, studious, spiritual, etc. If he'd been smart, he'd have known better than to go to a terrorist training camp. If he'd been introspective, he'd have realized his flight to an extreme and violent form of Islam was motivated not by spirituality but by personal problems. Dad turns out to be gay and Johnny runs off to a regime that considers homosexuality a capital crime. How much brains and introspection does it take to figure that out? Studious? He was a dabbler.
When the guilty plea came down, Bill Jones, a friend of Lindh's father, recoiled.

"I had a chill right down the middle of my stomach," he said. "His only guilt as far as I'm concerned is that he became a fundamentalist Muslim."
No, Mr. Jones. Tali-boy's guilt is that he aided and abetted -- to the best of his very limited ability -- a gang of terrorists who'd killed Americans before Sept. 11 and vowed to do it again.

Lindh will pay a high price for his stupidity: 20 years in prison. I predict he'll switch religions again. Why? Because he's the kind of pathetic weakling who needs God or Allah or Wotan to tell him what to think, and I don't think the prison Muslims will take to a white boy from Marin with a purer-than-thou attitude. Also, that type tends to be fickle. Hip hop to Allah, Allah to . . . Hitler, probably. But that's too prison-trendy, so he might go for Jesus or Dr. Laura.

Tim Blair doesn't think much of Lindh's spiritual journey either.



Street smart
The American version of Sesame Street won't feature a new Muppet sponsored by H-I-V or A-I-D-S, a Sesame Street executive told the New York Post.
  "Categorically, there are no plans to put this Muppet on the American 'Sesame Street,' " (Robert) Knezevic told The Post yesterday.

Knezevic was referring to the newspaper stories from late last week that said the HIV-infected Muppet was being mulled for U.S. television.

The HIV-positive Muppet will be introduced on South Africa's Sesame Street. It's estimated 10 to 12 percent of South Africans are infected with the AIDS virus, including many children exposed by their mothers.


Tuesday, July 16


Trash talk
"Union Hits Independent Public Schools, Calls for Regulating Charters." Not news, is it? Instead, Newsweek called the American Federation of Teachers' hit on charters a "report card."
While some distinctive new schools have been established, the report concludes that too often, charters haven’t lived up to their end of the bargain. On average, charters (especially the for-profits) spend more on administration and less on instruction than local public schools. Student performance is usually no better, and often worse. Charters are more homogeneous in race and class than their comparative school district. The study found that few charters are doing anything truly innovative, and too many are permitted to opt out of public comparisons of their students’ test results.

Newsweek doesn't mention that most charter schools aren't unionized.

The AFT report will be released tomorrow. I foresee a number of comparison issues, since most charters are small, most are very new and many serve special populations, such as high-risk minority students. How does AFT compare an independently run school with a large district? Is it fair to compare performance for brand-new schools with established schools? (A Texas study found charter students did worse than similar non-charter students in their school's first year; after the first year, the charter students started to do better.)

My upcoming book, "Start-Up High," is on a charter school that targets underachieving Hispanic students. The student body is more homogenous in ethnicity and class than the district as a whole. The school spends more on non-classroom costs, such as raising money, searching for a permanent site, counseling students and educating parents. Perhaps AFT would say it isn't innovative: There's a huge emphasis on students doing homework every day, which might be considered traditional. The students take the same tests that other public school kids take in California; a scientific study would compare the results to a control group of low-achieving Hispanics in district-run high schools, but that's not possible. And it will take more than two years to determine whether it's a success.



Low on college knowledge
While 96 percent of Latino parents expect their children to attend college, most don't know how to help their children get there, concludes "College Knowledge," a report by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute. Latino parents in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles were asked questions such as: "From what you know, does a community college offer the same bachelor's degree that a university offers?" Two thirds of parents got half or more questions wrong.

Of course, graduating from high school is a critical step on the path to college. Only 57 percent of Latino students earn a high school diploma, the report says. That's far lower than the percentage for whites, blacks or Asian-Americans.



AFT in Vegas
Education Intelligence Agency is in Las Vegas to report on the American Federation of Teachers' annual meeting.


Monday, July 15


Klez worm watch
Natalie Solent reported her e-mail address was attached to a wormy note, slugged "fw darling," sent to John Braue of Rat's Nest. Apparently Dawson also has received fake blogger e-mail. I just got an e-mail, purportedly from Unremitting Verse, labeled "to the top." It contained no text, just an attached file. Thanks to the warnings, I didn't open it. Apparently, it's a Klez worm, whatever that is. Be vigilant.



Homogenized or factionalized
Michael Tinkler, the Cranky Professor, responds on the collegiality question:
I don't think that collegiality is severely sexist so much as it is intellectually homogenizing. Your other reader's point about Chomsky's fiefdom sums up what I think about it. Small departments become relatively homogenized and large departments (you have to have at least 15 tenured professors to be a large department in my estimation) become factionalized.

Despite the way the criterion is named, "collegiality" is usually interpreted by everyone above the level of the department quantitatively rather than qualitatively -- did the person undergoing review pull his or her weight in departmental affairs? That is, serve on internal committees, serve as director of graduate studies, serve as department chair. Service to the college or university as a whole gets pigeonholed under "community service."




Disabling the SAT
It hits junior year, just before the PSATs. Students become "learning disabled," qualifying them for extra time to take college-aptitude tests. Parental Affluence Disability Syndrome (PADS) strikes hardest at upper-middle-class students in private schools. The poor are relatively immune.

To settle a lawsuit, the College Board has agreed not to tell colleges which students got extra time to take the SATs, or other assistance, due to disability. After September, 2003, tests won't be marked "Scores Obtained Under Special Conditions." A PADS epidemic is expected, reports the New York Times.
Although the settlement arose from litigation by a man with a physical disability, most of those who are accommodated have attention deficit problems or learning disabilities like dyslexia, a reading disorder.

"It's the right thing to do, but it's going to have very negative ramifications," said Brad MacGowan, a guidance counselor at Newton North High School, in an affluent suburb of Boston. "In a perfect world, if students really need extended time to do as well as they can on a test, they should not have it flagged. But it's that flag, that asterisk, that helps cut down on abuse. This will open the floodgates to families that think they can beat the system by buying a diagnosis, and getting their kid extra time."
Extra time is supposed to compensate for the disability, not give the student an advantage. But there's no precise way to calibrate how many extra minutes should be given. And counselors believe most of the students with vague disabilities diagnosed just before test time aren't really disabled. They've simply got parents who know how to work the angles.

We need a narrower definition of disability that distinguishes between the really disabled and the conveniently disabled. Or untimed tests for everyone.



Brendan on bad blogging
Newbie blogger Brendan O'Neill wants better writing in Blogville and "considered judgement" rather than "pithy opinion."
But the Blogosphere must have standards if it expects to be taken seriously.

I disagree. Anyone can write a blog. Nobody has to read it. Those who prefer rants or rambling essays or sex jokes are not crowding out those who prefer thoughtful, informed analysis; there's no electron shortage. There are too many good blogs for any sensible person to read, so why bother with the shallow or subliterate?

O'Neill's writing advice is sound: Think before you write. Cut the blather. Check your facts and spelling. Those who take it -- O'Neill could be more concise himself -- will reach more readers.

I tell novice writers to pretend words cost $1; facts and ideas pay $10. Try to write profitably.


Sunday, July 14


Free Iran
John Weidner has kicked off the Iran blogburst with an open letter in support of freedom for Iran. It ends:
And to the people of Iran, we say: You are not alone. We see your demonstrations in the streets; we hear of your newspapers falling to censorship; and we watch with anticipation as you join the community of the Internet in greater and greater numbers. Our hopes are with you in your struggle for freedom. We cannot and will not presume to tell you the correct path to freedom; that is for you to choose. But we look forward to the day when we can welcome your nation into the community of free societies of the world, for we know with deepest certainty that such a day will come.
I don't think bloggers have any influence on U.S. government policy. But perhaps online Iranians will be encouraged in their struggle.

I remember when I heard about the Berlin Wall: Germans were tearing it down, piece by piece, with whatever tools they could find. Picks, shovels, trowels, spoons, their bare hands. It happened.

Iran will liberate itself from its homegrown tyrants. It will happen.



What works
Ninety percent of students at Houston's YES College Prep come from "high-risk" backgrounds; 99 percent pass all the state's academic tests. In the Houston Chronicle, two board describe how to build a charter school that works
Hire a school director who has a long-term vision for the school. With that leadership, develop a tangible mission that has measurable goals. . . .

Provide a longer school day if the school's constituency needs it. In many cases, the students of inner-city charter schools need additional instruction to bring them up to grade level. At YES, not only is the school day longer (from 7:50 a.m. to -5 p.m. every school day), but students also attend Saturday school twice a month, and attend one extra month during the summer.
Students can't graduate from the charter school without being accepted at a four-year college.