Bridget Green was all set to be valedictorian of her New Orleans high school, but she didn’t even go to the graduation ceremony. Despite her A in Algebra II, Green failed the math portion of the graduation exam. It was her fifth try.

The test measures 10th grade skills: the 75 percent passing score reflects “approaching basic” competency, according to Number 2 Pencil, which has a link to sample test questions. Furthermore, Green’s difficulties with the graduation exam were no fluke. Her ACT score of 11 was lower than 99 percent of students who took the college admissions test.

The Times-Picayune story is heart-breaking. Green was willing to learn, but her teachers didn’t tell her that she needed to improve.

Studious, athletic and outgoing, teachers and peers said Green is an ideal student. In her three years at Fortier, she balanced a college-prep class schedule with competing on Fortier’s basketball and track teams. Her transcript, which is full of A’s and B’s, shows she earned top marks in biology, geography, history, creative writing and Spanish.

On her 12th-grade report card, her teachers praised her, with several congratulating her for her “outstanding effort” and calling her a “pleasure to have in class.”

They were giving her As for being a good kid. But they weren’t teaching her. She passed the English exam on her first try, but just barely. The math questions “looked nothing like what she learned in class.”

To sharpen her math skills and improve her chances of passing the exam, Green asked school officials to let her skip a physical education class and take an additional math course during her senior year. But she said the school’s counselor wouldn’t let her make the switch.

(Principal Harvey) Cyrus said he doesn’t know why Green’s request was blocked, but he said his counselors wouldn’t deny it without strong reasons.

“My counselors are excellent,” he said. “They’re going to do everything they can to help a student.”

. . . Cyrus said Green’s experience does not suggest the school is doing anything wrong.

“I feel my teachers did everything they could do,” Cyrus said. “Sometimes students just don’t ask for help.”

And sometimes a student asks for help, and doesn’t get it. She gets inflated grades that signal she’s doing fine when she isn’t.

The principal blames the test. He has no worries about the students who got lower grades than Bridget Green.

“I would say most of our children are ready to go on to college,” he said.

Green plans to keep retaking the test till she passes. Then she’ll enroll in community college. Based on her high school grades, she’s confident she can succeed. She wants to major in elementary education.

Chicago’s superintendent will bribe — um, reward — high school students for showing up. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Tickets to sporting events and coupons for Walgreens drug stores are among the incentives that will be offered to Chicago public high school students this year to get them to show up for class more often.

Some kids likened the idea to bribes, but Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan said he was merely trying to “incent improvement.”

A 2 percent increase in attendance would bring in an extra $55 million in state aid. Students who heard the announcement weren’t enthusiastic.

“We can’t bribe children to go to school,” said Paola Hidalgo, a Hancock senior who stood behind the mayor in the library. “It’s our responsibility to go to school. Teachers can’t do miracles.”

Schools may say “OK, I’ll give you a prize right now,” Paola said. “But if you don’t want to be there, you’ll just take the prize [and do what you want]. Are they going to keep on giving you more stuff to stay in school?”

I’m with Paola. The incentive for attending school should be the chance to learn.

I won a trophy for perfect attendance in fourth grade. My teacher had won it in a dance contest at the Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. I cherished it because it came from Mr. Parker, a brilliant teacher. I would not have shown up every day for a Walgreen’s coupon.

If only blacks should teach black history and only women should teach women’s studies, then who should teach criminology? Ex-cons, right? Identity politics has come into its own, writes Erin O’Connor.

Big Arm Woman imagines the faculty deciding who’s the most qualified criminal to teach Advanced Criminal Behavior.

In the same spirit, here’s a New York middle school dean in charge of discipline who was convicted of possessing cocaine and marijuana. Now that he’s been through rehab and the conviction is about to be expunged, he’s entitled to get his job back, an arbitrator ruled. (Via Twilight of the Idols.)

Brian Mickelthwait is a fan a British show called That’ll Teach ‘Em, which puts a group of teen-agers in a 1950s-style boarding school. Brian, a boarding school grad, says it’s not the same without the cane.

Without the ultimate sanction of the cane, or at least some kind of comparably severe torture, these places don’t function properly. After all the humour and irony had been exhausted, if I didn’t do what those bastards at Marlborough told me to do, then I was physically assaulted. And if that didn’t work I would have been expelled, an option which I wish I had explored more thoroughly than I did at the time. (Put it this way. I am often able to startle the ex-victims of Communism with my grasp of the finer points of Communism, what it was and how it worked. How the hell did you know that? – they say, of some weird communist nuance. Easy I say, I went to a British public school.)

If you go to the show’s web site and look at comments from viewers, there’s an awful lot on corporal punishment and boiled cabbage.

New College of California — only in San Francisco — will offer degrees in “activism and social change”, reports the Chronicle. Tuition runs $5,500 to $6,000 a semester for one weekend of classes per month. Instructors include tree-sitter Julia “Butterfly” Hill and “ecofeminist witch” and author Starhawk. There are no conservatives on the faculty, college officials conceded.

Students will study everything from anarchist theory to the civil rights movement. The master’s program has a course on globalization, the hot topic in progressive circles.

“We want people to learn how they can be activist and not just someone who is angry and against the system,” said Peter Gabel, president emeritus of New College, who plans to teach in the activist program. He is now director of the Institute for Spirituality and Politics.

For applicants a little light on the prerequisites — a high school degree and at least 45 units of college credit — New College will consider their “life experience.” And no, school officials said, being arrested four times for blocking an intersection isn’t what they mean. Admission officials want to see a portfolio of community work, not a rap sheet.

Call me cynical. I think they want to see that $6,000 check.

New College also offers a master’s degree in women’s spirituality.

Biloxi classrooms are on candid camera: With a network of 500 webcams, administrators can monitor who’s pilfering supplies — and how teachers are teaching. USA Today reports:

”It helps honest people be more honest,” says district Superintendent Larry Drawdy, who, along with principals and security officers, can use a password to view classrooms from any computer. In an emergency, police also can tune in.

Webcams let parents nitpick teachers, complains Melinda Anderson of the National Education Association.

”Webcams would move us toward an environment of open-ended, all-day, all-the-time access to classrooms,” she says. ”You can argue that ‘just watching it’ does not interfere with teaching and learning, but if the watching results in a constant stream of complaints about teachers and their style, presentation of material, then it could become an interference.”

Drawdy says the cameras are there for safety — ”for supervision and not snoopervision.” But the images could be used by others to evaluate teachers, he concedes. ”If you’ve got unscrupulous administrators, that’s always a possibility. But if we’re going to act as professionals, then we should not be doing something in the classroom that we would be afraid to be on camera.”

Teaching isn’t a private activity. In theory, there should be no problem with outsiders observing in person or via webcam. (Biloxi doesn’t let parents tune in, though it would be easy enough to give parents a password to see their own child’s class.) It does seem creepy, though.

I grew up in a modern house: Everything was airy and open. I longed for dark corners, nooks, an attic, a magic wardrobe to Narnia. A person doesn’t always want to be seen.

The high-tech boom has bust, but India’s college graduates are being recruited by U.S. employers: Schools need math and science teachers, and India has very well-educated, English-speaking prospects who don’t mind working in Greenwood, Mississippi. The Times of India reports:

“No one wants to teach these days, least of all in Greenwood, Mississippi,” says Principal George Noflin, who made the journey to India in June this year by tying up with a recruiting agency after failing to hire locally.

It was his first visit to India and he found the heat stifling, the poverty unbearable, the food dodgy, and the driving insane.

“But the quality of teachers, it was unbelievable,” he says. He interviewed 85 in the week he was there and hired three. A fellow educationist from Kansas on the same trip hired three.

Laid-off engineers and programmers in the U.S. have been applying for teaching jobs, so the math-science shortage isn’t as acute as it was a few years ago. However, the Indian teachers have teaching experience, as well as strong knowledge of their subject area. They’ll face a culture gap in the classroom, but so will the laid-off programmer assigned to teach Algebra 1.

Foundations, Inc., a private school management company, will take over Philadelphia’s Martin Luther King High School, which has been plagued by low achievement and violence. But it looks like they’re still expecting to lose two-thirds of students before graduation.

For starters, to foster better interaction among teachers and administrators and their students, the building will be divided into four houses. There will be two ninth-grade houses, each with about 350 students; a 10th-grade house, with 400 students; and a house for 11th- and 12th-graders, totaling 450 students.

Foundations also is managing schools that feed into MLK High. Eventually, that could make a difference. But it’s very hard to turn around a failing high school.

Remember Steve Hinkle? The Cal Poly student tried to post a flyer for an upcoming speech by a conservative black author at the multicultural center; black students who felt “offended” and “disrespected” told him he couldn’t post a flyer without permission; one student called the campus police. After a seven-hour hearing, Hinkle was found guilty of disrupting a “campus event” — an unscheduled, unannounced Bible study session that hadn’t yet begun. “He was ordered to write letters of apology to the offended students, risking penalties up to expulsion if he refused,” reports FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).

Cal Poly says Hinkle was punished for conduct, not for being a white, male Republican. But FIRE has the transcript of the disciplinary hearing. The offended students admitted they objected to the content of the flyer, which advertised the speaker’s book, It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. Here’s Hinkle questioning Student 6, who called the police.

SH: And you said I asked you, “Why can’t we sit down and talk about it?”

S6: Yes.

SH: Okay. And you told me, “Take the flier elsewhere or I will call public safety”?

S6: Yes. I said, “Take that elsewhere or I will call public safety.” And then that’s when you tried to debate, even more debate, and I went and called public safety because I wasn’t, I wasn’t up for it. It was just, the timing was horrible.

The hearing officer asks if Hinkle’s demeanor was threatening or abusive.

S6: You’re talking about Steve’s demeanor? Was his demeanor threatening?

RG: M-hmm, or abusive?

S6: No.

Here’s Cornel Morton, Cal Poly’s vice president of student affairs, who’d complained FIRE had quoted him out of context.

CM: Well, it’s clear that we have an identifiably young white male who has been self-identified as a member of the College Republicans group. And although the College Republican group, I’m certain, is not exclusively white or male, there are some implications. And on the other side of this we had a group of students of color, at least identifiably, largely students of color, and the mix, unfortunately, and the collision of experience, that is, the collision of your experience with theirs, on that day at that time was placed inside a larger context, as you recall. And namely these fliers that were posted and the concern that some had about the nature of the speaker’s message and all the rest …. And then to learn later after some investigation that the College Republicans had sponsored the speaker. I think that chemistry, if you will, without question, had racial implications, not reduced solely or purely to a matter of race. But again, I think we would be naïve if we did not acknowledge at least that; we would have to acknowledge that.

It seems like Morton is acknowledging that Hinkle was disruptive by virtue of being a white Republican in the not-so-multi-cultural center. Apparently, Cal Poly officials think that black students have a right to be sheltered from contrary political beliefs or believers. A polite invitation to discuss a conflict is taken as disruption.

Update: It’s not harassment just because someone feels offended, says the Office of Civil Rights.

Some colleges and universities have interpreted OCR’s prohibition of “harassment” as encompassing all offensive speech regarding sex, disability, race or other classifications. Harassment, however, to be prohibited by the statutes within OCR’s jurisdiction, must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive. Under OCR’s standard, the conduct must also be considered sufficiently serious to deny or limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the educational program. Thus, OCR’s standards require that the conduct be evaluated from the perspective of a reasonable person in the alleged victim’s position, considering all the circumstances, including the alleged victim’s age.

OCR says its rules don’t require universities to adopt speech or conduct codes that infringe on First Amendment rights.

Update: OCR is fuzzy on free speech, writes Eugene Volokh.

The SAT is dropping analogies and adding an essay. In the future, it may test for judgment, study skills and creativity. The Boston Globe reports on possible questions:

What would you do if you had already eaten lunch when you realized you didn’t have the cash to pay for it? . . . How would you ask a professor you didn’t know well to write you a recommendation? Or: Write a story entitled ”The Octopus’s Shoes.”

Researchers are trying to test for qualities ”other than cognitive ability,” according to Wayne Camara, the College Board’s vice president for research. You’d think cognitive ability would predict college success better than creativity, but Robert Sternberg, a Yale professor of psychology and education, says his alternative tests are better predictors, while reducing the racial/ethnic scoring gap.

. . . Sternberg, who is now president of the American Psychological Association, developed what he called the theory of ”successful intelligence,” which holds that all people have three kinds of abilities: the analytical ability that is the focus of most standardized testing; the practical ability he also calls ”street smarts,” and the creative ability to adjust and invent.

Underpinning all three is the ”tacit knowledge” that helps people handle everyday encounters and situations. All but analytical ability, he says, are measures overlooked by traditional tests such as the SAT.

”There are people who are really good at traditional tests, who may get 800s, and then when they get out of school, that’s the end of the story for them,” Sternberg said. ”They don’t get along with people. They don’t persuade people to listen to them.”

College Board also is funding research on ways to test students’ judgment, study skills and insight into their own strengths and weaknesses.

The purpose of the SATs is to evaluate students’ likelihood of success in college, not whether they’ll do well in later life or be fun at parties. If judging the humor of their cartoon captions is a better predictor of college success than asking them to solve math problems, so be it. I can just see the SAT prep courses where students will drill in “tacit knowledge” and creativity.