Gary Farber at Amygdala is seriously broke and needs a hand. A hand with money in it.

The Winter 2004 Education Next is out with articles on Why School Districts Can’t Downsize, Head Start, the down side of inclusion for autistic children and more.

In Why Choice is Good for Teachers, David Ferrero of the Gates Foundation proposes a “truce in the ideological holy wars of education. Let teachers choose the school that fits their philosophy. Pluralism works in religion. Why not in education?

Despite moving toward a greater appreciation for pluralism in other spheres of life, American educators and policymakers persist in their attempts to impose a uniform doctrine of education on the entire institution of schooling. Consider the attempts to develop national or even state-level content standards. Or the efforts to establish a uniform canon of “best practices.” Reformers of all stripes seem to want to create what educational historian David Tyack has termed “the one best system.” Yet as Tyackís Stanford University colleague Larry Cuban has recently argued, there are many different ways for a school to be “good.”

For instance, Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (“the Met”) in Providence, and the Oakland School for Social Justice and Community Development are all very different urban high schools that enroll mostly low-income black and Hispanic students. Students at Douglass wear uniforms and study a traditional college preparatory curriculum, whereas students at the Met pursue individual projects built around their interests in an environment notably less formal than found at Douglass. The School for Social Justice, meanwhile, comes closest to Freire’s ideal. There students take courses in “culture and resistance” where they learn about “systems of oppression” and are taught to organize political action in their communities. Despite these differences, all three schools graduate students who are literate, competent citizens. And all three outperform nearby comprehensive high schools enrolling similar student populations. In short, students seem to thrive in a broad range of schools.

Schools with a coherent set of values, attracting teachers and parents who share those values, are likely to succeed.

Conservative English Major, a PhD candidate in English at an unnamed university, finds little respect for diversity by his fellow academics.

I recall when I started my PhD program that the professor I was “TA”ing for at the time, got all the TAs together and told us how to deal with “right wing assholes” who will try to steal the discussion and push their narrow views on the class.

I made a comment about how, yeah, extreme views on either side of the spectrum are bad when taken overboard – what is needed is real discussion considering all the sides of the issue.

I was given an odd look and told that liberals are never wrong and their views are appropriate for class, since liberals are open-minded and tolerant and that’s what higher education is about: liberalizing the students.

Silly me, I thought it was about clear and honest discussion of all sides of an issue.

CEM is a TA for a professor who teaches a general education literature class. The prof “admitted he chooses works of literature that are anti-religious because he wants to show the students how idiotic it is to be religious.”

Via Erin O’Connor, who faced similar experiences when she in grad school in 1991. A Critical Mass reader adds another example:

I was a TA for a British lit survey class, in which we were discussing Milton. Of course, the only important thing about Milton was what a sexist he was, and we spent some three days of lecture looking at his negative depiction of Eve. For the most part, this consisted of looking at select passages and simply noting how sexist he was.

Many students began asking questions about Milton’s theology. The response of the professor was — I kid you not — that she was a post-Christian, and that she didn’t think a discussion of Christianity was important to an understanding of Milton.

‘Cause Milton never wrote on religious themes.

Money isn’t the main motivator for teachers who switch schools or quit teaching, says an Education Next article based on Texas data. It’s working conditions. Teachers prefer suburban schools with higher-achieving students who are easier to teach.

. . . teachers transfer from one school to another — or exit the Texas public school system altogether — more as a reaction to the characteristics of their students than in response to better salaries in other schools. This tends to leave disadvantaged, low-achieving students with relatively inexperienced teachers. Because teachers appear so unresponsive to salary levels, it would take enormous across-the-board increases to stem these flows.

Improving working conditions and pay at inner-city schools might keep teachers on the job longer, the authors write.

At an English teachers’ convention, cheat notes are in; spelling is out.

During a seminar on the changing role of spelling, teacher Rebecca Sipe said there are no bad spellers, only “challenged” spellers. And challenged spellers are often first-rate English students who love to read and write but get discouraged by fussy English teachers wielding red pens.

Readers see words spelled correctly many times; they build vocabulary, including a knowledge of word roots. I’ve seen many bad spellers; none were first-rate English students with a love of reading and writing.

An SMU class on the Kennedy assassination purports to teach students to read and think critically.

The one-semester course called “On the Trail of the Assassin(s)” considers the assassination as a work of critical reading, teaching wide-eyed college youths in the English department that there is no absolute truth, but a whole lot of ways to navigate through contradiction.

Actually, there is an absolute truth about the assassination, though it may not be provable beyond a shadow of a doubt. I worry about a class that presents Oliver Stone’s wacky, fact-inventing conspiracy theories as worthy of consideration, even if students also read non-fiction about the event. Perhaps students learn to distinguish between fantasy and reality, but I doubt it: Half end up as conspiracy buffs.

Via Don Burton, who writes:

I think I’ve finally figured out what “critical thinking” means when used by academics:  giving all ideas and notions equal weight, without reaching a conclusion on anything. That’s why academics say that people who use their reasoning ability to reach sound conclusions or who reject leftist claptrap are not engaged in “critical thinking.”

Now, let’s not be cynical.

College students are inflating their own grades, while deflating their credits, by dropping classes to avoid a mediocre grade. Irascible Professor’s guest commentator, Tina Blue, who teaches at the University of Kansas, lost most of her C students and some of the B students.

The thing is, I know that many of the students who dropped my course were actually enjoying it.  But as I was told by one girl I ran into a couple of weeks after she dropped the class, a lot of them just don’t feel they can risk getting a “bad” grade — and in today’s academic environment, a C is definitely a bad grade,  In fact, a B might even be low enough to seriously damage their records, cost them their scholarships, or hurt their chances of getting into their preferred major or into the graduate program of their choice.

I think this puts an intolerable burden on our shoulders.  We should be able to grade our students fairly, without worrying that giving out anything less than A’s will destroy some kid’s life.

Most colleges now let students drop a class at any time for any reason. It’s one reason that so many students take five, six or seven years to complete a four-year degree.

In the U.K., there’s a scheme afoot to ship every child off for a week of character-building summer camp at the age of 11 or possibly 14.

Ministers believe the move could fire enthusiasm for school and build youngsters confidence.

Parents in the US traditionally pack off youngsters each summer for character-building activities at camp.

Really? I suspect only a minority of American kids go off to camp, and most would stay home if they thought character building was involved.

Natalie Solent doubts this will save British youth.

A pilot scheme was successful and so they are all convinced that a burst of wholesome exercise and outdoor living will send the young lads and lasses home flushed and happy for some reason other than the usual Ecstasy tablet / successful shoplifting expedition / fornication.

So we’re back to ten mile runs and outdoor living, eh? What’s the betting that next year’s miracle cure is the long-neglected educational virtue of cold showers.

These poor deluded innocents never seem to figure out that experimental pilot schemes frequently succeed because they are pilot schemes; i.e. new and not offered to everybody.

Indeed.

High schools and colleges are offering classes in how to manage a relationship. Not for credit, I hope.

Advised by 300 Iowa teachers, Howard Dean announced his plan to reform President Bush’s education reforms. Other than giving schools more money, Dean’s key proposal is to relax accountability provisions by introducing more subjective measures of progress:

We must set reasonable goals for adequate yearly progress that are fair to students, teachers, schools, and states and do not rely solely on standardized tests; include multiple measures of learning and progress in assessing success; measure individual student growth using “value-added” approaches, not average student scores that encourage schools to push out low-scoring students; and develop appropriate methods to assess students with disabilities and English language learners.

Under his plan, states would decide when to assess student learning, which means states could skip subjects or grade levels. Dean also opposes letting students transfer from “failing” schools, since funding follows the student.

Not surprisingly he wants to spend more on free breakfast programs and student health centers.

Pressure to change would be eased, since it would be easier to fuzz inconvenient news and much easier to avoid consequences for poor performance. However, Dean did throw in a reference to “value-added” analysis, which is the hot new thing. It requires lots of testing to produce crunchable data. I wonder if he understands that.