The self-esteem fad has hit Britain, and teachers are now being asked to be therapists charged with developing “emotional literacy” in students. Writing in The Telegraph, sociologist Frank Furedi notes there’s no evidence to support feelgood education. He adds:

In previous times, educators were charged with teaching children to behave well. Good conduct was associated with clearly defined public acts such as politeness, honesty and altruism. The regime of therapeutic education is based on a form of behaviour modification that not only targets conduct but also attempts to alter certain forms of feelings and emotions.

Training a child how to feel is far more intrusive and coercive than educating a pupil in how to behave. That is why dealing with the question of how children see themselves should be the business of the parent.

Well said.

School vouchers don’t drain money from public schools, writes Terry Moe in the New York Times.

In a typical voucher program, the cost of the voucher (say, $4,500) is far lower than the average amount the public schools spend on each student (say, $8,000). This means that when students go private, only part of the money budgeted for their education goes with them. The remainder stays in the government’s pocket. If these savings were put back into the public schools, the schools would actually have more money per child. And the greater the number of students using vouchers, the greater the increase in spending per child could be.

It’s not hard to design a voucher program for low-income students that saves more than it costs; the savings can be funneled back to the public schools.

Afraid of lawsuits by the parents of mediocre students, Nashville schools won’t post honor rolls.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A-students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways — all at the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, Nashville school system lawyers warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission.

Some schools have since put a stop to academic pep rallies. Others think they may have to cancel spelling bees. And now schools across the state may follow Nashville’s lead.

Some principals are asking parents to sign permission slips allowing their children’s achievements to be recognized. But others want to abolish academic honors and competitions.

Latin isn’t a dead languages, says The Economist. It’s just resting.

If Latin, spoken or written, is ever to catch on again, perhaps it needs justifying. Among the XVIII slightly desperate reasons for learning Latin to be found on Latinteach.com, the most attractive is “Explain the passive periphrastic to your significant other,” and the most topical, “Learn to conquer the world and claim it was self-defence.” Or perhaps, discarding justification, the language just needs modernising. Henry Beard’s handy little tome, “Latin for All Occasions,” is designed to recycle old Latin tags for the present time. (Eg, rara avis: There is no car hire available.) Many have pointed out that “Been there, done that,” was originally coined by Caesar when he proclaimed Veni, vidi, vici, though he did not wear the T-shirt.

The center of Latin news broadcasting is Finland. But you knew that.

Amherst High, which once canceled “West Side Story” for “insensitivity” to Puerto Ricans, is staging “The Vagina Monologues” for Valentine’s Day. This is believed to be the first high school performance of Eve Ensler’s play, Time reports.

“The girls who will be up there faking orgasms onstage wouldn’t even be old enough to see When Harry Met Sally in the movie theater,” fumes Amherst (Mass.) resident Larry Kelley, who read the play after he heard of the high school’s plans. “But it isn’t the orgasms or even the use of the C word that gets me. Rather, it’s the favorable description of sex between a 24-year-old woman and a 16-year-old woman. This is inappropriateness squared for high school students.”

Surely, there should be just a soupcon of sensitivity toward the feelings of people like Kelley. And note that he says “16-year-old woman.” He must have been trained never to use the word “girl.”

Randi Coy may lose her job as a Catholic school teacher in Scottsdale, Arizona for mocking marriage. Coy took a leave from her job as a first-grade teacher to appear in “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance,” which offered her a million-dollar prize for pretending she wanted to marry a big, fat, obnoxious guy.

For Coy to win, she needed to convince her family that she met, fell in love with and planned to marry “Steve” without revealing that their pairing is a farce.

But “Steve,” his friends and family were actors, paid to sabotage the staged wedding.

. . . The school’s mission statements vow to teach students to become Christian leaders and responsible citizens, which might come into conflict with marrying a stranger on television for money.

Via Education Gadfly.

France may ban bandannas and beards in school — but only if they’re worn for religious reasons. Quelle bizarre.

No Child Left Behind is forcing education researchers to get serious about determining what works, writes Karin Chenoweth in Education Week. The “dirty little secret of education” is that we don’t know.

Here’s an example: For children whose first language is not English, what is the best way to ensure that they learn not only English, but all the math, history, and science that they should learn? Is it best to teach math, history, and science in their home language while teaching English separately? Or is it to intensively teach English, leaving aside the other subjects until English is mastered? Does it make a difference if the child comes to this country when he is 2 years old or when he is age 12? Does it matter whether the child’s first language has a lot of overlap with English, like German or Spanish, or if it is completely unrelated, like Turkish or Chinese? Does it help or hurt to continue to use the home language outside of school?

For a nation of immigrants in the middle of a huge wave of immigration, it would seem important to know the answers to those questions. Unfortunately, we have no idea.

Individual educators may have implemented successful practices in their schools, but without linking those practices to research demonstrating that what they do could be successful with other kids, all we have are individual experiences, not standard practice. This leaves us with philosophies. We have a bilingual philosophy and an English- first philosophy, complete with testimonials about what worked for whose grandparents, but these really are politicalóbordering on the religiousó arguments, rather than scientific ones.

G. Reid Lyon, the chief of the child- development and -behavior branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the director of the institute’s reading-research program, has commissioned a major study on what methods of English-language instruction work best for which kids, but we won’t have the results for some time.

No Child Left Behind is creating a revolution in education research, Chenoweth writes. About time. The What Works Clearinghouse is supposed to provide guidance on a variety of education questions.

Update: Reform K12 says we do so know what works. We just don’t do it.

The Senate has passed a school voucher plan for District of Columbia students.

The $13 million plan would award private-school vouchers to at least 1,700 poor students in the district, home to a chronically struggling system of 65,000 students. Students must gain admission to a private school and cover tuition or other costs exceeding their vouchers.

Critics want to give the money to the public schools. Actually, the plan does that too, giving D.C. “an extra $1 million for administrative costs, $13 million for its charter schools and $13 million for its other public schools.”

Pitzer president Laura Skandera Trombley says the SAT is useless in an LA Times op-ed. If this is the best example of the SAT’s bias, the exam should be out of trouble. Trombley critiques an SAT question:

“Aware of the baleful weather predicted by forecasters, we decided the —- would be the best place for our company picnic.

(A) roof
(B) cafeteria
(C) beach
(D) park
(E) lake

Now, if I had grown up on the East Coast, my immediate choice would be “cafeteria,” as my assumption would be that “baleful weather” would indicate rain or maybe even snow. But in fact, I lived for many years on the western side of the Pacific Coast Highway, so “baleful weather” could indicate high waves „ meaning that my company picnic would be best, and more pleasantly, relocated to a lake.

On the other hand, if I had lived in Iowa (and I did for five years), baleful weather might indicate flooding. Obviously my company picnic would be best held on the roof. What to do? What to choose?

Context: the framework within which we make sense of the world.

Actually, this makes no sense at all, writes Cathy Seipp. “Baleful” means a gloomy expression, and gloomy weather is rainy weather all over the country.

Actually, the SAT question Trombley cites happens to be an example of a perfectly unbiased question, because you don’t need to know the word “baleful” to answer it correctly. (Of course it helps if you aren’t determined, like Trombley apparently is, to think not of horses or even zebras when you hear hoof beats, but unicorns.)

The question’s rather fretful tone, and the information that weather is involved, are all the clues you need to realize that (B) cafeteria is the right answer, because it’s the only choice that’s indoors. You’d realize that even if the question began, “Aware of the zzzyrrk weather prediction by forecasters…”

It’s a logic problem obvious to anyone who’s watched Sesame Street. One of these things is not like the others.

Seipp wonders at Trombley’s trembling in the face of a little weather. Who moves a picnic from the beach to avoid waves? Or picnics on the roof for fear of those Iowa cafeteria floods.

Kimberly Swygert observes that Pitzer’s reliance on high school grades creates winners and losers too.

The problem is not with the measuring system. The problem is that some students who want to go to college are poorly prepared for higher education.

Update: Trombley misstates the SAT gap, notes Eugene Volokh. Whites don’t outscore “non-whites” by 206 points. ÊWhites outscore blacks by that amount. Asian-Americans average 1083, whites 1063, Mexican-Americans 905, Other Hispanics 921 and blacks 857. The white/non-white gap is roughly 113 points, says a Volokh reader.