In England, a children’s pancake race was cancelled when insurance premiums soared and risk assessors demanded 25 marshals for the 50-yard course. Traditionally, women run with a frying pan and pancake, flipping a certain number of times as they go.

Children at Okehampton Primary School in Devon had been looking forward to the annual event on Shrove Tuesday next week.

But the 80-yard run in the town’s Red Lion Yard has had to be cancelled because a risk assessment had revealed that 25 marshalls would have to line the race route to ensure public safety.

And last year’s £75 public liability insurance bill has rocketed to £280.

With publicity, the premium is down and the race is on again with a limited number of participants, a limited number of spectators and a mandatory “first aider” with a first aid box. A firm that makes crepe pans will pay the insurance premium.

A much more dangerous custom is the Shrove Tide Football Match held in Ashbourne, Derbyshire.

Here the men of Ashbourne play football through the streets of the town, in a no rules (thankfully murder and manslaughter are barred), free-for-all. It is the world’s oldest, largest, longest and maddest football game. The game takes place between the Up’ards and Down’ards (two mills three miles apart which form the goal posts) . . .

Via Samizdata.

New York City parents who don’t want to pay exorbitant private school tuition compete to get their children into public magnet schools. Zoe Heller writes about her descent into schooling frenzy.

When you first arrive in New York from England, you look around at the crazy fuss that middle-class New Yorkers make about their children’s education — the multiple applications to private schools, the extravagant “donations” (i.e. bribes) made to school boards — and you think, I’ll never be like that. You don’t want to pay crippling fees so that your child can run about with a bunch of horrid prepubescent snobs in Dior combat trousers. When the time comes, your child will attend the perfectly good state school down the road.

Then you hear about a “top-of-the-line state school for brainy children.”

It’s very difficult to get in, of course, but you decide it’s worth a try. And this is how it starts. This is how a perfectly sensible, non-neurotic parent gets suckered into the city-wide schooling frenzy.

First, the child’s IQ must be tested. Which psychologist gives the highest scores?

Now you have to fill out another, longer application form, full of questions like, “What are your child’s particular skills and talents?” And “How would you, as a parent, like to be involved with our school?” You write that you and your “partner” wish to be very, very involved in the school — that you would like to come in on weekends and scrub floors. Knowing that the school puts a high premium on “diversity”, you try to persuade your boyfriend to pretend that he is an Iranian Jew. He’s very tanned, you tell him, and it’s not as if they’re going to ask to see his passport. But your boyfriend steadfastly refuses.

You receive an appointment for the next round. You are to take her to the school at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, where a panel of educational experts will observe her playing games with a group of other four-year-olds.

Heaven help the late bloomer.

When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Except at a New Jersey middle school that locks up the restrooms during passing periods and limits students to 15 restroom passes per month. On other days, students can go during lunch or gym, if they have it, or not at all. There’s less vandalism in the restrooms — but students are avoiding fluids to save their passes for emergencies.

But some parents don’t buy any of the school’s arguments. They say students are pressed for time at lunch and usually feel the need to use the restroom later in the day, especially if they drank something with their meals. If students have gym at the beginning or end of the day, parents say it doesn’t help much. Gym is every other day and some students are enrolled in health instead.

At my large high school, most restrooms were locked all the time because the teachers didn’t want to be on anti-smoking patrol. We learned planning and self-control. But, at least, there were some restrooms open during passing periods.

In Britain, the government will propose part-time apprenticeships for students starting at 14.

Pupils as young as 14 will be allowed to leave the classroom for two days a week to learn a trade under plans to tackle skill shortages and motivate disillusioned children.

. . . They will learn alongside skilled workers such as plumbers, joiners and information technology operators.

Apprentices would spend one day a week at a college (a trade college?) and two days at a regular school. They’d leave school at 16 with a vocational certificate and be able to go on to a full-time paid apprenticeship.

In the U.S., apprenticeship proposals tend to fall apart because of union resistance and employers’ fear of lawsuits and of incompetent teen-agers. We’re also much more committed here to the idea that everyone — regardless of motivation or ability — should go to college.

When a Milwaukee voucher school failed, it closed. That’s a victory for school choice, writes Andrew Coulson of The Gantelope.

So long as schools are run by human beings, some schools will fail. Historically, competitive market schools have failed their students far less frequently than have government monopolies. More importantly, markets force failing schools to either improve or go out of existence, whereas government school monopolies keep their failing schools in operation for year after year, inflicting their pedagogical malpractice on generation after generation of children.

Coulson is the editor of School Choices and author of Market Education: The Unknown History.

Shark Blog asks Washington state residents to express their support for charter school legislation that’s in danger of defeat. Here’s info on how to contact legislators. Washington state is one of the few that doesn’t allow charter schools.

Is it a yard, garage, rummage, tag or jumble sale? You can link to dialect maps here.

Like Andrew Sullivan, I score as slightly Southern. He’s a Brit; I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Who knows?

In second grade, Miss Bletsch told us that Midwesterners speak perfect American English. Everyone else is a little peculiar. We did talk about marry, merry and Mary, creek vs. crick and the pronunciation of root and roof. (“Root” rhymes with “foot,” OK?)

In a speech on alternative teacher certification, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Professor Martin Haberman rips traditional schools of education for repeated failure to improve teacher quality.

Since WWII, the federal government has given over a billion dollars  to schools and colleges of education to improve the teacher workforce with nothing to show for it. These grants go directly into  the pockets of education faculty and university administrators of research who pursue lucrative careers getting even more federal grants which benefit nothing and  no one but themselves. . . . Where there is zero accountability there is  less than zero accomplished; that is, there are negative effects such as the exploitation of failing school districts and teachers’ and childrens’ time for  the generation of misleading “findings.” Teacher educators do not offer programs based on data. Like schoolfolk, their programs reflect  custom, tradition and the convenience of faculty.

We in teacher education quack about the need for making policy based on evidence but we act in ways which are not only baseless but frequently in contradition to the evidence. For example, as we speak, the folks in Las Vegas and in several other urban school districts are hiring new teachers with signing bonuses in the hope of  getting  better teachers who will stay. This is an example of policy based on delusion not fact.  And it takes precious funds from very tight school budgets. N.Y.C. spends 12 million dollars  per year for tuition for its teacher interns to complete masters degrees in education at local universities when the evidence indicates that completing these programs are not in any way  related to increasing student achievement and that as teachers earn more advanced degrees they are more likely to leave the classroom.

Studies of teacher shortages ignore the economy, Haberman says.

In periods such as the present, where jobs with any career potential  are scarce and disappearing, substantial numbers come into and remain in teaching because they have no other options. This increases the number of teachers in the poorest schools who are  strong insensitives and who have no commitment to the children. They are  also not likely to burn out. They can resist the debilitating conditions of work because they don’t care. They are  in teaching for the job and the benefits. In my city, the benefits package is 63%.

Haberman argues the best teachers are mature adults with real-world experience and knowledge of subject matter, not recent college graduates with education degrees.

Via Teacher Quality Bulletin and Education News.

Education Gadfly links to a liberal debate on No Child Left Behind. In Impotent Liberalism, Andrew Rotherham of the 21st Century Schools Project attacks a series of articles titled Children Left Behind in American Prospect.

For example, Robert Borosage, a leading liberal intellectual, offers the standard disclaimer that money alone is not a reform. Nonetheless Borosage then turns what could be an interesting essay on the enormous challenges public education faces and lack of support for meeting them into a call for basically more of the same, with an emphasis on the importance of the “common school.” Romanticism about common schools in the face of what research shows about the demographics and outcomes of public education is an astounding feat of denial. Moreover it is a misdirection play to divert attention from the horrifying achievement gap that is one of the primary barriers to greater social equity and mobility today. We’re all for more investment in public education, particularly in underserved communities, and would like to see greater support for public schools, too. Yet neither of these challenges should serve as a smokescreen for serious structural problems that result in a system that systematically undereducates minority and poor youngsters.

Rotherham thinks liberals need to get serious about serving students, not the adults in the system.

At a Chicago school, students in the gifted program, known as “giftees,” got in trouble for wearing T-shirts with their nickname on it. Their parents filed suit. In response to my post, the head of the school council writes:

The term “giftees” was ascribed to the students in the Options Program (commonly referred to as the Gifted Program) by the students in the regular program at the school. In return, the students in the Options Program gave their regular program fellow students the nickname or “retards” or just “tards.” Our school also has a Trainable Mentally Handicapped Program so you can understand the additional sensitivity of that term.

The school’s administration made it clear that neither term is acceptable for any students to use. So the Options students created a shirt that tried to skirt this by having the term appear as “g*****s” on the shirt in question. Again, unacceptable and quite possibly inflammatory. Disguising the letters does not change the meaning.

To avoid confrontation in the hallways of the school between these students, the Options class was kept in their homeroom on the day they wore the t-shirt and their teachers came to them. Further discipline would have been allowed in accordance with the Uniform Discipline Code of the Chicago Public Schools, but that was not done.

It has always been and will continue to be the goal of this school to foster a spirit of community between all of its students and their families. This current lawsuit is an unfortunate attempt to create a division in that community. We are not all born with the same gifts but we should be taught to understand how to properly utilize those gifts and respect the talents of those throughout the community. That is our goal at Beaubien and we will continue on that path.

Michael Renkosiak
Chairman, Beaubien Local School Council

I can understand banning the term “tard,” which is an insult. Banning “giftee” or “g*****” I don’t get. If the nicknamed don’t mind, why should the nicknamers be inflamed?