Once upon a time, students learned good manners from their parents. Now there are school programs to teach niceness in the hopes of preventing stereotyping, bullying and violence. The Washington Post reports on Challenge Day, a voluntary program at a Virginia high school:

Curriculums devoted to teaching children to be nice to each other are gaining popularity across the Washington area, under headings such as “ethics days,” “honor days” and “character education days.” In Virginia, schools are required to include a component aimed at producing “civic-minded students of high character,” and students in Maryland must perform 75 hours of community service to graduate. Dozens of District schools are rolling out programs on how to be a good person.

Although eye-rolling students tend to dismiss such efforts as “cheesy” or “touchy-feely,” the lessons imparted at Marshall yesterday seemed to resonate loudly and immediately. During an afternoon session, facilitators with wireless microphones tried to keep up with the teenagers coming forward to confess thoughts of suicide, abusive relationships, eating disorders, gang activity and family problems. One student revealed he was gay. Another warned her friends to stop drinking and driving because they were frightening and hurting her.

I’m puzzled by the lead example: A boy apologizes to his girlfriend’s friend for disliking her because of her high, whiny voice. But before Challenge Day, they always exchanged “fake smiles” in the hallway. Surely, faking niceness is good enough. Why should he have to like her?

It’s dangerous to teach in some Chicago schools: Physical assaults on teachers are up 17 percent this year, reports the Chicago Trib.

Janet Pena-Davis is barely 5 feet tall, but the veteran English teacher doesn’t scare easily.

One day, though, a girl arrived 15 minutes late to class — and full of attitude. When the girl took out a snack and began to talk loudly to a friend, Pena-Davis asked the student to leave the class and try again the next day.

The girl hurled a full soda can at her head.

Pena-Davis was able to duck the can. But as the teacher went to close the classroom door, the girl dragged her into the hall and began to beat her –punching and scratching, pulling off her glasses and tugging viciously at her hair. The attack was enough to terrify Pena-Davis, 55, who walked out of Austin High School that day and never went back.

Teachers complain violent students get short suspensions and return to class before the victim’s bruises are healed.

Pena-Davis was assaulted by a girl who’d just returned from a 10-day suspension.

The school disciplinarian told her to be careful because the girl who had beaten her up had a boyfriend who already was looking to avenge his girlfriend’s arrest, Pena-Davis said. When she asked to fill out an assault report, she was told it was not necessary, she said.

When she called to follow up on the police report that was filed, the police told her to give up, she said. Nobody was going to pursue the case.

Home schooled children do better academically, says Time magazine. But are they better citizens?

In many ways, in fact, home schooling has become a threat to the very notion of public education. In some school districts, so many parents are pulling their children out to teach them at home that the districts are bleeding millions of dollars in per-pupil funding.

Of course, if a school district has fewer students to educate, it needs less money.

Aside from money, the drain of families is eroding something more precious: public confidence in the schools.

Surely, the loss of confidence precedes the decision to home school a child.

Thomas Jefferson and the other early American crusaders for public education believed the schools would help sustain democracy by bringing everyone together to share values and learn a common history. In the little red brick schoolhouse, we would pursue both “democracy in education and education in democracy,” as Stanford historian David Tyack gracefully puts it. Home schooling forsakes all that by defining education not as the pursuit of an entire community but as the work of one family and its chosen circle. Which can be great. Despite some drawbacks, there are signs that home-schooling parents are doing a better job than public schools at teaching their kids. But as the number of kids learning at home grows, we should pause to wonder: Better at teaching them what? Home schooling may turn out better students, but does it create better citizens?

Do semi-literates make superior citizens? I see no evidence of it.

Daryl Cobranchi links to a Boston Globe column that suggests parents have a “common duty” to send their children to inferior public schools.

Summer school works for struggling third graders, according to a Brigham Young study that followed Chicago students. Summer school grads did better than students who did just well enough on tests to avoid summer classes; the improvement persisted for several years. Summer school was less effective for sixth graders.

I got home this afternoon. After four days away, I had more than 500 spam e-mails, not to mention dozens of responses to my Fox column. In all there were 626 e-mails.

I’ve noticed some evil program is spamming my comments with advertising, mostly for drugs. Several people sent suggestions on how to deal with this before, but I didn’t do anything because the spamming seemed to be a one-time thing. Now I’m motivated to act. (Actually, I’m motivated to homicide, but probably won’t get the chance.) What do I do to defend comments against spam?

In Indianapolis, a four-year-old boy showed his Head Start friends a baggie of “flour.” It turned out to be crack cocaine worth $7,500 to $10,000, say police. They’re still looking for his parents, who have criminal histories.

Students deserve honest grades, writes Reform K12.

Grades are not (and never have been) a measure of a child’s worth! If Johnny’s report card has a D in Mathematics, that doesn’t mean Johnny the human being is worth a D, it simply means that Johnny’s performance in the knowledge and skills of Mathematics is worth a D!

. . . Do your students a favor, and don’t do them any favors! Just do your best to teach them, and at the end of the term, give them the grades they earn. They’ll thank you later.

Well, they should thank you later.

In Boston, children from Spanish-speaking homes are learning English quickly now that schools have dropped bilingual classes; some now prefer speaking English. But are they losing their native language and culture? And what happens when the children speak better English than their parents?

The Boston Globe story sees the negatives, but admits that learning English has empowered the mothers too, though they’ll never be as fluent as their children.

Sign language relies on stereotypes, many of which are no longer socially acceptable. But deaf Britons say it’s discrimination to change signs that use a hooked nose for Jews, a limp wrist for gays and slant eyes for the Chinese. Others say the new sign for gay is offensive too.

Critics labelled the move as silly yesterday, saying that the producers were interfering with “deaf culture.”

Polly Smith, the acting chairperson of the British Council for Disabled People, said that the changes were a form of discrimination.

“The programme makers at Channel 4 are interfering with deaf people’s language, culture and view of society, and that is a form of discrimination,” she said.

. . . The sign for “Indian” is now a mime of the triangular shape of the subcontinent; “Chinese” is the right hand travelling from the signer’s heart across his chest horizontally, then down towards his hip, mimicking the tunic worn in China; and the sign for “gay” is an upright thumb on one hand in the palm of the other, wobbling from side to side.

. . . Other signs that have been accused of being politically incorrect – such as the sign for German, which is a fist held to the forehead with a finger pointing straight up, mimicking the shape of a Prussian spiked helmet – are widely used. The sign for disabled, in which a finger on each hand depicts a limping movement, is used by some deaf people.

This is British Sign Language, but there are similar problems in American Sign Language.

Denver teachers approved a pay for performance plan that’s contingent on passing a $25 million tax increase.

The Denver proposal would include pay incentives for student growth, measured by improvements on state tests and by objectives agreed upon by individual teachers and principals.

Other factors for pay would be professional development, including graduate degrees and teacher evaluations. Incentives would be offered for hard-to-fill schools or subjects.

The plan is very complex, and will be difficult to implement fairly. However, Denver did complete a two-year pilot that apparently convinced teachers to drop the old seniority-and-credits system.