A 15-year-old boy’s anti-war sketches prompted his art teacher to call in the principal, who called in the local police, who called in the Secret Service. The Secret Service interviewed the boy and pronounced him no threat to the president’s life.

The drawing that drew the most notice showed a man in what appeared to be Middle Eastern-style clothing, holding a rifle. He was also holding a stick with an oversize head of the president on it.

The student said the head was enlarged because it was intended to be an effigy, (family friend Kevin) Cravens said. The caption called for an end to the war in Iraq.

If the Secret Service has to vet every person in America who’s drawn a caricature of the president . . . Well, that would be stupid.

The CNN story says the school disciplined the boy, but didn’t suspend him. By what right was he disciplined? What school rule did he violate?

Reform K12 has a nice post about a teacher who got a thank you from a parent.

See, I’d given her daughter an F for the third quarter, and her mother couldn’t be more tickled.

What this failing grade had done was give her daughter a well-needed kick in the pants. She’d done a mediocre performance the first two quarters, but this failing third quarter grade gave her the sobering thought that she might fail the entire course.

The student started to show up every day and do the work.

Big Bird — that is, the actor who portrays Big Bird — will be Villanova’s commencement speaker. A committee made the choice. Some students are not pleased.

Big Bird was my least favorite Sesame Street character. I hated that voice.

Chicago students who transferred from low-performing schools are doing much better in their new schools, reports the Sun-Times.

Kids who won highly prized transfers out of failing Chicago public schools averaged much better reading and math gains during the first year in their new schools –just as drafters of the federal No Child Left Behind Law envisioned, an exclusive analysis indicates.

And, contrary to some predictions, moving low-scoring kids to better-performing schools didn’t seem to slow the progress of students in those higher-achieving schools.

Even kids “left behind” in struggling schools generally posted better gains in state tests once their peers transferred elsewhere.

The transfer students had been falling behind the national average, and even their classmates’ progress, when they attended low-performing schools. In their new schools, they improved at a much faster rate, beating the national average.

In their sending schools, transfer kids posted 24 percent less than the expected gain in reading, and 17 percent less than the expected gain in math. But in their new schools, transfer kids produced 8 percent more gains than the average student — in reading and math.

It’s possible that these transfer students have more education-savvy parents than others: It’s hard to navigate the transfer process and only the strong survive. But those parents weren’t giving the kids an advantage in their old schools.

Students praise the sense of purpose and the discipline in their new schools.

Parents who landed in three of dozens of receiving schools — Dixon, Galileo Scholastic Academy and Healy Elementary — noticed the difference right away: Teachers sent home more challenging homework, communicated with them regularly through assignment notebooks, called them immediately with good news or bad.

In other words, teachers nipped problems in the bud. Suddenly, there was no mouthing off. Calls or notes came home the minute homework was missing.

Quiana Wilcoxon, 11, said she visited three possible new schools and picked Healy during its open house for potential transfer kids.

“I could just tell, from the assistant principal talking about the school, that I wanted to go there,” said Quiana, whose Healy test scores last year showed strong math gains. “She said if somebody did something wrong, they would be sent to the principal’s office immediately — five seconds later.”

Transfer student Rodney Gandy, now a fourth-grader at Galileo, said his new teacher called home immediately when he repeatedly drummed on his desk during class. At Galileo, Rodney said, teachers “will be right on your behind if you get into trouble. They will be right on you — like that.” And, he said, “That’s good.”

Market forces work, says Orrin Judd.

I’ve been getting a lot of depressing mail lately from teachers, professors and employers. Here’s one from someone who hires emergency dispatchers. Because of the stress and the bad hours, there’s a lot of turnover. Replacing dispatchers is difficult.

I begin by arranging a group orientation and testing for applicants, in order to verify the applicants’ concept of the job, and to weed out those who cannot read and comprehend, spell, write or organize thoughts, and carry through basic multi-tasking exercises.  The spelling test is 50 words and was devised at random from a combination of a Civil Service Exam and a beginning “How to Become a Dispatcher” book found at a local bookstore.  An 80% on all tests is required to pass on to the next phase of testing.  During the last round of applicant testing, all of the 52 applicants had the required high school diploma or equivalent, and some had current desk-type jobs for which the above skills are necessary (or so I thought).  Six out of 52 people passed the spelling test.  And the results of the other tests were not much better.  So, I had six people to move into the next round of testing, which is geared more toward the specific required skills and abilities of a communications officer.  In the end, four people were qualified to interview.

She’s looking at the tests to see if they’re too hard, but worries about “mediocre service from a dispatcher who might be attempting to help save a baby’s life over the phone.”

Hatemonger’s Quarterly critiques the notion of the “scholar athlete” and announces a new challenge in its First Annual Horrible College-Student Poetry Competition. There is nothing more horrible than horrible amateur poetry.

Poets die young compared to prose writers, notes Jim Miller. Apparently, burning the candle at both ends is a fire hazard. (Do they put a toothpick in the middle of the candle and mount it horizontally?)

Instead of requiring high school students to pass a graduation exam, Delaware decided to award three levels of diplomas: basic, standard and distinguished. The levels are based on students’ performance on state reading, math and writing tests given in 10th grade. Some 52 percent of students are in line for only a basic diploma, 40 percent for standard and only 8 percent for distinguished.

First, honor roll students with mediocre scores complained they have to settle for standard diplomas. Now there’s a furor over the achievement gap: 76 percent of blacks and 70 percent of Hispanics are likely to get only a basic diploma, “resegregating” the graduating class. By contrast, 43 percent of whites and 30 percent of Asians are expected to be basic graduates. (I note that 24 percent of Asians score as distinguished.)

The Legislature is likely to delay the three-tiered plan, killing the messenger. If they wait till students of all races and family backgrounds earn the same test scores, they will wait a long time.

“Eventually, with a good study, they will find it furthers the aura of separation of these kids when, ultimately, you want them to feel that they are just as good as their counterparts,” said Hector Figueroa, education director for the Urban League.

They’re not just as good, of course. Not in reading, writing and math.

The state’s school superintendents also want the three-tiered system to end. Robert Andrzejewski, head of the Red Clay school district, said the system will not motivate students as legislators insisted it would.

“One of the worst things you can do to kids with low self-esteem, who are often of low-income anyway, is show them failure,” he said. “So many of those students have experienced failure in their lives and there comes a point when they decide they have to save face for themselves, and, unfortunately, that may mean they drop out.”

Many states are denying a diploma to students who fail to meet minimum standards. Delaware’s plan gives everyone a diploma, regardless of skills, but rewards those who’ve done average or above-average work with a silver or gold sticker. I don’t think that’s unfair to basic grads. Their problem is not the color of the sticker on their diploma. It’s the fact that they lack the skills — indeed they lack the basic skills — they’ll need to pass a college class or qualify for an apprenticeship or fill out a job application properly.

Dave Huber, a Delaware teacher, has more.

Some San Jose area teachers are dumping the D as a passing grade. They say students who are doing the minimum to get by will just have to work a little harder. California’s public universities won’t accept anything below C- on an academic transcript. The Mercury News reports:

“Where else in the world does anyone accept `D work’ but in public schools?” says Pete Murchison, principal at Fremont’s Irvington High School, which has done away with D’s altogether.

. . . The demise of the D makes it harder to pass a class, but educators say it’s improving marks in their grade books. Still, some wonder whether the new grading scheme demands too much from students who aren’t shooting for spots at Stanford or even Cal State-Stanislaus.

“I’d rather go to a junior college,” said Alex Johnson, a junior at Mountain View High who is eyeing Foothill or De Anza community colleges. He says it’s unfair that some teachers at his school are widening the range for an F. His dad isn’t thrilled either.

“D’s are the only thing keeping him from getting F’s,” Alex’s dad, Doug Johnson, said. “He’s an incredibly bright kid, but he couldn’t care less about school.”

That’s precisely the problem, say teachers who don’t want to pass students who scrawl their names and some answers on exams but still don’t grasp much of the material.

The risk of eliminating the D is that teachers will stretch the C- to help kids squeak by. But if teachers hang tough, students will learn to set their sights higher.

Principal Murchison said young people need to learn that substandard work is not OK in the real world.

“I’m fixing my kitchen right now,” Murchison said. “I’m not going to pay a guy $5,000 for `D-work’.”

Oh, but what if he’s an incredibly talented workman who does lousy work because he just couldn’t care less? You mean that’s not good enough?

U.S. history books are filled with pristine role models, complains Jonathan Zimmerman in the LA Times. He blames our infatuation with psychology, which was cited in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case. Segregation was wrong, said the court, because it made black children feel inferior.

By the 1960s, African Americans and their liberal white allies would use the same rationale for desegregating American history textbooks: Black kids needed to “see themselves” in the books or their self-esteem would suffer.

. . . Up until this time, we should remember, most American history books either denigrated or ignored African Americans. In the South, textbooks called slavery a benevolent institution, and Northern books were little better, depicting slaves as childlike victims who morphed into marauding savages during Reconstruction. Today, our students no longer read such racist drivel in school; instead, they learn about great African Americans like Martin Luther King. This reform is one of the great achievements of that same history.

But these gains came at a cost. For whenever a new racial luminary moved into our textbooks, he — or, increasingly, she — also moved beyond reproach.

. . . Before long, of course, whites began complaining that accounts of slavery and racial violence harmed their kids’ fragile minds. “Education is getting a positive image about oneself,” fumed a white Michigan parent in 1974, condemning a textbook that described white attacks upon blacks during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. “No child, white or black, will get a positive image by reading about stabbings, war, the problems.” Once Brown enshrined self-esteem as the highest American value, in short, an honest American history became impossible.

To understand history, students must do more than simply “see themselves” in it; they need to grapple with its enigmas, its ambiguities and its inconsistencies. But they’ll never do that if we’re overeager to protect their psyches, which are far less delicate than most adults suspect.

I also strongly dislike the idea that children require role models of matching race, ethnicity and gender.

In British Columbia, home-schooling parents who get online assistance from the public schools have been told they can’t use faith-based materials at home, even if they’re bought with the parents’ money. Even non-religious parents are threatening to pull out of the distance education program, which serves 6,800 students in the province. The Vancouver Sun reports:

Home-schooling parents are fuming after the B.C. Education Ministry ordered thousands of them to stop using faith-based materials — or any other “unofficial” resource — when teaching their children at home.

Parents were promised a link to experienced teachers and free books if they signed up with the online program. Children who met provincial learning standards would graduate with a certificate.

To encourage the electronic programs, the ministry boosted its per-pupil funding of distance-education students in public schools to the same level as regular students ($5,408 in 2003-04). Cash-hungry districts responded by aggressively courting home-schooling families.

The districts don’t want to lose their profits from the distance education students, who don’t really require much support. But now parents are deciding the help isn’t worth the loss of independence.

“I’m definitely not going back and I don’t know anyone who is,” said Anita Kosovic, who has two children in U-Connect. Although her family isn’t religious, she said she doesn’t want to be held to B.C.-approved resources, some of which she says are awful.

“I don’t think anyone should be able to tell me what I can do in my own home and that’s what they’re telling us.”

Frankly, I don’t see how districts possibly could “ensure that students are not using religious materials or resources as part of the educational program.” It’s an Orwellian idea. And what about all those children who attend public schools? Their parents also may be using unauthorized or religious teaching materials at home. They may be trying to teach the parents’ values and beliefs. Can’t have that.