More of the same would mean more failure at James Lick High School in East San Jose. The school ranks in the bottom 10 percent in the state, even when it’s compared to schools with similar demographics: Most students are low-income Hispanics; one third aren’t fluent in English. Some 300 students have taken advantage of the No Child Left Behind Act to transfer to a neighboring school with a much better record.

So the superintendent replaced the management team at the school, which faces state and federal sanctions for its failure to improve. The new team of three co-principals has tightened discipline, added time for teacher collaboration, offered classes to help students pass the state graduation exam and decided to teach nothing but English and math to new students who are too far behind to do high school work. From the San Jose Mercury News:

More than half of incoming freshmen and 10th graders will take English and math — and little else. That’s three periods of English and two of math for a projected 60 percent of students who test two or more years behind grade level. If the budget permits an extended day, they’ll also get gym and an elective.

This unprecedented, seismic shift in students’ lives reflects the demand of the state Department of Education to reverse Lick’s abysmal test scores.

Math and English teachers will get more training. Incoming students will be tested to determine what classes they should take, instead of dumping everyone in algebra and ninth grade English.

A “good” school in a wealthy suburb of San Jose is plagued by cheating.

Update: Kimberly posts on a British plagiarist who plans to sue the university for not catching him right away.

A student who admits down-loading material from the internet for his degree plans to sue his university for negligence.

Michael Gunn, an English major at the University of Kent at Canterbury, claims he wasn’t warned not to plagiarise and “never dreamt it was a problem.”

“If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough.

“But all my essays were handed back with good marks and no one spotted it.”

Gunn’s plagiarism was caught just before he was due to receive his degree. That does sound negligent.

Writing in the New York Sun, education professor David Steiner says his study of courses required for new teachers found bias toward progressive-constructivist ideas and hostility to high-stakes testing.

Given the divide between “back to basics” and the “constructivist-progressive” models, one would expect education schools to expose students to both points of view. Our research (which covered 165 syllabi of required courses in the foundations of education, the teaching of reading, and teaching methodology) strongly suggested, however, that at many of our highest ranked schools of education, the constructivist-progressivist arguments are being taught to the almost complete exclusion of the other, direct instruction model.

Few incoming teachers are well-prepared to teach math and science content. According to a new U.S. Education Department report, 3.5 percent of future teachers majored in math; 4 percent majored in life science. Some “80 percent of future teachers attended non-selective undergraduate institutions,” observes the National Council on Teacher Quality Bulletin.

Philadelphia students told a congressman what happens when inner-city schools can’t hire qualified teachers.

Instead of learning math, Yusef Perry said, he and his ninth-grade classmates at Sayre High School played basketball. Latoya Andrews and other biology students at Simon Gratz High endured weeks of being split up among other classes.

Kenneth Ramos, who attends Kensington High, had no geometry teacher for four weeks this year.

“We have more long-term subs than regular teachers at Kensington,” he said. “Some of them don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes I wake up and sit on the side of my bed and wonder what I’m going to school for.”

The teachers’ contract lets teachers choose their assignments based on seniority. As teachers gain experience, they can transfer to easier jobs, leaving behind low-income, high-minority schools.

Philadelphia is now offering bonuses for those who take difficult teaching assignments, and is trying to renegotiate the contract to ensure that all schools get their share of qualified teachers.

Chicago has improved teacher quality — and recruited a lot more math teachers — by streamlining alternative certification, says the Chicago Tribune.

Often they are people in mid-career who simply decide they would rather serve as teachers. Many are bankers, accountants, engineers, saleswomen, lawyers and scientists. They have life experience and they’ve developed an expertise in their field. Now they want to teach.

. . . “They’re a different caliber of people: smarter, more mature, more committed and more in it for the long haul,” said Chicago Public Schools Chief Arne Duncan.

Eduwonk has some other links to teacher quality stories, and points out that No Child Left Behind’s insistence that “poor kids get good teachers” is not as horrible as progressives seem to think.

Update: Here’s a “tipping point” plan to attract good teachers to difficult schools:

Lower class sizes, clean and safe schools, up-to-date materials, and state of the art technology are among the incentives some districts are using to lure personnel to their hard-to-staff schools.  While these are important, the single most important incentive for principals and teachers — the one that has the greatest chance of convincing them that they can make a difference in these highly demanding schools — is the promise of membership on a competent and committed team of teachers and administrators.  The Tipping Point plan is designed to lead dysfunctional schools to the point where they “tip” — a point where teachers and administrators come and stay because together, as a team, they are able to create successful learning experiences for their students.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

Students at a Chicago high school were warned they’d have to sit out prom if they let detentions pile up. Fifteen of 180 students ignored the warning. But they went anyhow. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Jones College Prep Principal Don Fraynd thought he was giving his students a valued lesson in responsibility when he barred 15 seniors who had racked up anywhere from 50 to 300 unserved detentions each from prom.

What he got was a lesson in politics, when the students held a protest, their parents blitzed the Board of Education with complaints, and the board reversed him, allowing the chronically late and class cutters to go to the ball.

“My biggest concern in terms of the reversal is the take-home message for these kids, and for the other kids who have behaved so well,” said Fraynd, a first-year principal at the top magnet school.

Students were warned they had to start making up detentions to attend prom. Some did. Others blew off the warning.

“Everybody was upset because they spent all their money getting suits and limos and all of that,” said Remon Miller, 18, who said he had 302 after-school detentions and 102 Saturday detentions to serve.

Well, the kid has a point. He’s obviously been allowed to ignore detentions for years — you can’t pile up 404 detentions in just one school year — and suddenly he’s told he has to play by the rules. No wonder he thought the warning was meaningless. And, thanks to the school board, he was right.

Edith Foster, a classicist who writes curricula for the National Endowment for the Humanities, suggests a summer project: Teach your children to memorize poetry and speeches.

Memorization does not deserve its reputation as a killer of creativity. On the contrary, memorization is useful to the whole process of thought creation. It exercises intelligence and quiet concentration, creates a supply of examples to think with and about, and provides models of speech that can be accommodated to suit different themes. Memorization is the basis of versatility, because examples that live in the mind are truly one’s own: they can be molded and recast for any useful purpose.

. . . Memorization is a discipline. ItÕs not totally easy. But it makes ideas permanently accessible to the mind. Whether you choose to memorize a poem, something from the Bible, part of a speech, or part of a play, whatever you memorize will become a possession of your family.

Foster gives specific advice on how to teach memorization — including letting your teen-agers realize that they’re better at it than you are. Classic Poems to Read Aloud has some good options, she writes.

I memorized and recited The Highwayman in fifth grade — just for the hell of it. (Actually, I was very nervous about saying “hell” in public in the “though hell should bar the way” lines, even though the teacher said it was OK.) I still remember the first part.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding, riding, riding,
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

Likewise I remember the Wordsworth sonnet I had to learn in high school. “The world is too much with us late and soon. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours . . . ”

And: “Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gire and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves and the mome raths outgrabe.”

If you learn it, you own it.

Via No Left Turns.

The kid who says, “Put me in, coach,” usually isn’t mocked for wanting to play. Idiotically, a middle school basketball coach in Pleasantville, New Jersey chose to humiliate a player who begged for playing time by giving him a “crybaby award” at a team banquet. The boy’s parents complained.

Last week, the coach apologized to the eighth grade honor student at a school assembly and gave him an award for team spirit and dedication.

A boy who’s being taught at home wants to try out for his local high school’s soccer team. There’s no reason to deny home-schoolers a chance to play on a team, argues a South Carolina father.

Women who’ve never rowed a boat can get crew scholarships to universities with football programs, thanks to Title IX, which requires an equal number of scholarships to male and female athletes.

Ohio State elevated its women’s rowing program to varsity status nine years ago. Now, as the men’s club team runs programs such as Rent-a-Rower ($50 for four hours of chores like raking leaves, cleaning garages or moving furniture to raise money for equipment and travel), the women are fully funded.

The team has an N.C.A.A. maximum 20 scholarships, and 16 women receive full rides. The remaining money is divvied up among other rowers. The team’s annual budget is nearly $900,000.

”In the fall, rowing is a sport that you carry 70 to 80 people, then in the spring at least 46 kids get out and race,” Ohio State’s athletic director, Andy Geiger, said. ”It’s an expensive sport, but it’s worth it. It really does help offset football.”

I don’t see the justice in denying athletic opportunities to male athletes while begging and bribing women to try sports in which they’ve never had any interest.

Jon Stewart, who was graduated from William and Mary in 1984, was awarded an honorary doctorate.

I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to this place. Seriously, it saddens me. As a person, I am honored to get it; as an alumnus, I have to say I believe we can do better. And I believe we should. But it has always been a dream of mine to receive a doctorate and to know that today, without putting in any effort, I will. It’s incredibly gratifying. Thank you. That’s very nice of you, I appreciate it.

I’m sure my fellow doctoral graduates — who have spent so long toiling in academia, sinking into debt, sacrificing God knows how many years of what, in truth, is a piece of parchment that in truth has been so devalued by our instant gratification culture as to have been rendered meaningless — will join in congratulating me. Thank you.

As Andrew Sullivan says, the speech is very good.