All students learn more when “diverse” voices participate in class discussions, say proponents of racial and ethnic preferences. But minority students don’t necessarily want to speak for their groups. At the University of Colorado’s School of Education, a “school and society” class created a special section restricted to minority students and students who are the first in their families to attend college. Because the class has a long waiting list, that means some students won’t get in based on the color of their skin.

School of Education Dean Lorrie Shepard said the section requirements meet the state’s interpretation of federal law because they are not strictly race-based. In addition to minority students, the class includes those of any race who are the first in their family to go to college.

The course itself is open to all students, she said, and therefore is not discriminatory. But the section for underrepresented students was developed as an experiment last year after students of color found they were continually called on to represent a minority perspective, she said.

The class curriculum covers issues of race, gender and culture.

“Often a student of color would find they were the only non-white person in a given section and … very often their class would turn to them whenever an issue of race was discussed,” Shepard said. “They’d be asked if they agreed with a certain perspective or to defend a position. They’d be put on the spot in ways that made it feel like a hostile environment.”

. . . But for those who choose it, she said, it provides an “important intellectual opportunity” and a “much safer and open environment to be able to agree and disagree with each other without having to speak for their whole group.”

Being asked their opinions created a “hostile” environment?

Via Discriminations.

Kimberly Swygert links to a New York Post story about a 17-year-old boy who’s well on his way to a lucrative career as a litigant. In 1999, Albert Salcedo got $30,000 for facial cuts suffered when he fell through a school fence. As Kimberly points out, the way to suffer facial cuts from a fence is to be climbing it when it falls under your weight. Now Salcedo wants $5 million for the broken foot and ankle he suffered when a Snapple vending machine fell on him in a school cafeteria. Salcedo said he shook the machine “very gently,” when it ate his dollar; school officials say he pulled it over on himself.

You can read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (2000) for free online.

A former teacher and long-time critic of the system, Gatto is the author of Dumbing Us Down, A Different Kind of Teacher, The Exhausted School and Educating Your Child in Modern Times: Raising an Intelligent, Sovereign, & Ethical Human Being.

Worried about a rise in childhood obesity, British authorities plan to send manuals to parents of newborns on how to play games such as hopscotch and hide-and-seek with their children. The manuals also cover skipping. In Fife, Scotland, the idea already is being tried.

The Play At Home manuals remind parents how to do everything from ring-a-ring-o’-roses to peek-a-boo to the hokey cokey. Parents receive further books, containing new exercises more suited to older children’s development, when their son or daughter turns three and five.

We Americans would say “ring around the rosey” and the “hokey pokey,” which I once helped teach to a group of Bedouin camel drivers in Jordan.

The story contains the word “quango.” A quango is “any administrative body that is nominally independent but relies on government funding.” We live and learn.

But the initiative is likely to spark claims that ministers are resorting to ‘nanny state politics’ by giving parents such detailed guidance about how to bring up their child.

Surely, this is the quintessence of the nanny state.

Via Brian’s Education Blog.

Students taught directly by the teacher understand scientific concepts signfiicantly better than students who are asked to discover the science on their own, concludes a study by David Klahr, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Milena Nigam, a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biomedical Informatics. Monitor on Psychology reports:

For decades, early science education has emphasized “discovery learning,” in which children, given experimental materials such as springs and pulleys, marbles and ramps, are expected to “discover” scientific principles on their own . . .

Klahr saw three main reasons to challenge discovery learning. First, most of what students, teachers and scientists know about science was taught, not discovered, he says. Second, teacher-centered methods (in which teachers actively teach, as opposed to observe or facilitate) for direct instruction have been very effective for procedures that are typically harder for students to discover on their own, such as algebra and computer programming. Third, he adds, only vague theory backed the predicted superiority of discovery methods — and what there is clashes with data on learning and memory. For example, discovery learning can include mixed or missing feedback, encoding errors, causal misattributions and more, which could actually cause frustration and set a learner back, says Klahr.

Seventy-seven percent of “direct instruction” third and fourth graders — but only 23 percent of “discovery learning” students — “were able to design at least three out of four experiments” without confounding factors.

About a week later, a different experimenter asked the children to evaluate two science-fair posters by suggesting how to make them “good enough to enter in a state-level science fair.” Both posters described deeply flawed experiments. Again, significantly more children exposed to direct instruction were able to critically evaluate experiments.

Critics of the research say that discovery learning used in today’s classrooms is not as unguided as the model studied. It sounds like teachers are sneaking in more direct teaching.

Via Education Gadfly.

Many of Buffalo’s 4,000 charter school students are in school in the summer, reports the Buffalo News. Students don’t seem to mind; it’s not as if their families can afford summer camp or family vacations.

At the Enterprise Charter School, classes ended July 15 and start up again on Aug. 16, cutting summer break from 10 weeks to four. In addition, nearly 100 of the school’s 426 pupils currently are taking part in a voluntary three-week intercession, consisting of recreational and cultural activities.

The Community Charter School, 404 Edison St., ends the school year a week later than traditional city schools and resumes classes a week earlier.

Those schedules are designed to give students extra time to learn, to keep them off the streets and to avoid “summer learning loss.” “A lot of the charter schools are concentrated in urban neighborhoods and believe that a longer school year or school day is just necessary for the student population they serve,” said Peter Murphy, vice president of New York Charter Schools Resource Center. “Hopefully, that will put pressure on the traditional school districts to look at the scheduling issue.”

KIPP’s long school day and longer school year gives students 60 percent more learning time than traditional public school students. It helps.

Chicago is closing 60 failing schools, opening 100 new schools and letting private managers run most of the new schools with no union contract. Chicago business leaders used the prospect of federal sanctions under No Child Left Behind “to pressure the city to put many schools into private hands, outside union jurisdiction,” reports the New York Times. The local teachers’ union is distracted by charges of fraud in the recent election for union president. With nobody in charge, the union hasn’t done much to fight the plan.

Since pioneering educators raised student achievement by creating small schools in Spanish Harlem in the 1980′s, smaller-is-better has become a national mantra of reform, with New York and other cities, like Baltimore, Boston, Sacramento and San Diego, dividing large schools into smaller, more personal learning communities. But Chicago’s plan breaks ground not only because it is huge but also because no other city has proposed to replace large numbers of failing, unionized schools by allowing the private sector to create new schools operating outside of the teachers union contract.

Philadelphia contracted with Edison Schools in 2002 to manage 20 public schools there. But Edison was required to work under the terms of the existing teacher contract, which limited the company’s educational options, said Paul T. Hill, a University of Washington professor who wrote a 1997 book, “Reinventing Public Education.”

“Chicago intends to give the private groups creating these schools full freedom of action and control over hiring and firing,” Dr. Hill said. “That hasn’t been done anywhere on this scale.”

About 60 of the new schools — 10 percent of the entire system — will operate outside the union contract.

In 1995, Mayor Richard Daley took control of the city’s school system. Despite reform efforts, one third of the city’s schools are in danger of federal sanctions under NCLB.

“Chicago has a long history of tinkering with failed schools,” said Tom Vander Ark, executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed some $25 million since 2001 to school reform efforts in Chicago. “They’ve called it re-engineering, reconstitution, restructuring. They would change a few things, but not surprisingly, its never worked very well. What this new plan offers schools is a complete break with the past.”

Under the new plan, the 100 new schools would open by 2010, including 30 charter schools and 30 schools created by private groups under five-year contracts with the district.

In the Baltimore Sun, columnist Gregory Kane profiles a black engineering professor who’s turning inner-city kids on to math. “Most of the Ph.D.s in math are going to foreign students,” says Charles Johnson-Bey. He’s coaching Team America.

Last week, for the third consecutive year, the 38-year-old electrical engineering professor at Morgan held his one-week math, science and engineering summer camp for 5- to 10-year-olds.

In five short days, Johnson-Bey taught the kids how to read their electric meters at home, how to build circuits and create a programmable robot to do basic movements, how to build a miniature flying saucer. He gave them a rudimentary familiarity with Ohm’s law and had them write a short play and program it into a computer to generate a short animated video.

And there were the 25 math problems Johnson-Bey gave the 13 children in the program for homework. It’s Johnson-Bey’s way of getting Americans ready to answer the challenge of Team China and Team Japan.

“I want to show them the application of math in everything they do,” Johnson-Bey said. “I’m trying to get the kids excited about math.”

Johnson-Bey is a graduate of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a mostly black public school that’s one of the top-scoring schools in Maryland. Calculus is a required class at Poly.

As teen-agers revel in online pornography and videogame violence, they’re less likely to be reveling in the real thing. Glen Reynolds makes the connection:

When teen crime and pregnancy rates were going up, people looked at things that were going on — including increased availability of porn and violent imagery — and concluded that there might be something to that correlation. It turned out that there wasn’t. Porn and Duke Nukem took over the land, and yet teenagers became more responsible and less violent.

Maybe the porn, and the videogames, provided catharsis, serving as substitutes for the real thing. Maybe. And maybe there’s no connection at all. (Or maybe it’s a different one — research indicates that teenagers, though safer and healthier, are also fatter — so perhaps the other improvements are the result of teens sitting around looking at porn and videogames until they’re too out-of-shape and unattractive for the real thing.)

Or it’s just possible that “correlation isn’t causation.” Killjoy.

Once a social studies teacher, California Superintendent Jack O’Connell teaches adult students preparing for the high school equivalency exam. The LA Times reports:

The Monday night classes offer a reality check for O’Connell, whose day job is filled with piles of paperwork, power lunches and endless meetings about education minutia.

O’Connell gets to see the challenges faced by people who never learned basic reading, writing and math skills.

The class format is fluid. On any given night, O’Connell might lecture about the Civil War to one group of students, review algebraic equations with another group and tutor a student individually in strategies to improve reading comprehension

. . . “I need more help over here,” Emilio Carbalia, 45, called out.

Carbalia, a high school dropout who has picked tomatoes, washed dishes and driven trucks over the last 25 years, was struggling with a division problem. He had to find out how many times 1,760 went into 15,840.

O’Connell sat shoulder to shoulder with the burly man wearing a Coca-Cola hat and used an analogy to give the numbers real-life meaning.

“If you had 1,760 people and 15,840 hot dogs, how many hot dogs would each person get?”

Carbalia looked perplexed. O’Connell showed Carbalia how to do the math, step by step. They arrived at the answer together: nine hot dogs per person.

“Oh!” Carbalia said, chuckling with delight, and then added to himself: “Boy, he’s pretty good with this stuff.”

The state superintendents in Rhode Island, Georgia and South Dakota also teach periodically, says the Times.