Eduwonk blasts an ad in the Boston Globe that claims No Child Left Behind “will close the majority of American elementary schools, or will allow them to be taken over by the state or profit-making businesses.” And end civilization as we know it. According to the ad, NCLB:

*Shifts control of most aspects of education from states to Washington ideologues
*Drives students and teachers out of schools and encourages lying about the facts
*Limits and proscribes educational research
*Bases all decision-making on test scores
*Labels effective schools as failing and effective teachers as unqualified
*Controls who may teach and how they teach
*Mandates archaic methods and materials
*Uses blacklists to banish professionals, institutions, methods, and books
*Punishes diversity in schools
*Is unconstitutional

Eduwonk responds, “Well, they got one right.  It apparently does encourage lying about the facts.”  

Education Week’s story reports that the anti-NCLB ad was placed by a group led by Ken Goodman, an emeritus University of Arizona education professor who’s a whole language advocate.

The story quotes Andrew J. Rotherham, director of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, which runs Eduwonk.

“Hysterical paranoia went out of style after the primaries, when John Kerry [prevailed],” Mr. Rotherham said. “Ads like this hurt the cause of people seeking changes in No Child Left Behind, rather than help it,” he added. “Your average person sees an ad like that and is going to smell weirdness, not reasoned debate.”

Come now. Hysterical paranoia never goes out of style.

Amritas wonders about the timing of the campaign sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is sponsoring a nationwide reading and discussion of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 this October. Educators and students in high schools, colleges, and universities, and citizens in libraries, community organizations, and book discussion groups are invited to read the book and discuss its prophetic nature and what it might teach us about life in the contemporary United States.

Actually, I think George Orwell would have been able to tell the difference between Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft.

The education plank of the Democratic Party’s platform is heavy on platitudes and spending, writes Chester Finn in National Review.

Insofar as one can detect policy impulses in the fog, however, many of them resemble what Republicans also say. Think of them as standard education pabulum: attention to “fundamental skills” and “fundamental values,” “a great teacher in every classroom,” closing learning gaps, higher graduation rates, citizenship education, parent partnerships, school choice (confined, for Democrats, to charter and magnet schools), making college affordable, etc.

Kerry has watered down his proposal to tie teacher pay to performance and to fire bad teachers. Now only new teachers would be held accountable, and nothing much would change for underperforming teachers.

“We must raise pay for teachers, especially in the schools and subjects where great teachers are in the shortest supply…. At the same time, we must create rigorous new incentives and tests for new teachers…. And teachers deserve due process protection from arbitrary dismissal, but we must have fast, fair procedures for improving or removing teachers who do not perform on the job.”

The Gore-Lieberman platform in 2000 was much gutsier, Finn writes.

. . . “every teacher should pass a rigorous test to get [into the classroom]…. Every failing school in America should be turned around — or shut down and reopened under new public leadership…. [N]o high school student graduates unless they have mastered the basics of reading and math…. Parents across the nation ought to be able to choose the best public school for their children… “

In 2004, the debate will be about how much to spend, not how to spend it, Finn predicts.

When the GED (General Education Development) exam got tougher, the number taking the high school equivalency test went way down. But, for those who tried, the pass rate went up slightly. The new tests has fewer multiple-choice questions.

The number who took the General Educational Development program, or GED, dropped 43.6 percent in 2002, the first full year of the new test series, according to the GED Testing Service report released Monday. It said many GED candidates had rushed to take the old test before new standards were implemented.

. . . Still, the percentage of those who passed the revamped test rose marginally, from 68.6 percent in 2001, the last of the old tests, to 70.6 percent in 2002.

Test-takers in 2002 improved in reading, and had the most trouble with math.

Betsy, who teaches Advanced Placement classes, explains why evaluating teachers by their students’ AP scores, as suggested by Jay Mathews, wouldn’t work.

Different AP classes have different difficulty rates so it wouldn’t make sense to compare AP Government results to AP Physics. Also, different students take different classes, so you have a self-selected group taking AP Latin or Calculus BC. He gives an example of AP Biology and AP Psych but I would bet that the difficulty levels of those tests vary and the students taking the class might be different sets of kids.

And different schools have vastly different populations. He seems to assume that it is the same group of bright kids across the board taking APs. I was talking to an AP Government teacher from an inner-city school in Michigan this summer, and he has never had a student pass the test. I am not vain enough to think the difference in our results is due to me.

Many schools now encourage students to try AP classes, even if they’re not likely to do well enough on the test to earn college credit. Other schools reserve AP classes for the very best students. I’d hate to see teachers have an incentive to exclude good-but-not-great students from taking the AP challenge.

Told their son was unable to learn due to “dyspraxia,” a British family eventually concluded his problem was poor teaching at his expensive private school and loss of confidence in his own abilities.

Technically, it is a condition affecting a person’s judgment of space, and manifests itself in the child’s inability to understand how to juxtapose shapes such as triangles and squares, or by their hapless failure to co-ordinate their physical movements. There is no cure, say the experts, but treatment and conditioning allegedly help.

Clearly, a proportion are genuine sufferers – but others are children who have been categorised for a brutal reason. Namely, that private schools prefer to blame the child than admit to teaching inadequacies in their schools. To protect second-rate teachers, private schools prefer to label those casualties of inadequate teaching as “dyspraxic.”

Yet far from being dyspraxic, by the end of four years, my son was declared to be completely healthy and academically excellent. In the meantime, his self-confidence had been undermined, his education had been damaged and I had spent nearly £20,000 on a small army of private teachers and educational psychologists.

What worked was hiring a math tutor. Their son learned math, gained confidence and began to do well in all his subjects.

I’d never heard of dyspraxia. Apparently, it used to be called “clumsy child syndrome.” It seems to be a fad diagnosis in Britain.

Ken Jennings has won more than $1 million answering questions on Jeopardy. Is he a genius? Howard Gardner, Mr. Multiple Intelligences, tells the New York Times that Jennings has great “verbal linguistic memory,” and probably a logical, organized mind. Also he has the “inter- and intrapersonal intelligence” (people smarts) to be a great bluffer.

Jonathan Plucker, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University who runs a site on intelligence, suggests intelligence may be a general ability “translatable from one field to another.”

(Plucker) said he was quite impressed after watching Mr. Jennings compete. “He was playing the other competitors as much as he was playing the board,” Dr. Plucker said, by making guesses, holding back at certain times, acting confident. “This guy was clearly good at contextual sorts of intelligence,” which is to say, reading the situation and the rules, in addition to having the necessary knowledge.

I don’t normally watch the show but I saw Jennings clean up a few nights ago. The guys is cool under pressure. I got one question he missed. Saul’s hometown is Tarsus, not Damascus. Sure, he was on the road to Damascus when he was converted, but he wasn’t heading home.

Via Chris Correa, who also has a post on a study of whether music lessons boost IQ. He believes any cognitively demanding activity may raise IQ, and notes that voice lessons did more for the six-year-olds in the study than keyboard lessons.

In a sex ed class designed to “destigmatize” condoms, a 15-year-old girl said she was urged to taste flavored condoms.

According to a report in the Santa Fe New Mexican (use this to register), parent Lisa Gallegos said that when her 15-year-old daughter balked at putting a condom in her mouth, instructor Tony Escudero told her, “Come on, sweetie, have a little fun.”

Also, Gallegos quotes her daughter as saying when a male student expressed his disgust with homosexual activity, Escudero said, “Never say never, because you never know. Someday you might like it that way.”

The mom says she favors sex education, but this is inappropriate. The New Mexico Education Department sided with the teacher, saying he merely told students they could taste the condoms if they wanted to and urged them to tolerate gays.

Why are children’s books so grim? In The Spectator (use this for registration), Rachel Johnson complains that children’s literature these days is all too devoted to sex and social issues. Instead of reading Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden, her daughter reads about a child who smears the walls with excrement, children who cope with a manic-depressive mother, a girl dumped in a dustbin at birth, etc.

Take Doing It by Melvin Burgess, about three boys learning about sex, and I quote from the blurb:

“Dino really fancies fit, sexy Jackie but she just won’t give him what he wants. Jonathan likes Deborah, but she’s a bit fat — what will his mates say? Ben’s been secretly shagging his teacher for ages. He used to love it, but what if he wants to stop?”

. . . why are some children’s books (pace Potter) so grim? (And I do mean grim rather than dark.) Philip Pullman and Lemony Snicket are dark in the way that C.S. Lewis or Roald Dahl are dark, in an inventive, fantastical, even anarchical way that takes root and sprouts in the child’s imagination. Whereas Doing It and the forthcoming Julie Burchill book, Sugar Rush, which I am told is a joyful exploration of the sunlit teenage world of drugs and lezzies, sound unquestionably grim and narrowly grotty.

Melvin Burgess also wrote Smack about two 14-year-olds who run away from their alcoholic, abusive and/or strict parents and become heroin addicts. It does sound depressing.

My daughter read a lot of social issues books — she must have read a dozen about dyslexia — in her youth, but they were lighter than this: The homeless girl would be a friend, not the main character. The crazy mother would be offstage after the first chapter, replaced by the difficult but basically decent grandmother.

She also read Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden and the like. Anne is an orphan sent to live with strangers who want a boy to work on their farm. Mary is a neglected child who’s orphaned; her cousin is a neglected invalid. In Little Women, the father is away fighting the Civil War. Beth dies. Yet these books aren’t grim.

A self-appointed censor is rewriting a series of mystery books in a Utah library, reports the Salt Lake City Tribune.

Davis County library officials are facing a mystery that only Jessica Fletcher could solve.

It seems a library patron has been busy crossing out the “hells” and “damns” in books based on the the popular ”Murder, She Wrote” TV series and changing them to “hecks” and “darns.”

The only clue is that the censor uses a purple pen.