On Education Weak, Tough Love praises corporate consultants who restructured business practices for St. Louis schools, saving $79 million and balancing the budget.

Last year, the St. Louis Public Schools were on the brink of bankruptcy, facing an astonishing $75 million year-end deficit and a near-term $99 million cash shortfall. The district was spending more than $11,000 every year for each of its approximately 40,000 students – out of a total budget of $450 million. While the district had the highest rate of per-student spending in the state, just over $6,000 per student actually found its way to the classroom.

Tens of thousands of dollars were squandered to insure vehicles the school district no longer owned. Money went toward maintaining buildings and facilities that had long been abandoned. Books and supplies were ordered, but then sat in warehouses, while teachers reported scrounging at yard sales for used books.

Competition is working in Philadelphia, which tripled the number of schools meeting federal standards for progress. Philadelphia schools showed significantly higher gains in test scores than the state average, writes Lisa Snell.

The gain rates achieved in Philadelphia are among the highest of any of the nation’s largest school districts, according to the Council of Great City Schools.

Moreover, the gains in student achievement occurred in both contracted “partner” schools and in traditional public schools, providing the first substantial evidence that the city’s public-private school management experiment — to turn around the district’s lowest performing schools — is working.

Edison says its schools posted the largest gains of any of the district’s major school management partners.

A third grader in Espanola, New Mexico was arrested for disorderly conduct, handcuffed and sent to an adult jail. He’d raised his voice to a teacher after hitting a classmate with a basketball.

(The boy’s mother, Angelica) Esquibel, who works next door to the school, said she was called to the office, and that Jerry began crying and saying he wanted to go home.

She said a school counselor wanted him to return to class, and that when the boy ran outside and started crying louder, the counselor told him if he wasn’t going to be in school, she was going to call police.

The counselor told him officers would handcuff him and put him in a cell “until he changes his attitude,” Esquibel said.

Guillen said he’d been told the mother agreed police should be called. She said she told school officials not to call them.

Two officers tried to tell Jerry to go back to class and told him he had a choice — class or jail, Esquibel said. When the boy got upset and loud, they handcuffed him, she said.

The police report says Jerry was arrested, taken to jail, booked and released to his parents.

Esquibel said that when she arrived at the police station, he was standing against a wall, crying.

He told her he was placed “in a dark room with a window, a metal toilet and a metal sink,” and that inmates banged on the window “saying they were going to get him and cussing,” she said. He said officers told him to stop crying or they’d let the inmates get him, she said.

This was a little boy throwing a temper tantrum.

Read this oped on Education’s future: the power of wonder by Peter W. Cookson Jr., dean of the graduate school of education at Lewis and Clark. Then explain what it means in 25 words or less. Do not win valuable prizes.

A military charter school aimed at urban black students is starting its first year, reports the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Founder My Lai Tenner , formerly an administrator at suburban schools, advertised on a hip-hop radio station, and “quickly filled the 250 open slots for grades 5 through 8.” Hundreds more students, nearly all black, are on the waiting list for Charles Young Military Academy.

A tightly run military atmosphere with demerits for unclean uniforms or even untrimmed nails: That’s a pledge drawing hundreds of middle-school students to one of the state’s most popular new charter schools this fall.

. . . The rules, Tenner says, aim “to make sure they have the tools to function in society. If they have these skills, we feel, they’ll be able to do some good things.”

. . . Tenner doesn’t have military experience but says his mother, an Army sergeant, instilled him with discipline. “I’ve kind of been in her boot camp for years,” he said. It was his mother who gave him the name My Lai, to mark the significance of the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers.

For the military academy, almost half of the staff he’s hired has a military background, he said, including a retired drill sergeant.

The academy will require parents to volunteer two hours of time a month. Students will wear West Point-style uniforms.

I think there’s great demand in the inner city for schools that provide structure, discipline and high expectations.

The Onion addresses the effect of sunlight on student activism: College Student Does Nothing for Tibet Over Summer.”

“Someone should tell Becca that the needs of the disadvantaged do not take a scuba holiday off the coast of Curacao,” Coe said, referring to a one-week vacation Davis took with her family in June. “Activism takes time, hard work, and commitment. Posters don’t nail themselves to sticks.”

According to the Christian Science Monitor, student activists are out of the mainstream — and not necessarily on the left side.

On many campuses, protesters dwell on the margins rather than in the mainstream of campus life. Some of their fellow students may admire their convictions – but others confess that they find activism more annoying than persuasive.

At Harvard University – where protests range from noisy antiwar rallies to smaller but equally zealous antiabortion demonstrations – many students say such actions are missing the mark.

“A lot of [the activists], liberals and conservatives alike, are fanatics or hopelessly idealistic,” says Michael Soto, a Harvard senior studying Latin American development. “I’m not sure how much they actually accomplish, since it’s just a small group. They are mainly annoying to the rest of the campus, and ineffectual.”

. . . At many schools today it is the faculty members who tend to be solidly liberal – often far more so than their students.

“The faculty here will no doubt vote 95 to 5 percent in favor of [John] Kerry, while the students may be more in the middle, perhaps as high as 35 percent for [George W.] Bush,” says Robert George, professor of political science at Princeton University in New Jersey. “Nowadays, students don’t see [the war] as such a black-and-white issue; they are listening to both sides of the argument.”

Unlike their professors.

The Happy Carpenter is unhappy, because he has to spend five hours and 50 minutes online to pass a course for his Florida general contractor’s license. Answering the questions is the easy part. The trick is to do it slowly.

1.) You must spend at least 5 hours and 50 minutes of actual time on-line to get 7 hours of credit. Furthermore,
2.) You must be active on the site. If you’re inactive for more than 10 or 15 minutes (honestly, who can remember this kind of stuff?) you’re timed out.
3.) If you’re timed out, then the time you put in up to that point is erased and you have to start over!

The content of the course bears no relationship to the skills contractors actually use, he adds.

The New York Times’ vendetta against charter schools continues with this misleading story, writes the relentless Eduwonk. In short, the Times thinks the data sampling techniques used by the feds to survey public and private schools are sinister when applied to the growing number of charter schools. And the Times repeatedly implies that No Child Left Behind will turn sanctioned public schools into charters, though that’s only one possible remedy and not the most likely.

I’ve got an oped on politics and education policy in today’s San Jose Mercury News Perspective section.

Number 2 Pencil is crowing about this story on the perfection of the number 2 pencil, which has “the perfect amount of reflective quality.” It’s Kimberly’s new tag line.

Opinions on vouchers vary widely depending on how the question is phrased.

According to the annual survey conducted by Gallup for Phi Delta Kappa, an educators’ group, 54 percent of the public oppose school vouchers; 42 percent favors “allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Yet 43 percent would be more likely to support a pro-voucher candidate, 37 percent less likely. Some 57 percent of public school parents said they’d use a full voucher to send their children to private school; 38 percent would stick with public school and the rest are undecided. If the voucher paid half the tuition cost, 45 percent said they’d choose private school; 50 percent would choose public school.

The very pro-voucher Friedman Foundation (that’s Milton and Rose Friedman, after all) hired Wirthlin to do its own voucher opinion survey with slightly different wording.

Half of the sample was asked the more negative PDK question, “do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?” Only 41 percent supported school vouchers when presented this way.  The other half was asked the more neutral question “do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose any school, public or private, to attend using public funds?” The support was significantly higher with 63 percent supporting school vouchers.

According to the Friedman/Wirthlin survey, about 60 percent of Americans (68 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats) would be more likely to vote for a candidate supporting school choice. Nearly 70 percent of African-American Democrats surveyed would be more likely to vote for a candidate supporting school choice; overall, 80 percent of African-Americans surveyed favor school choice.

The PDK survey focuses on No Child Left Behind, finding opposition to the testing provisions of the law — as described by the pollsters — but strong support for the law as a whole. Here’s Gadfly’s analysis. And Eduwonk, which says all sides slant the poll questions.