Today is opening day for KIPP Heartwood Academy, a middle school in East San Jose.

In the Washington Post, Jay Mathews describes how novice teachers Mike Feinberg and David Levin founded KIPP, a national network of charters targeting very disadvantaged minority communities. The results are impressive.

One hundred percent of eighth-graders at KIPP Academy Houston passed the Texas state tests last year. KIPP Academy New York ranks in the top 10 percent of all New York city schools. Students at KIPP schools opened since 2001 averaged score increases last year of 39 percent in mathematics and 20 percent in reading. About 80 percent of KIPP students in 15 states and the District have family incomes low enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies, and they are all of the hormone-addled middle school age that makes even teachers at wealthy private schools tremble. (KIPP is starting an elementary and a high school in Houston this year.)

Feinberg and Levin say they want discipline, attention and steady, measurable progress that supplants the distractions of their students’ homes and neighborhoods.

KIPP students go to school for as much as 9 1/2-hours a day, and come in regularly on Saturdays. They get a lot more time to learn. Discipline is enforced consistently so distractions are minimized. Despite paying teachers more to work longer hours, KIPP spends only about 13 percent more than the national average. “In some expensive cities like New York, however, KIPP is still spending less per student than regular public schools are.”

Via Eduwonk, I’ve discovered Hip Teacher, written by a brand-new high school English teacher. She’s teaching in an inner-city school, but I can’t figure out where.

Dave Shearon thinks Hip Teacher should include some white westerners in her World Literature class. She doesn’t even get the book that’s been ordered for five weeks into the school year.

Children are being pushed to specialize in a single sport, writes teacher Patrick Welsh in USA Today. The pressure may start in elementary school.

Take the situation with youth basketball. Fifth- and sixth-grade kids playing in recreation leagues are being scouted by Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) coaches with connections to sneaker companies.

Coaches from prestigious private schools have their street-dude surrogates hanging around recreation centers using sneakers and promises of scholarships to entice the best players. Once kids are in the clutches of these coaches, they are encouraged to play in year-round leagues.

. . . Now kids are made to feel like second-class underachievers unless they make a city’s “traveling” or All-Star team. Some kids even refuse to play on their high school teams because they say that their club teams are more competitive and that their club coaches have better contacts with college recruiters.

Via Donald Sensing, father of athletes. I’m the mother of the only child in Palo Alto who never played soccer. She said she’d heard it involved running. I’d heard it involved parents waking up early on Saturday morning.

Does a Latin textbook need to be updated?

Critics say they understand why biology and accounting textbooks need frequent updating, by why algebra or ancient languages?

Unnecessary updates are “one of the biggest driving factors behind the high costs of textbooks,” says Merriah Fairchild, higher education advocate at the California Public Interest Research Group.

Wheelock’s Latin textbook includes many more photos and maps than in the original version, published 50 years ago.

Readings feature fewer battlefield dispatches and more emphasis on women and everyday life. There is even a dirty poem by Catullus.

Wheelock’s also has a Web site, e-mail discussion groups and, soon, online audio recordings.

A new version comes out about every five years.

Raising Kevion in the NY Times Magazine is excerpted from reporter Jason DeParle’s upcoming book on three ex-welfare mothers and their families. The main character is a man trying to be a good father in a world in which selling drugs is “cool” and delivering pizza is “gay.”

Mickey Kaus says a Washington Post story buried the good news: The birth rate for unwed teen-agers is down, and it can’t all be explained away.

Purple is replacing red as the color of correction, according to this Boston Globe story. Red is too associated with wrongness. Green and yellow don’t offer enough contrast. Orange is too close to red. Purple is “friendlier.” So pen makers are boosting production of purple pens and office supply stores are thinking purple.

A mix of red and blue, the color purple embodies red’s sense of authority but also blue’s association with serenity, making it a less negative and more constructive color for correcting student papers, color psychologists said. Purple calls attention to itself without being too aggressive. And because the color is linked to creativity and royalty, it is also more encouraging to students.

“The concept of purple as a replacement for red is a pretty good idea,” said Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute in Carlstadt, N.J., and author of five books on color. “You soften the blow of red. Red is a bit over-the-top in its aggression.”

The Globe quotes an immigrant mother who’s taking English classes. Victoria Nedruban stands up for red.

“I hate red,” she said. “But because I hate it, I want to work harder to make sure there isn’t any red on my papers.”

Apparently, she hasn’t assimilated 21st century American values.

Via Cris Simpson and The Corner.

Child’s play is too dangerous for recess, school administrators are deciding. Josh Cohen links to a Sacramento Bee story:

Concerned about safety and injuries and worried about bullying, violence, self-esteem and lawsuits, school officials have clamped down on the traditional games from years past.

Gone from many blacktops are tag, dodgeball and any game involving bodily contact. In are organized relay races and adult-supervised activities.

At one school, children aren’t allowed to push each other on the swings. Administrators worry about “bullying and potential lawsuits from parents.”

Many see the recess restrictions as part of larger cultural shifts. Schools now must craft lesson plans on responsibility, honesty and violence prevention, Maeola Beitzel Principal Judy Hunt-Brown said. And those lessons, among other things, fit neatly into the structured, organized play so prevalent on today’s schoolyard.

“To some degree, the school has needed to take a larger role in teaching children how to play with each other – the whole taking turns, how to deal with conflict,” Hunt-Brown said.

When I was a kid — OK, I’m about the same age as Beaver Cleaver — children worked these things out for ourselves. Of course, we had competent parents who’d taught us self-control and basic good manners.

If your blood needs boiling, consider this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel column about a 15-year-old girl who was forced to perform oral sex by a 17-year-old classmate at a Milwaukee high school. She reported the assault. The boy, who claimed the sex was consensual, was suspended for five days. So was the girl. Eventually, he pleaded guilty to “abusive, indecent or otherwise disorderly conduct,” after his lawyer used the girl’s suspension as proof the sex was consensual. The boy got a 30-day stayed jail sentence and 18 months probation, and paid $400 restitution. He transferred to another high school where he was allowed to compete in basketball.

The girl, an honor student, is trying to get her record cleared of the suspension, which she fears will hurt her college admission chances. The school district refuses to admit that it made a mistake by punishing the victim for reporting a sexual assault.

Right after sentencing, Assistant DA Michael Mahoney took the extraordinary step of firing off a letter to school officials expressing his anger with how they handled the matter.

“(She) did not consent to this assault and, indeed, did not know the defendant or his name, prior to the assault,” Mahoney wrote Jan. 21. “Also please note that (she) was not legally capable of consenting to this sexual activity alleged by the Defendant.”

The suspension remains on her record.

Via Eduwonk.

Explain this to me, folks. My e-mail program (it comes with the i-Mac) is downloading 7,133 e-mail messages dating from July 31. I’ve already received and deleted these messages, of course. What is going on? I haven’t done anything weird to my e-mail. Why is it being weird to me?

Update: It now says it’s downloading from 11,017 messages dating from July 30. I keep erasing; it keeps downloading the same messages. I tried changing my mail preferences to kill all messages on the server as soon as they’ve been downloaded; when I hit the “do it now” button, it crashes the mail program.

Update: Victory! My ISP killed all the e-mail, and the massacre seems to have worked. So far.

Public Agenda’s survey of teachers, parents and students, Reality Check 2002, finds widespread support for standards and testing.

Most students say they can handle the testing, and while a strong majority of teachers, parents, professors and employers say they’re worried about “teaching to the test,” only one-quarter of teachers say they’re actually doing it. All groups endorse standardized testing in some form, with one major caveat: majorities in all groups agree that a student’s graduation or promotion should not hang on one test. The groups surveyed report tangible change in other ways. Teachers report that summer school attendance is up, and social promotion is down.

However, the impact of higher academic standards has been mixed.

Few teachers report that schools have been either rewarded or sanctioned based on student performance. Employers and professors also continue to voice considerable dissatisfaction with high school graduates’ basic skills.

Check out Public Agenda’s fact file too.