Social promotion doesn’t work, writes Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia, in the New York Times. Neither does flunking students. “Research on the subject is clear: neither social promotion nor holding back students works,” Levine writes. “Leaving students back increases their dropout rate, while using the same methods to teach them the subjects they failed to master the first time does not help them progress. Socially promoted students, meanwhile, are unable to learn more advanced material in the next grade and are more likely to become disruptive, diminishing their classmates’ ability to learn as well.” He advocates flexibility.

There are three steps the school system could take that might quell this fruitless debate and help our children. First, starting from the first days in a classroom, schools could assess all students’ skills – moving ahead students who are beyond their grade level and providing additional instruction to students who are behind. Second, the system could create transitional classes between grades. Thus, the student who would ordinarily be left back in third grade, say, would move into an intermediary third-fourth grade in which the focus would be on remediation in areas of weakness and building on subjects already mastered, instead of repeating the entire grade. Third, the school system could extend the school day or academic year for all students, allowing advanced students to take enrichment classes and lagging students to do additional work in areas in which they learn more slowly.

If we abandon grouping students by age and grade, fast learners might finish school in 10 years; slow learners might need 14 years.

Education Gadfly likes the idea, but says it needs to be backed by “high standards, rigorous assessment, and strict results-driven accountability.”

Chester Finn and Rick Hess have published a book, Leaving No Child Behind?, and NCLB analysis in Public Interest and Phi Delta Kappan. I can’t get any of this online, but here’s a response by Eduwonk:.

Finn and Hess note that NCLB abandoned “time honored” school choice principles and despite many thoughtful recommendations for improvement, skepticism about whether public institutions can get the job done implicitly pervades much of the analysis. The foundational dispute between right and left in education boils down to whether the leverage needed to improve public education comes down to allowing clients to leave or whether it can be publicly applied through standards, more money, or whatever.

Hess and Finn want to get rid of “many of NCLBÍs rules for ‘subgroup’ accountability, Eduwonk writes. The alternative, a “value-added” accountability model, couldn’t be implemented for many years by most states.

Hess and Finn also chide NCLB for being out of touch with basic political and policy realities while they, apparently without irony, propose national content standards as one way out of the current thicket.

National content standards are very, very controversial.

NCLB’s defenders are afraid that tinkering with the law will mean diluting its power to force change for kids at the bottom. Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, National Alliance of Black School Educators, Just for the Kids, National Center for Educational Accountability, the Education Trust and the Business Roundtable have formed the Achievement Alliance to defend NCLB. The founding statement says:

The Achievement Alliance acknowledges that problems with implementation of No Child Left Behind exist. But those problems do not overshadow the fact that NCLB represents the best hope the nation has for raising the academic achievement of all children, particularly children from poor families, children of color, children learning English and children with disabilities. And the fact is that NCLB is working. State after state is reporting that in the last two years overall student achievement has inched up and achievement gaps have begun to close.

If only the web site was readable without requiring Flash. I’ve been bugging them to fix it.

Kindergarteners now spend a full day in school, with no naptime, reports the Baltimore Sun.

As educators strive to prepare children early so they can achieve later, naptime — the envy of some adults — has evolved into a period of quiet activities in the full-day kindergarten programs offered in Anne Arundel, Howard and other Maryland counties.

The disappearance of naptime is part of an increased emphasis on curriculum and instruction designed to make the most of the precious moments children spend in the classroom.

Maryland kindergarteners are older than they used to be: Nearly all turn 5 before school starts. Many have been in day care or pre-school, so they know how to handle group activities.

Full-day kindergarten programs stress developing language and pre-reading skills.

(Teacher Renee) Krysiak has the children for more than six hours each day, so she has time to spend about two and a half hours with the Open Court reading curriculum, which heavily emphasizes phonics.

The full-day schedule also offers time to leave the classroom for physical education, music, art and media, providing another respite during the day.

All children benefit from extra time to learn, especially those who may not have as much exposure to reading and language early on, said Anne Arundel Superintendent Eric J. Smith. Preparing them for first grade also gives them the confidence to feel they can be successful, he said.

However, determining the amount of sleep a child needs should remain the purview of parents, Smith added.

“Sometimes we do things that really are the domain of the home,” he said. “We ought to stick with the things we do well.”

There’s a concept.

In The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch argue for local control, rather than having textbooks chosen at the state level.

Textbook adoption is a fundamentally flawed process: it distorts the market, entices extremist groups to hijack the curriculum, and papers the land with mediocre instructional materials.

We do not believe the adoption process can be set right by tinkering with it. Rather, legislators and governors in “adoption” states should devolve funding for and decisions about textbook purchases to individual schools, districts, or even teachers.

Instructional materials are key parts of the domain where we should rely on front-line educators to make the best decisions for their pupils. That means that textbook selection and purchasing decisions should be made as close as possible to the teacher, ideally by the teacher herself. If that’s not practical, then they should be made by the school or district.

They also call for abandoning “social content” guidelines and readability formulas.

Update: Here’s Diane Ravitch on Gadfly.

Girls “account for 29 percent of all juvenile arrests, up from 23 percent in 1990,” the Christian Science Monitor reports. But the arrest statistics may be misleading. “Status offenses” like truancy and running away are more likely to be labeled as crimes, and schools’ zero-tolerance policies are “upcriming” minor offenses. In addition, “Awareness is growing in the media and among policymakers of girls’ violence, which was always there but largely ignored, since the juvenile justice system has traditionally been geared toward boys.”

Over all, teen-agers are less violent.

The spike in juvenile violence started in the late ’80s, reaching a peak in 1994, when it began a steady downward trend, according to the US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

By 2001, juvenile violent crime arrests had dropped 44 percent. But while boys’ crimes – almost three-quarters of all offenses – were tapering off, girls’ crimes were still rising or at least declining at a slower rate.

According to the FBI, girls’ arrests rose 6.4 percent from 1992 to 2003, while boys’ dropped 16.4 percent. In the area of assault, girls’ arrests shot up 40.9 percent over the same period, while boys’ climbed just 4.3 percent.

Girls may be using more physical violence when they fight, but the evidence is anecdotal. And it’s contradicted by a Centers for Disease Control survey: “Between 1991 and 2001, self-reported delinquency revealed that the number of girls getting into physical fights actually dropped 30 percent.”

Graduation rates are higher for Milwaukee students using vouchers to attend private schools, concludes a Manhattan Institute study. In 2003, voucher students had a 64 percent graduation rate, compared to a 36 percent for Milwaukee public high schools and 41 percent for “six academically selective public high schools, whose students are likely to be more advantaged than choice students.”

Gainesville Elementary is a 90-90-90 school, writes Samuel Freedman in the New York Times. Ninety percent of the students are non-white, 90 percent are poor and 90 percent meet Georgia’s state standards. All students who are behind “stay for an extra three hours of class each weekday and seven hours on Saturday.” Principal Shawn Arevalo McCollough, “a social reconstructionist by nature,” uses what are considered “conservative” education ideas.

He does not pull out children for separate bilingual classes, offering only “survival skills English” two hours a day for a maximum of eight weeks. He has reached out to Gainesville’s financial establishment, gaining a $20,000 grant for the Saturday school from Mar-Jac, one of the major poultry companies. He culled an additional $20,000 for the lengthened weekday classes by deferring purchases of textbooks and other materials.

Like the Gainesville school district as a whole, Mr. McCollough uses standardized tests to guide curriculum and hold teachers (and himself) publicly accountable. Every nine weeks, pupils in all five Gainesville elementary schools take tests that measure their knowledge of the various components of Georgia’s statewide curriculum. By analyzing the results, principals and teachers select the next round of lessons to address the weak points. Phonics and math drills figure prominently in the lessons. All the test results are posted in school hallways and on the district Web site – not just by school or by grade level but by the individual teacher’s name.

Tests show you where you’re at, says the principal. Diagnosing the problem is a step toward finding the solution.

Most of his students are the children of Mexican immigrants who came to Gainesville to work in chicken-processing plants. Their parents are poorly educated and speak little or no English. When these kids fail, it’s easy to come up with excuses. But they can learn.

Via Number 2 Pencil, here’s Teresa Heinz Kerry’s take on education policy:

In terms of education, Heinz Kerry blasted Bush’s No Child Left Behind reform measure as an unfunded mandate that has increased bureaucracy.

Schools have been hampered rather than helped by its mandatory assessments, she said, and some extracurricular activities are falling by the wayside as schools teach to the tests.

“Tests should be a measure that is enabling, not disabling,” Heinz Kerry said. “Tests that are a trap are sinful.”

Sinful?

You’ll be happy to know this: “Day One of his presidency, every child in America will have health care. Period,” Heinz Kerry said of her husband. Then he’ll guarantee catastrophic care to everyone, paid for by cutting administrative costs. Yes, that always works.

Elizabeth Edwards, campaigning in one of the other Americas, came out for giving more money to failing schools. Because that’s worked so well before.

Respect the Box.

When a seven-year-old Florida boy hit a classmate, a teacher and the principal and scratched a school staffer, the second grader was arrested, booked, fingerprinted and held briefly at a juvenile justice facility.

Expelling the boy, who’s now on house arrest, makes sense. Swearing out an arrest warrant on a seven-year-old? That seems a bit much, even for Florida.