On News Gorilla, Ed Susman, former city editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Times, writes about handing out American flags to newly arrived immigrants. It was a community service thing and a nice photo for the paper. One day, he gave a flag to the first group of Vietnamese refugees.

No one spoke a word of English, but I managed to communicate with the 12-year-old daughter who spoke some French and I hadn’t forgotten all my French from high school days.

Flash forward about 4-5 years, during the last days of the Times, and this young Asian woman shows up at my desk. In flawless English she thanked me for the flag so many years past. She was now graduating high school, had a scholarship to some school I would never have even applied to and was either valedictorian or salutatorian or something major in her high school class.

He asked why Asian students outperform native-born students. The girl said that after the flag picture appeared, a school official came to the door and told her mother to register the four children for school. Her mother explained she could afford only to register the two boys. She was told there would be no fees; education is free.

The girl told me that after the school official left, her mother gathered her children around her and said, “It is true that the streets are paved with gold in this country. They give away education. If any of you ever misses a day of class I will beat you so hard you will never sit down again.” The girl said that grades less than a B were similarly punishable. All the girl’s siblings were at the head of their classes.

An English teacher in San Jose once told me that all her best students were Vietnamese. This was a few years after the refugee influx. I said, “How can that be? They all speak English as a second language. How can they be the best in English.”

“They work harder,” the teacher said.

Maryland, which has only one charter school for the whole state, is about to approve a number of new schools, reports the Baltimore Sun.

The goal is to duplicate schools like Amistad Academy, a middle-school in New Haven, Conn. that turns low-income black and Hispanic students into achievers. The Sun reports:

Don’t do your homework and you’ll be staying for three extra hours on Friday afternoon. Lose control and shout out an obscenity in front of classmates, you’ll stand before the whole school to apologize. Put your head down on the desk or forget to follow the teacher with your eyes, the whole lesson will stop while the class waits for you to start paying attention.

With its near obsession with getting the small details right and enforcing consequences for poor behavior, Amistad has found a formula to mold its undisciplined and low-achieving fifth-grade students into eighth-graders who study hard and beat the odds.

Amistad, one of Connecticut’s charter schools, set out to prove that poor, minority children can succeed as well as white middle-class students if only they are given the right education.

So their children get much of what a student at a good suburban public school would learn and be exposed to at school and at home. They go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with most of the afternoon spent on their choice of music, art, dance or sports.

. . . Six years after it opened, Amistad’s 97 percent black and Latino population is posting test scores better than those in New Haven and the state of Connecticut on statewide eighth-grade tests. Last year, 86 percent of its eighth-graders passed the writing test, above the statewide average of 62 percent and better than the public schools of wealthy Greenwich.

In most cases, those same students – 84 percent of whom are poor enough to qualify for a free or reduced lunch – were reading and doing math about two years below grade level when they started at Amistad in fifth grade.

The charter school raises an extra $3,000 per student to supplement the $7,200 that comes from the state.

San Diego’s High-Tech High is turning around students from low-income, left-behind families. Test scores are high and all graduates in the first two class have gone on to college. Forbes profiles the founder and principal, Larry G. Rosenstock.

Rosenstock, 56, is betting that schools like this one can work anywhere, as long as they’re kept small. Size, he says, is one of the things that doom city high schools: “These are factories, not places you want to go to learn.” Nationwide, 30% of ninth-graders drop out before graduating. One study of 2,000 big schools found a 40% dropout rate.

Rosenstock is creating a nationwide network of urban charter schools with financial help from the Gates Foundation, which is funding small high schools. Qualcomm’s founder, Irwin Jacobs, also is an early backer.

Enrollment is capped at 500 students; students take four classes a day, so they can spend more time on each subject. “Internships and group projects replace a lot of textbook reading. Twice the physics class has built a working submarine.”

Operating costs are kept low, which enables High Tech High to break even on 73% of the average funding for San Diego’s traditional public high schools.

Rosenstock hires young teachers, most of them with less than five years’ experience, and puts them on one-year contracts. There’s no football or baseball or band. Rosenstock’s salary is comparable to that of a headmaster at a private independent school.

The teachers at High Tech High have a hand in budget decisions, spurring them to look for ways to be stingy. At one Wednesday morning meeting they proposed handing out $20 Starbucks gift cards to teachers as incentives for perfect attendance, instead of spending $110 a day on substitutes.

Applicants are selected by lottery. When the family income level rose too high, Rosenstock started sending students to recruit in “churches and community centers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.”

Each year Rosenstock, like all his teachers, spends two weeks of afternoons schlepping to advisees’ homes. One of his was a Cambodian-Vietnamese girl who lived with eight family members in a two-bedroom apartment. The TV was constantly blaring. “That was their way of having privacy,” says Rosenstock. “I couldn’t hear myself think.” He told her to stay late after school and do her homework there. (She’s now at UC, San Diego).

Catharine Hart, an 18-year-old graduate of High Tech High (now a freshman at Cal State, Los Angeles), cruised through middle school. Her teachers didn’t check her homework, so she often just regurgitated questions in spaces left for answers. “You knew how to just get by, not be noticed too much. Its all about working the system,” she says. When she got to High Tech High, she found a system that was too intimate to disappear into. “We’re the Jewish parents these kids don’t have. We’re constantly asking them, ïDid you do it? Did you hand in the work?’” says arts teacher Jeffrey Robin.

The school has become more structured over time.

In the first year students were in class only three hours a day, with unstructured time for individual projects filling afternoons. Too many kids filled those hours socializing or playing Internet games instead of completing assignments. So the school ended the classless afternoons, filling them with project work closely attended by teachers. “We made mistakes,” says Rosenstock. “We knew what we didn’t want to be more than we knew what we wanted to be.”

But he was able to recognize the problem and change to meet it.

Generic Confusion links to a discussion on the miseducation of teachers, which includes a post about an experiment comparing constructivism with traditional math teaching. “Will Durant” designed the experiment for his master’s thesis using summer school geometry classes.

Two classes (one remedial, one enrichment) would be taught using traditional methods; the other two would be taught using constructivist methods. With my professor, I created the curriculum and learning objectives. I wrote the lesson plans for the traditional classes; my professor designed the constructivist exercises that would be used in the constructivist classes. I enlisted six teachers to assist me by doing the actual teaching (the constructivist classes required TWO teachers — an indication right from the start that something was wrong).

Traditional students from both the remedial and advanced classes did slightly better on the constructivist “final exam” than the constructivist students. The “constructivist students did ridiculously worse on the paper and pencil exam, with many scores very close to zero and almost nobody passing the exam, even among the enrichment group.”

The truth was that constructivism was proven to be a worthless pathetic failure. Of course, nobody ever gets a thesis accepted and published by bucking established theory, so I watered down my conclusion to a much weaker (but still true) statement: “No evidence was found that the constructivist methods are better than the traditional method.” Professor read my first draft and turned it down outright. He told me to reanalzye my data so that I could state the constructivism was better or I would never graduate. So I walked out of his office, got an incomplete on my thesis (which eventually became an F) and never graduated.

The other ed school posts on the thread are incredible too.

Update: Will Durant has created a blog for discussion of this topic.

Teachers no longer assign research papers of more than a few pages, writes Leigh Muzslay of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

Many teachers lack the time and energy to assign and grade research papers. There are too many state-required lessons to plow through and too many kids to teach. And more and more, students lack basic writing skills.

. . . (Fred) Franke’s U.S. history students write no more than a page.

“Even in some cases, it’s difficult to get a complete sentence,” Franke said. “If it’s multiple choice or matching they’ll do it, but if you give any kind of homework assignment that requires them to read and answer questions, they won’t do it. It’s unbelievable.”

Three-quarters of high school seniors never get writing assignments in history or social studies, according to a 2003 report.

Even in their English classes, many students only get short writing assignments. A few weeks before Rachel Vosika graduated this year from Pacific High School in San Bernardino, she worked on the biggest research paper she’d ever been assigned – a three-page biography of Virginia Woolf. She needed at least four sources, all of which could be from the Internet.

The effects of this trend show up in college classes. Fewer than half of students turn in papers relatively free of language errors, according to a 2002 survey of professors at California’s public colleges and universities.

On his blog, Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Weintraub argues state standards aren’t crowding out research papers. In fact, the standards call for teachers to teach these skills.

The reason they’re not doing it is because neither the schools nor parents nor the community demands it, and the skills required to produce such a paper have slowly drifted out of the curriculum.

The California standards for 11th grade history include 11 separate benchmarks, each with its own set of sub-topics. If each of those 11 standards is given equal time during a school year, each one could take 14 days of class time, and the teacher would still have several weeks to spare for assemblies, testing, and time wasted at the start and the end of the year.

Weintraub lists the standard for history students studying World War II. There are plenty of good topics for a research paper.

Ann Hurlburt lays down the first rule of parenting: Don’t let Dr. Phil boss you around.

My column on the lack of rigor in education research is up at TechCentralStation.

TypeKey is acting up lately for Roger Simon. I think some of you have been having troubles too. You can report issues here. I know this has been a pain, folks, but it’s almost totally eliminated my comment spam problem. (One spammer got through and was quickly banned.)

Samizdata links to an article by a science professor named Christie Davies, who argues science is the new Latin, a subject we force children to study even though they hate it and have no use for it.

Science we are told is something that every child should and must study. Most children hate it, fail to master it and never use it or think about it again after they have left school. It is forced upon unwilling and inept pupils because it is supposed to be good for them. Science is the twenty-first century’s version of Latin.

A knowledge of science we are assured is essential for a proper understanding of the modern world. It is not. Very few English people whether adults or teenagers have any serious knowledge of the sciences but this does not hinder them in any way when it comes to earning, buying and selling, taking care of their children, playing elaborate games on their computers, tinkering with their car engines, giving up smoking or choosing between one fool and another at election time.

Davies takes on field trips, labs and tendentious environmental science courses. Yet he concedes we need scientists. Immigration is the answer, he writes.

By long tradition anything disagreeable in Britain is always done by foreigners, so why not science? For talented scientists in poor countries or ones where there is little personal freedom the tedious work done in a laboratory in free and wealthy England is an escape to paradise. All they need are scholarships, contracts and visas. I look forward to having 100,000 new Hindu and Chinese neighbours.

I think he’s kidding about not bothering students with science.

Kimberly Swygert of Number 2 Pencil claimed she had to cut down on blogging for work reasons. Now she admits what she’s really been up to.