Rubber bands are banned at some schools to prevent students from shooting projectiles, known as “wasps” at each other. Buffalo’s school district warned:

If students are in possession of rubber bands for any reason they will be subject to consequences that may include out of school suspension. When rubber bands are required for classroom use, they will be provided and collected.

Another link, provided by Reginlief, makes the case for banning condoms in school: They make dangerous slingshots.

Faculty and students at Borough of Manhattan Community College are protesting plans for a security management certificate program which they “view as an endorsement of the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security,” the New York Sun reports.

“Faculty members point out that if BMCC becomes known as ‘Homeland Security U,’ this will intimidate and drive away many present and potential students, especially immigrants,” the (student government) leaflet states.

The president of the student government at BMCC, Jason Negron, said the proposal is “a very scary issue that students are very, very against.”

He said if the program were to be instituted, students would be exposed to “a lot of right-wing views” and about “a lot of things that other countries have done to America without giving the other side of the story.” He said it was the “progressive” faculty members who voiced opposition to the proposal at Wednesday’s meeting.

It would be horrible if students were exposed to right-wing or pro-American views on a college campus, wouldn’t it?

Betsy comments:

I guess that going to school in the shadow of where the World Trade Towers once stood is not enough to convince these numbskulls that security is not a partisan issue, but something that this country is going to have to think about for a long, long time. And there will be plenty of jobs for someone who has a little background in security management considering that every mall and big office building will want such employees.

Apparently, these students and the faculty members supporting them don’t care about giving their students a marketable skill if it means that someone could possibly twist that into some skewed endorsement of George Bush.

Elinor Garely, the business professor who helped design the proposed program, said, “That’s why we have colleges, so people can speak out.”

Not really, Betsy replies:

We have colleges to educate students. Perhaps, to prepare them for a fulfilling life not spent sponging off their parents. A community college, in particular, is dedicated to providing either remedial or marketable skills. People can speak out anywhere.

The protesters are trying to suppress the teaching of ideas about terrorism, such as the notion that America has a right to defend against people who have a lot of reasons why they hate us and want us to die.

No blogging today, folks. Go celebrate. Or eat Chinese food.

Searching for toy guns for his three little cowboys, Tony Woodlief finally turned to a hobby shop.

I was greeted by a gruff bearded man. He could smell the panic on me, like a grizzled sergeant can smell it on a soldier in his first battle. “Something I can do for you, son?”

“Yes. Please. Please, for the love of all that remains good about America, tell me that you carry toy cowboy guns. Just a couple of cowboy guns is all I’m asking for. Toys R Us doesn’t have them, Wal-Mart doesn’t have them . . .” My voice trailed off.

He sized me up, perhaps to see if I was one of those pansy do-gooder Public Citizen types just looking to make trouble. Fortunately I hadn’t shaved, and I was wearing flannel. “C’mon,” he said with a gleam in his eye, “we just got in a shipment.”

They just got in a shipment.

He led me to the back, where he had assembled — and I am not making this up — gun racks to hold all the toy armaments. If Santa ever needed to assemble a commando strike force, this could be his armory.

I was raised in a non-gun-owning family — except for squirt guns, and it took a lot of argument to get those. We used garden stakes to make bows and arrows, a true put-your-eye-out toy. When I was a kid, it paid to be an Indian.

Charter schools outperform non-charters in Colorado, reports the Denver Post.

Forty-six percent of Colorado’s charter school programs were rated “excellent” or “high” on the state’s School Accountability Reports this year, compared with 39.6 percent of traditional public schools, a Denver Post analysis of the accountability data found.

Colorado charters serve fewer students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, which is the traditional way of determining student poverty. Advocates say they’ve got just as many poor kids but many charters don’t serve lunch, so they don’t collect eligibility data.

Education Gadfly points out that “many of the Colorado charter schools have been around long enough to iron out some of the ‘start-up’ kinks that plague fledgling charters elsewhere.”

Exploding the Self-esteem Myth in the January Scientific American looks at the evidence that high self-esteem leads to better outcomes. Not much there.

After coming to the conclusion that high self-esteem does not lessen a tendency toward violence, that it does not deter adolescents from turning to alcohol, tobacco, drugs and sex, and that it fails to improve academic or job performance, we got a boost when we looked into how self-esteem relates to happiness. The consistent finding is that people with high self-esteem are significantly happier than others. They are also less likely to be depressed.

Even here, correlation doesn’t prove causation.

People with high self-esteem are better at making friends. Unfortunately, that means they’re quicker to end a relationship, confident they can move on to someone else.

The Insta-Wife, who’s written a book, The Scarred Heart on violent children, isn’t a big self-esteem fan either.

Nearly 900 U.S. children lost a parent in the war in Iraq by the end of November, estimates Scripps Howard.

Overall, Americans in uniform today are far more likely to be married and have children than in the military of the past, (Professor Charles) Moskos and others said. And the reliance in Iraq on reserve forces — who tend to be older and even more settled than active-duty soldiers — also means more offspring at home.

. . . According to the Scripps research, more than 40 percent of the 1,256 war dead through November were married, and 429 had children. At least half of those youngsters were 10 years old or younger. Among the parents who died were six women soldiers who had borne a total of 10 children among them — another historic first for females in the U.S. military.

More than 40 men died without ever seeing their children.

Mathematicians and math educators attended a “peace summit” to settle the math wars, reports the Washington Post. Participants were surprised to discover a wide area of agreement:

¥ Heavy reliance on calculators in the early elementary grades is a bad idea.

¥ Elementary school children must have automatic recall of number facts, meaning that, yes, they have to memorize multiplication tables.

¥ Children must master basic algorithms. The meeting participants spent time defining the word “algorithm,” which means a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.

Math makes you smarter, according to an article linked by Chris Correa.

In next month’s issue of Intelligence, an interdisciplinary group of researchers propose a new hypothesis to explain the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect refers to the puzzling rise of IQ scores all over the world during the twentieth century.

Popular explanations of the Flynn effect often note improvements in nutrition and increased access to formal schooling, but these authors emphasize the changing nature of mathematics education and the possible effects on the prefrontal cortex. This is because fluid intelligence (the ability to reason and deal with unfamiliar problems) has rapidly improved in recent history. They suggest contemporary education requires kids to get a lot of practice with prefrontally-based fluid cognitive skills.

Via Eduwonk.

Oliver Willis hates Ebonics. Ben Kepple and Dean Esmay and Amritas respond.

The Oakland school board’s Ebonics proposal that set off the initial controversy was an attempt to get more money to educate low-income black students by equating their problems to the challenges facing low-income, Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants. Both groups typically start school with poorly developed English language skills. Extra money spent teaching standard English, as opposed to teaching black dialect or Spanish, is money well spent.

Should college be open and free for everyone? David Adesnik and Matthew Yglesias have kicked off a debate.

Alex Whitlock has doubts.

My degree helped get me to the front of the line. If everyone were to have that piece of paper, I have my doubts that the overall employment rates would change much and I seriously doubt that it would lead to a serious wage increase across the board. Instead, I believe the result would be a lot more college majors working at Starbucks.

Community college essentially is open and free to everyone, and it’s a wonderful way for people of any age to improve academic and job skills. But people with very poor reading, writing, math and study skills — and those who’ve come to hate classroom learning — have trouble making use of community college opportunities.