The nation’s first boarding school, Dummer Academy, is changing its name to something less susceptible to bad jokes. The school was founded by an early Massachusetts governor, William Dummer.

Via Katie of Constrained Vision, a proud graduate of Carnage Middle School.

I’ve always wondered at the judgment of the East Side Union High School District board in San Jose, which named two of its high schools Lick and Overfelt.

New York students can pass the Math A Regents exam by answering 31 percent of questions; 40 percent earns an “honors” pass.

The exam, the simpler of two math tests and a requirement for graduation, is comprised of 30 multiple-choice questions worth 2 points each and nine computation questions worth up to 4 points.

Answering just 13 of the multiple-choice questions right Ñ each question provides four possible answers Ñ guarantees a passing grade.

“It is unreasonable that a student who gets the minimum passing score has achieved only slightly better results than a student who guesses,” said Stanley Ocken, a math professor at City College of New York and a critic of the grading system.

In 2003, two-thirds of students failed the exam, so the passing score was adjusted.

People with high self-esteem feel good about themselves, but don’t necessarily do any better than everyone else, writes psychologist Roy Baumeister in the LA Times.

High self- esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades. (Actually, kids with high self-esteem do have slightly better grades in most studies, but that’s because getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, not the other way around.) In fact, according to a study by Donald Forsyth at Virginia Commonwealth University, college students with mediocre grades who got regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.

Violent people think quite well of themselves. Bullies — and people who intervene to protect victims of bullies — tend to have high self-esteem; victims have low self-esteem.

High self-esteem doesn’t prevent youngsters from cheating or stealing or experimenting with drugs and sex. (If anything, kids with high self-esteem may be more willing to try these things at a young age.)

Self-esteem does promote initiative, which usually is good. And it makes people feel good. Otherwise, it’s overrated, Baumeister writes. “Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline,” he recommends.

When Jenny D. teaches would-be teachers, she tries to make her teaching decisions explicit and clear. Showmanship doesn’t necessarily lead to learning, she writes.

Here she gives examples of clarity in teaching prospective teachers about Brown vs. Board of Education.

“In order to prepare for this, I thought about the timeline myself. I checked my notes from the lecture, and reviewed the reading. Then I made a lesson plan that walks through the timeline, but pauses at some places to expand some ideas. I am intending to write a few things on the board.

“It’s tough because although I have laid all this out, including the questions I will ask to forward our learning, I have to think on my feet as you answer in order to keep the lesson moving. I need to the notes to keep me directed, even if I have veer into another topic because of a question. This is difficult, and fun, but it could easily turn into just me entertaining you and not pushing you to probe, think, absorb and question ideas.”

She wants teachers to see the “invisible parts of teaching,” so they’ll know it’s a learnable skill not a natural talent.

Here she teaches a junior at a selective university how to write a short “reflection” on what she’s read. Good advice, too.

A night janitor at Stanford learns English from a student. Samuel Freedman writes in the New York Times:

Learning even the rudiments of English can save a janitor from being fired for not responding to a request he does not understand. With some fluency, a janitor can get off the night shift and onto days. A rank-and-file janitor can try to become a shop steward. An immigrant can try to pass the citizenship test.

For the Stanford students, meanwhile, the tutoring provides a sense of purpose and human connection that cannot be taught. Many of these undergraduates won admission partly by doing “community service” for the most cynical of reasons, to build their résumés. Their courses here resound with the armchair radicalism of Orientalism, neocolonialism, deconstructionism, white studies, critical race theory, queer theory, blah blah blah.

“There’s a lot of privilege in this place and a lot of ignorance about that privilege,” (tutor Eric) Eldon said. “People are used to having maids and servants. If they trash their dorm, they’re used to having someone else clean it up.” He continued, “You can take classes on all sorts of highfalutin political theories and trends. But to me, none of them teaches as much as being connected to people outside of Stanford.”

A Rhode Island school district has canceled the elementary school spelling bee because it produces a winner.

Assistant Superintendent of Schools Linda Newman said the decision to scuttle the event was reached shortly after the January 2004 bee in a unanimous decision by herself and the district’s elementary school principals.

The administrators decided to eliminate the spelling bee, because they feel it runs afoul of the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

“No Child Left Behind says all kids must reach high standards,” Newman said. “It’s our responsibility to find as many ways as possible to accomplish this.”

The administrators agreed, Newman said, that a spelling bee doesn’t meet the criteria of all children reaching high standards — because there can only be one winner, leaving all other students behind.

“It’s about one kid winning, several making it to the top and leaving all others behind. That’s contrary to No Child Left Behind,” Newman said.

A spelling bee, she continued, is about “some kids being winners, some kids being losers.”

As a result, the spelling bee “sends a message that this isn’t an all-kids movement,” Newman said.

Furthermore, professional organizations now frown on competition at the elementary school level and are urging participation in activities that avoid winners, Newman said. That’s why there are no sports teams at the elementary level, she said as an example.

Newman wants to build students’ self-esteem, “so they believe they’re all winners. Even if they’re not.

Of course, No Child Left Behind doesn’t require schools to pretend all students are achieving at the same level in all subjects.

Via Opinion Journal.

Michele of Small Victory writes about sexual exploitation of girls by the media — and by boys — and and says it’s not the fault of “society” if your kid has no self-respect, morals or judgment.

Well, damn. I missed Katie Couric’s special on blowjobs last night. I really meant to watch it, because I so depend on television personalities to tell me what my kids are thinking in regards to sex and how to talk to them about it.

Couric became passionate about the subject after hearing “horror stories” of teens having sex at early ages and wanted teens, parents and experts to weigh in.

So what was the point of Katie’s sex show? To bring these kids to the forefront and show all the other teens who are not aware of “friends with benefits” what they’re missing?

“I think that society is so sexualized from the time these kids are small, they’re quite comfortable..”

Isn’t Katie just adding to the sexualization of society by bringing these teens on national television to talk about their sexploits? Oh, she’s doing it under the guise of something newsworthy or educational.

Before the Internet, kids were having sex too, writes Michele. But people didn’t blame society for it. They blamed the parents.

Michele is an admitted counter-revolutionary in the sexual revolution. Not coincidentally, she’s the mother of a teen-age girl.

And she’s got a survey on oral sex.

In the Teacher Quality Bulletin, Kate Walsh looks at how to do merit pay.

. . . while student achievement gains should be
the most important indicator of a teacher deserving of higher pay,
standardized tests scores paint too narrow of a picture to be a sole
indicator of a teacher’s worth. Putting merit pay decisions in the hands of states or even school districts officials still will lead to excessively complicated formulas that suppress the potential benefits that merit pay could achieve. As always, efforts at real reform must come down to the school building level.

To our thinking, states or school districts ought first to run carefully designed experiments with merit pay, entrusted in the hands of good principals who have proven track records with their schools performance. Give one group of these principals a fixed pot of money to newly staff a school — no more and no less money given to any other school in the district. Over a three- to five-year period, grant these principals the freedom to decide how to allocate their pot of money any way they see fit. The other group of principals would serve as the control group, and would have to work with the existing uniform salary schedule to staff its schools. At the
end of the experiment, compare the two groups on such critical factors as student achievement gains and teacher retention and let the results speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of principals out there who teachers don’t trust to evaluate merit. Perhaps this model would remove the excuses and clarify who those principals are.

What defines a “dangerous school?” A new Reason Foundation study finds that schools have unreasonable and erratic definitions of “dangerous,” underreport school crime and don’t provide parents with accurate information about school crime.

Most school violence is concentrated in a few schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics during the 1999-2000 school year 2 percent of schools (1,600) accounted for approximately 50 percent of serious violent incidents and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents.

Students enrolled in a “persistently dangerous” school have a right to transfer to a safer school in the district under No Child Left Behind, but that doesn’t do much good when districts aren’t honest about school violence data.

Children of the Code has new interviews with reading researchers Keith Stanovich and Keith Rayner, and Robert Sweet. co-founder of the National Right To Read Foundation.