Fifty-four percent of students who enroll in the California State University system, which targets the top third of high school graduates, earn a degree. And that’s better than the national average for comparable universities. Only 10 percent finish in four years; 90 percent of those who graduate need six years.

In a visit to Vermont on a federally funded PBS show, an animated bunny named Buster reports on farm life, maple sugaring and lesbian couples. The new education secretary is not amused at the use of federal “Ready to Learn” funding. PBS said it already had decided not to distribute “Sugartime” to its stations.

“Ultimately, our decision was based on the fact that we recognize this is a sensitive issue, and we wanted to make sure that parents had an opportunity to introduce this subject to their children in their own time,” said Lea Sloan, vice president of media relations at PBS.

However, the show is un-banned by the Boston station that produced.

Via Jeff Jarvis, who’s keeping an eagle eye on cartoon morality.

Georgia students in small schools that don’t offer advanced classes — and home-schoolers and private school students — will be able to take classes online under a bill creating a Georgia Virtual School, reports Snooze Button Dreams.

The classes would be funded by state tax dollars based on the number of courses students were taking. A change introduced by Sen. Don Thomas, R-Dalton, would open up to six online courses a year to students not enrolled in public school.

“I want to be fair to every student,” Thomas said. “Their parents are paying a lot of taxes.”

The amendment was opposed by Democrats on the Republican-controlled committee and by representatives of teacher’s groups, who said the change would effectively take money away from school systems.

“This is one more step in weakening public schools,” said Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, a committee member who voted against the amendment. “Public school students should not have to wait in line.”

Snoozer agrees distance learning will weaken schools. He’s happy about that.

On Number 2 Pencil, home-schoolers worry that enrolling in public online classes will put their autonomy at risk.

Enrollment in Detroit’s district-run public schools is plummeting as students enroll in charters or leave the city. Detroit Public Schools officials predict the district will have to close 110 schools — leaving 142 open — and cut the budget by a third over the next three to five years Detroit could be down to its last 100,000 district students in 2008, “a little more than half of its enrollment before the state takeover in 1999,” the Free Press reports.

Update: Eduwonk reports on goings-on at the state level. The governor wants to dump the state superintendent, who’s fighting back.

Johnny won’t read because books assigned in class don’t appeal to male interests, write Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky in the Washington Post. Surveys show “boys prefer adventure tales, war, sports and historical nonfiction, while girls prefer stories about personal relationships and fantasy.” Boys don’t like to read stories that feature girls, but girls often choose stories that appeal to boys.

Unfortunately, the textbooks and literature assigned in the elementary grades do not reflect the dispositions of male students. Few strong and active male role models can be found as lead characters. Gone are the inspiring biographies of the most important American presidents, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs. No military valor, no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventurous and brave women abound. Publishers seem to be more interested in avoiding “masculine” perspectives or “stereotypes” than in getting boys to like what they are assigned to read.

At the middle school level, the kind of quality literature that might appeal to boys has been replaced by Young Adult Literature, that is, easy-to-read, short novels about teenagers and problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorced parents and bullying. Older literary fare has also been replaced by something called “culturally relevant” literature — texts that appeal to students’ ethnic group identification on the assumption that sharing the leading character’s ethnicity will motivate them to read.

Boys lose interest in reading, and the gender gap in reading widens.

I used to love to read adventure stories, history and biographies, and had no trouble imagining myself as the inevitably male lead. Of course, I loved fantasy and romance too. I read everything. I do see many kids who haven’t discovered books that they enjoy reading.

Update: On a sort of related topic, the University of California denied transfer credit to a Monterey Peninsula College course called Literature By and About Men on grounds the course was too narrow and didn’t match any course offered at UC. Instructor David Clemens writes on No Indoctrination.org:

While I don’t question U.C.’s woeful admission that not even one campus offers a course in literature by and about men, U.C. does accept, for lower division transfer from community colleges, such English courses as “Images of Women in Western Literature” from Saddleback, “Contemporary Women Writers” from Santa Barbara, “Women Writers” from Foothill, “Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Multicultural Voices in Literature” from Diablo Valley, “Women in Literature” from Santa Rosa, “Images of Women in Literature” from Santa Monica, “Changing Images of Women in Literature” from Butte, “U.S. Women’s Literature” and “Her Story: Women’s Autobiographical Writing in Multicultural America” from Chabot, “Literature By Women” from Sierra, and “Literature By and About Women” from Shasta, among dozens of other clearly gender-specific literature surveys.

After Clemens publicized the rejection in the blogosphere, UC reversed itself and agreed to give transfer students credit for the course.

Boots and Sabers links to a “goofy” story about a Houston high school plagued by perfection.

Every student in last year’s 11th-grade class at the DeBakey High School for Health Professions passed every section of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

But officials at the Texas Education Agency are reluctant to report that happy news, fearing it might violate a federal law.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is designed to protect students’ privacy. The argument goes that, knowing 100 percent of the students passed a test would let the world know how each student did.

So TEA is claiming the pass rate was only 99 percent to protect students from disclosure of their competence.

Teachers’ unions stand in the way of school reform, and always will, writes Terry Moe, a senior Hoover fellow and Fordham Prize winner, in Opinion Journal.

The idea that an enlightened “reform unionism” will somehow emerge that voluntarily puts the interests of children first — an idea in vogue among union apologists — is nothing more than a pipe dream. The unions are what they are. They have fundamental, job-related interests that are very real, and are the raison d’être of their organizations. These interests drive their behavior, and this is not going to change. Ever.

If the teachers unions won’t voluntarily give up their power, then it has to be taken away from them — through new laws that, among other things, drastically limit (or prohibit) collective bargaining in public education, link teachers’ pay to their performance, make it easy to get rid of mediocre teachers, give administrators control over the assignment of teachers to schools and classrooms, and prohibit unions from spending a member’s dues on political activities unless that member gives explicit prior consent.

Politicians will respond to public pressure, Moe writes.

Darren, a high school math teacher in Sacramento, and an Army vet, is blogging at Right on the Left Coast.

Here’s his letter to the NEA in response to an article suggesting “NEA Republicans, who comprise one-third of the Associaton (NEA) membership, need to become more active in the GOP” to change the party.

Perhaps NEA Republicans need to become more active in the NEA and help turn it from being little more than a shill for the Democrat Party.

Thank you again, Reg Weaver and the rest of the NEA leadership, for being so partisan, for putting all our eggs in the Democrat basket, that teachers can effectively be ignored by the Administration for another 4 years. Why should the Bush Administration listen to an organization that opposes its every move?

Darren says he was inspired by me, making Right on the Left Coast my blogchild.

Also check out a teachers’ dialogue blog (diablog?) called TLN Teachers Voices.

Kimberly Swygert is so old and unhip she thinks a $495 prom dress should cover a girl’s breasts.

Actually, Stuyvesant High students have their doubts too. “Double-sided tape doesn’t last all night, one girl pointed out.

“If you wore that to prom, you’d be falling out of it all night,” says senior Angela Cho. “There’s also hardly any material. I can’t believe it costs $400. You could make it yourself if you really wanted to.”

. .. “This dress would look great at a prom if the model in the picture wore it,” says senior Vlaz Ermant, “but we don’t have any girls like that at our school.”

That’s Vlaz the Impugner, who’s not getting a date with a classmate any time soon.

Teachers can follow the private-sector model — pay for performance — if they have the right productivity tools, argues Merrill Vargo of the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative.

Improvement and innovation bloom in any industry when the people doing the work — that means both managers and line workers — benefit from four crucial ingredients:

Incentive to do better.

Access to the best ideas about what successful competitors are doing.

Real-time data about current performance.

The flexibility to make needed changes.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s merit pay proposal provides incentives, writes Vargo. But teachers need more.

First, access to the best ideas. The private sector calls this benchmarking. Business leaders take for granted that if you want to improve something, you start by looking at what your peers are doing. Pepsi studies Coca-Cola; Burger King scrutinizes McDonald’s. But people who work in schools rarely get this privilege. Most teachers work all day in their classrooms without the benefit of peer feedback or advice from experts in their field.

In the private sector, leading companies routinely invest in professional development. But in public education, professional development is the first thing on the chopping block when budgets get tight.

Next up: Provide teachers with real-time data about how their kids are doing. Again, no business would expect to increase quality without a system to measure daily and weekly progress. But we don’t do that in education.

Students are tested once a year on state standards, and teachers wait months for the results. There are “quickly administered diagnostic assessments” with instant results on the market, but most schools don’t earmark funding for them.

Finally: Give educators the flexibility to make necessary change. So far, none of the much-vaunted flexibility to innovate enjoyed by charter schools has rubbed off on the rest of the school system.

BASRC folks are liberals. Smart liberals. It’s significant that Vargo is supporting data-driven improvement in teaching and linking teacher pay to student achievement. This wouldn’t have happened a few years ago.

See Eduwonk for the latest on reactionaries defending the status quo in California. The reactionaries are union-dependent Democrats, writes Eduwonk. Their victims are Democratic reformers.

Virginia Postrel’s political split –dynamists who can handle disruptive change versus stasists who can’t — increasingly applies to education. It’s not really a question of left or right, Democrat or Republican. It’s about people who are willing to try whatever it takes to educate kids and people who focus on defending the existing system,.