Most programs for drop-outs aim low, and miss. The Oregonian reports on a Portland program, Gateway to College, that sets high standards.

(Students are) required to read college-level books, complete every assignment, write term papers and attend class every day. They gain credits toward a two-year college degree while earning a high school diploma.

. . . A 2003 study of 22 dropout recovery programs in Portland found that most students quit in the first few months and that only 3 percent of students earned a high school diploma.

By contrast, 20 percent of students who enter Gateway to College earn diplomas.

The program’s director believes many drop-outs “long for structure.”

They skipped class, slacked off, didn’t do homework — because no one seemed to care that they did. At Gateway, officials crack down on every absence, withhold tests from those who miss a single assignment, make students pay tuition if they earn a D or an F. Students struggling with financial pressures, pregnancy or conflict at home don’t need coddling that focuses on those problems. Gateway advisers play to student strengths.

Gateway students get lots of attention, academic help and personal support. But the starting point is high expectations, high demands, no excuses, get it done.

The Gates Foundation is providing money to try the Gateway model in other cities.

Here’s a new resource for California School Ratings.

On Gene Expression, TangoMan links to a Multicultural Math course guide from the University of Florida’s education school. The course includes oral reports on the “contributions” of different cultures, crafts, games and Multicultural Food Day, when all students prepare an ethnic dish. There are Chinese tangrams, Vedic squares, kente cloth and Norwegian Christmas baskets. It sounds like fun in an elementary school sort of way. Apparently, the course is required for a master’s in math education; only six hours of “non-graduate math” (graduate level math?) are required for a master’s.

But do students whose ancestors came from Africa, Mexico, China or India understand math differently from students descended from Norwegians, Greeks or Russians? If math is universal and learnable by everyone with a gray, wrinkly brain, then why teach culture in math class? I wonder if the education school has a class on how teachers teach math in high-scoring countries like Singapore and Japan.

A British parent complains in The Telegraph that students are trained to write essays with no imagination, lest they lose marks on their exams.

My daughter had to do a précis of Macbeth. After mentioning Malcolm’s coronation at Scone, we encouraged her to follow her instincts. She ended her essay with: “Somewhere on a distant heath, the witches are laughing” – which we thought was a terrific insight. The homework came back with the sentence crossed out. She was told that it was not in the play and therefore not her business to suggest that it should be.

The children repeatedly tell their literature-loving parents not to interfere. One says, “No – please stop intruding. Examiners look on that kind of unsubstantiated enthusiasm as just bouncing up and down and woofing.”

Another Telegraph story reports on a headmaster who’s decided to ban homework as well as subject matter teaching. Patrick Hazlewood wants to make schooling more “relevant to life in the 21st century” by giving students responsibility for “managing their own learning.” St. John’s is testing methods developed by the Royal Society for the Arts, “which rejects the notion that a teacher’s job is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils.”

The project aims instead to encourage pupils to “love learning for its own sake” and the project is intended to replace the “information-led, subject-driven” national curriculum with one based on “competences for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information.”

The point of schooling, the RSA says, is to acquire competence not subject knowledge. It believes that exams only impede pupils’ progress.

The headmaster wants parents “to become pro-active partners in the process,” but it sounds like they weren’t consulted.

Third graders at a mostly black, mostly poor school in Rockford, Illinois aced the state reading tests, coming in second behind a school for gifted students, a few years after their school adopted scripted, teacher-directed instruction in phonics in the early grades. But fifth graders, who’d been taught under the “balanced literacy” method, were reading poorly, so the principal expanded the direct instruction program to all grades. The district relieved the principal of her instructional duties and ordered a return to “balanced literacy,” reports the Rockford Register Star.

Lewis Lemon, along with Nelson and Kishwaukee — three of the district’s most impoverished elementary schools– began its academic climb in 2001.

Former NIU professor Bill Bursuck developed a program called Project Pride for kindergarten through second and third grades at the three schools. The program’s $720,000 in federal funding ended last school year, although teachers in these schools were trained to continue.

From 2000 to 2004, a grant-funded reading coordinator, Mary Damer, worked with teachers to incorporate phonics and drilling called direct instruction: Teachers read from scripts, ask students questions, and they chorus back responses.

Once students had a foundation to decode words, or sound them out as is done in phonics, teachers would move forward with other approaches. This came at the end of first grade or into second grade.

By 2003, third grade reading scores were up dramatically. Principal Tiffany Parker decided to use direct instruction for all grades. The district’s new instructional director, Martha Hayes, said the program won’t work with older students.

Hayes wants teachers to use a variety of approaches like at Johnson Elementary, where reading scores are among the district’s highest. Teachers there use an eclectic approach, including guided reading, with children working in small, ability-based groups where they read books specified at their level. As a teacher works with one group, other groups do more self-directed activities.

Parker maintains that the small groups with book rooms and learning centers didn’t work at her school. Lewis Lemon’s upper elementary teachers used the tactic before the switch to direct instruction.

Parker says she started out as an advocate of balanced literacy, but “got so frustrated over not meeting the needs of my kids” despite teacher training, reading coaches and funding. She points out that Lewis Lemon has high teacher turnover; scripted lessons help inexperienced teachers be effective. Johnson has a more stable, experienced staff and mostly middle-class students.

A school board member asks a good question: “Why mess with success?”

Thanks to The Instructivist, who thanks Professor Plum, who quotes a subscribers-only story in the New York Sun by Andrew Wolf. The Sun story warns readers that New York City schools also are using “balanced literacy,” which Wolf calls “a revisionist term for the increasingly unpopular whole-language programs that research has proven don’t work for the lowest performing children – those most at risk – typically minority children.”

At the age of 23, Steelers’ linebacker Larry Foote learned he’d fathered a son when he was 15. Instead of ducking paternity, he embraced it. Foote is raising his son, reports Michael Rosenberg in the Detroit Free-Press.

“It’s still a little rocky between us,” said Larry, 24. “When I was telling him something, here comes this manly voice — he was looking at me like the Big Bad Wolf. He loves the video games, but when he got out here, he had to read every day. He had to go to his speech teacher. Homework on a regular basis. Eating vegetables. All he wanted to eat was buffalo wings.

“Here I am, I already took him away from his brothers and sisters — he’s already mad at me just for that. And I’ve got to sit there and tell him he’s got to eat some broccoli.”

Foote learned how to be a father from his own father.

“I was one of the few in my neighborhood growing up that had a father that was in my life. A lot of my buddies growing up, they didn’t even know their fathers — they didn’t know who they were. My father didn’t live with me, but every weekend, me and my father were close. That’s how I grew up.

“My uncles that I was close with, they were married and had kids. That’s the only way I knew.

“I had to get my son and be a part of his life.

Fatherhood is a “blessing,” says Foote, who’s engaged to be married to his college sweetheart.

Jacob Sullum talks about sex differences in math and science aptitude without yelling — or getting nauseous.

This controversy is ostensibly about the ability of women to excel in math and science. But it says more about the ability of academics to engage in rational debate when confronted by views that contradict their cherished assumptions.

Speaking at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, (Harvard President Lawrence) Summers, an economist and former treasury secretary, suggested three factors that may help account for the scarcity of women on the math, physical science, and engineering faculties of leading universities. In addition to discrimination (the explanation favored by Hopkins) and the reluctance of mothers to put in the long hours required by top math and science positions, he mentioned sex-related differences in ability.

Males tend to outscore females on spatial reasoning; more men are at the very high end of the scale for advanced math skills.

Yet average group differences in ability do not imply a judgment about any particular individual, since there is still much overlap between the sexes. Although men predominate in the upper echelons of math and science, that doesn’t mean the women who make it are any less qualified. The situation could change, of course, if the demand for gender balance leads universities to select faculty members based on their sex.

Differences may start with exposure to prenatal hormones, then be influenced by social factors.

On Constrained Vision, Katie links to a story on urban renewal in Washington, D.C. which points out a critical problem: Middle-class families won’t move to a neighborhood if they can’t send their kids to decent schools. Marc Fisher writes in the Washington Post:

The city is moving to replace the violence-plagued Sursum Corda project near North Capitol Street, but the school system seems unable to revive adjacent Walker-Jones Elementary, where only 27 percent of the students read at grade level.

The housing end of Mayor Tony Williams’s goal of building homes for 100,000 new residents seems realistic. But the city cannot build a thriving middle class without good schools.

If newcomers can send their children to schools of choice outside the neighborhood, they’re more likely to give gentrifying neighborhoods a try, Katie points out.

Here’s a candidate for stupidest lawsuit:

A suburban Milwaukee teen and his dad are suing the boy’s math teacher for assigning homework to be done over summer vacation.

They are seeking to bar homework assignments over the summer.

Betsy points out the kid doesn’t have to do the homework, as long as he’s willing to take the zero.

Update: Here’s a link to a story with more details:

Peer Larson, 17, had lined up a dream camp counselor job last June, but honors pre-calculus homework turned his summer into a headache.

“It didn’t completely ruin my summer, but it did give me a lot of undue stress both at home and at work,” the high school junior said Thursday. “I just didn’t have the energy or the time for it.”

Larson and his father sued in Milwaukee County Circuit Court seeking the end of summer homework across the state. They argue that homework shouldn’t be required after the required 180-day school year is over.

“These students are still children, yet they are subjected to increasing pressure to perform to ever-higher standards in numerous theaters,” the suit said.

Honors courses require some summer work, administrators say. If Larson didn’t want to meet the higher standard of honors math, he could have chosen the regular math track. He wants the prestige of honors math without the stress.

The National Education Association is softening its campaign against No Child Left Behind, writes Checker Finn on Gadfly. A NEA publication now concedes NCLB has spotlighted a real problem:

The persistent achievement gaps between white kids and kids of color; between special education students and their regular-ed buddies; between kids who eat free pizza at school and their classmates who dine frequently in fancy restaurants, are hardly new to educators. But the so-called No Child Left Behind law — with its rules that grade and penalize schools based on the test scores of each group of students — has injected new life into the public discussion of the academic divide. While that discussion is rife with criticism of the overemphasis on testing, the question of how to fix the essential problem of the “gap” remains.

What does this mean for educators, who now are charged almost single-handedly with making the problem go away? It means that it’s time to ratchet up the work.

Finn speculates the union has read “the political handwriting on the schoolhouse wall as signaled both by the 2004 election returns and by the union’s reported inability to persuade a single state to join as plaintiff in its long-sought lawsuit against NCLB.”

Still, one reads the fine print and sees that the NEA tiger hasn’t turned into an education-reform kitten. They still rue the “overemphasis on testing.” They still demand smaller classes and more money. The achievement gaps that concern them are “not just . . . between kids of color and whites, but between girls and boys; between gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered kids and their ‘straight’ peers.” (I found myself wondering what’s the data source for academic achievement among transgendered youngsters.)

Although the National School Board Association’s blog touts anti-NCLB lawsuits, Eduwonk says “the real story here is that all the much ballyhooed lawsuits have, at least until this point, amounted to nothing.“