James Lileks wants to send his daughter to kindergarten at the neighborhood public school.

There’s something about walking home on a spring day — or, for that matter, one of those wonderful autumn afternoons where is damp and misty and somehow very private, as though your only friend in the world is the world itself, the hidden mysterious world that revealed itself at times like this. It’s an integral part of childhood, at least as it was defined for me. I used to come home for lunch, too; is that even an option anymore? I came home to soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, Noonday on the B&W TV. No cartoons on that show. No hope of cartoons. Farm reports and LBJ; a dog from the pound if you were lucky. Then back to school.

I walked home for lunch from elementary school too, though we weren’t allowed to watch TV. Soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, definitely.

Lileks discovered the school offers all-day kindergarten, but only to non-English speaking children who are bused in from elsewhere. The extra time is used to teach “concepts” — like colors and shapes — in their native language. Lileks is dubious, but there are children who come to school without the basic knowledge that middle-class parents take for granted. Whether they’re incapable of learning “green” but capable of “verde” is another issue. Generally, more learning time for poor kids is a good idea.

He’s got a great anecdote about his daughter.

This morning she was painting, and what had been a portrait of her and her friend turned into a self-portrait, with the friend morphed into a house. And then she said something that’s stayed with me all day: “All of my mistakes are giving me ideas.”

Yes.

Teachers who quit low-income city schools aren’t the best and the brightest, concludes a new study of a Texas district. Education Week reports:

Rather than measure teachers’ quality by whether they had passed certification exams or had earned advanced degrees, the researchers looked at the test-score gains students made from year to year on state mathematics tests to determine which teachers were effective.

For the most part, they found, the teachers who left inner-city schools between the 1989-90 school year and the 2001-02 school year were no better at raising their students%u2019 scores than those who stayed behind. In some cases, the analysis showed, the departing teachers may have even been worse.

However, departing teachers were replaced by brand-new teachers, who were less effective in the classroom because of their inexperience.

As a result, the researchers said, disadvantaged inner-city schools are still left with a disproportionate share of lower-quality teachers, even though most are novices who might one day turn out to be good at their jobs.

Teachers reach peak effectiveness in their fourth year on the job, the study concluded.

A master’s student in social work at Rhode Island College failed a course because he refused to lobby the legislature for liberal causes he didn’t support, reports FIRE. Bill Felkner took Professor James Ryczek’s fall 2004 “Policy and Organizing” class, which required students to lobby for one of a list of causes, none of which Felkner supported.

Felkner about the showing of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, asking if a movie critiquing Moore would be shown at the school. Professor Ryczek responded: “Social Work is a value-based profession that clearly articulates a socio-political ideology about how the world works and how the world should be.” The National Association of Social Workers has a PAC “working actively to defeat Bush.”

So, as a social worker, I don’t find it at all unusual that a film like 9/11 might officially be sponsored by the school, and that the alternate view film might not be sponsored. In short, by and large as a profession we do take sides…and indeed in this school, we have a mission devoted to the value of social and economic justice.

Now that being said, I don’t think anyone here would want to quash alternative views. Again, as I have said in class…I want us to have an open discussion and debate about issues. In fact, questioning is an extremely important social work skill . . .

Yet, if a student finds that they are consistently and regularly experiencing opposite views from what is being taught and espoused in the curriculum, or the professional “norms” that keep coming up in class and in field, then their fit with the profession will not get any more comfortable, and in fact will most likely become increasingly uncomfortable.

Conform or get out.

Later, “Ryczek assigned students to form groups to lobby the Rhode Island legislature for social welfare programs from an approved list.”  Felkner was denied his request to lobby against one of the programs, so he joined a group backing a program he opposes, but wrote a dissenting paper.  

Ryczek failed this paper, writing, “Regardless of the content, application of theory, and critical analysis, you did not write from the perspective you were required to use in this academic exercise.  Therefore, the paper is must [sic] receive a failing grade.”

Felkner is now retaking the course from a different professor, who’s said he can choose his own issue but will receive a lower grade if his group doesn’t include “Policy and Organizing” classmates, all of whom are lobbying for a liberal program.

More students are dropping out of high school at earlier ages, says a report by Educational Testing Service. High school completion rates fell from 1990 to 2000, says the report, One-Third of a Nation: Rising Dropout Rates and Declining Opportunities. Wages for high school drop-outs have fallen sharply.

A Florida boy was suspended from school for 10 days for wielding a rubber band in class.

Robert Gomez, a seventh-grader at Liberty Middle School, said he picked up a rubber band at school and slipped it on his wrist.

Gomez said when his science teacher demanded the rubber band, the student said he tossed it on her desk.

Of course, it’s possible he shot it on the desk. School officials aren’t talking.

After the incident, Gomez received a 10-day suspension for threatening his teacher with what administrators say was a weapon, Local 6 News reported.

“They said if he would have aimed it a little more and he would have gotten it closer to her face he would have hit her in the eye,” mother Jenette Rojas said.

The boy was charged with a “Level 4 offense,” using an object to threaten or inflict harm. It usually applies to arson, assault and bomb threats, but apparently also includes rubber bands.

Today’s parents are more likely to have tried drugs themselves, especially if they grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and less concerned about their children’s experimentation with marijuana.

The study of parental attitudes toward teen drug use, conducted by The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, found that barely half of the parents would be upset if their children experimented with marijuana.

The number of parents who have never spoken with their children about drugs was 12 percent, double what it was just six years ago, the survey found.

Perhaps they were reluctant to open the subject of their own drug experiences.

Some 11 percent of parents used marijuana in the year before the survey.

Update: California Superintendent Jack O’Connell is urging school districts to drop a drug education program with ties to Scientology because an evaluation determined it provides inaccurate and unscientific information to students. Nanette Asimov of the San Francisco Chronicle broke this story, and deserves the credit.

High school standards are too low, the National Governors’ Association says. The governors want “more rigorous standards and harder exams than states have already imposed, often with considerable difficulty,” the New York Times reports.

Despite the zeal for academic standards and exit exams that has swept across states in recent years, a high school diploma does little to ensure that graduates are capable of handling the work awaiting them in college or in the workplace, the National Governors Association said in a report issued yesterday. Graduation requirements remain so universally inadequate that it is possible to earn a diploma anywhere in the nation and still lack the basic skills required by colleges and employers, the governors reported.

Indeed, more than 4 in 10 public high school students who manage to graduate are unprepared for either college courses or anything beyond an entry-level job, the governors reported, requiring billions of dollars in remedial training to endow them with the skills “they should have attained in high school.”

The report calls for regular testing of high school students; No Child Left Behind doesn’t require high school testing. States with graduation exams typically lower standards when it’s clear that many students who’ve been passing their courses can’t pass a test of 10th grade skills.

Who has it easier: boys or girls? They do about the same, concludes a study of child wellbeing.

Although boys have the advantage in some areas and girls score better in others, they are doing about the same in a broad array of measures assessing essential dimensions of life, such as health, safety, economics and education, the researchers found.

In school, girls are doing significantly better than boys.

Check out the third Carnival Of Education hosted by The Education Wonks.

For example, First Year Teacher and Mr. Babylon offer different perspectives on managing out-of-control students.

Candy pushers now roam the halls of Austin High School, reports the Austin American-Statesman via Best of the Web.

The candy removal plan, according to students at Austin High, was thwarted by classmates who created an underground candy market, turning the hallways of the high school into Willy-Wonka-meets-Casablanca.

Soon after candy was removed from vending machines, enterprising students armed with gym bags full of M&M’s, Skittles, Snickers and Twix became roving vendors, serving classmates in need of an in-school sugar fix. Regular-size candy bars like the ones sold in vending machines routinely sold in the halls for $1.50.

Some students were making $200 a week selling candy. To stamp out the black market, school officials restored “nutritious” candy to the vending machines, such as milk chocolate, which contains milk, and chocolate with nuts, which contains protein.