In Education Week, James Guthrie, a Vanderbilt education and public policy professor, responds to Nel Noddings, a Stanford education professor, who wrote earlier that No Child Left Behind is “bad law.” Noddings offers no evidence to back her assertions, writes Guthrie, and no ideas to do more than spend more money doing what’s already failed.

What is the damage being done to students’ psyches by testing? If there is such damage to children, however unlikely, is it any worse than the damage ultimately triggered from being promoted to the next grade regardless of academic performance? Why are negative sanctions for schools with sustained records of failure bad? Would it be better to ignore their failings and simply continue to pay adults who routinely contribute to students’ failure? What is the link between a restricted range of curriculum offerings and the No Child Left Behind Act? Simply because the law emphasizes reading and mathematics does not mean that it prohibits other subjects.

. . . Ms. Noddings concludes with an unusual twist of logic. She asserts that the No Child Left Behind Act promotes a culture of corruption because educators are called upon to test students and report progress. What of the converse? Is it not possible that the absence of appraisal conceals corruption, obscures a school’s failure to perform?

Via Eduwonk.

Charter school students do no better than students in traditional schools, and sometimes worse, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. A book will be out soon.

The American Federation of Teachers, which previously trashed charter schools, has a seat on the EPI board, points out the Charter Schools Leadership Council, which disputes the study.

Funding pre-school for all students would save money, a RAND study concludes.

For every dollar California would spend on creating a public preschool program for all 4-year-olds, the state would yield more than $2 in economic benefits by reducing the number of students held back in school, increasing the number of high school graduates and slashing the number of children who land in the juvenile justice system.

High-quality pre-school can help students from low-income, poorly educated and non-English-speaking families be successful in school; I doubt there’s much benefit to taxpayers in providing tuition-free pre-school for the children of affluent, educated parents.

Zero tolerance stupidities are creating pressure to modify rigid school rules, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

HOUSTON — Unaware it had turned cool overnight, Eddie Evans’s 12-year-old son bolted out of the house in shirt sleeves. He was on his way to the bus stop when his mother called him back for a jacket.

In third period the boy discovered that the three-inch pocketknife he had taken to his last Boy Scout meeting was still inside his coat – a definite no-no under the school’s zero-tolerance policy. Unsure what to do, he consulted a friend before putting the knife in his locker. The friend turned him in and, after lunch, police arrested him and took him to a juvenile-detention center without contacting his parents, according to senate testimony.

Mr. Evans says the school then expelled his son for 45 days and enrolled him in an alternative school for juvenile offenders. By the end, the First Class Boy Scout, youth leader at church, and winner of an outstanding- student award was contemplating suicide.

There’s no substitute for judgment.

Eastern High School is a low-performing D.C. high school that had an award-winning choir in the ’80s and ’90s. But the choir program has fallen victim to the “grating failure and corruption in the D.C. schools,” writes Marc Fisher in the Washington Post.

Broke, desperate for new voices, buffeted by the chaos of a school that has seen seven principals in seven years, ground down by the petty battles of a system that eats its own, the Eastern choir is on life support. The chorus had to cancel its spring concert last year because there were no tenors. Barely a handful of male singers remain from what was once a refuge for boys seeking a place to thrive away from the pressures of the street.

Boys who might have sung in the choir have dropped out of school.

“The school is in such a state of decline,” says Mary Ann Brownlow, who has served on the board for a decade. “There’s been such turnover and turmoil. . . . Unfortunately, the choir has always been a source of resentment among Eastern’s faculty, rather than seeing it as this school’s jewel.”

Students are fleeing to D.C. charter schools, writes Fisher, and the city’s best general high school is considering converting to a charter school to gain control of its budget.

In La Vida Robot, Wired tells the story of a team of undocumented Mexican immigrants at a West Phoenix high school who competed in a contest to build an underwater robot that could survey a model of a sunken submarine.

. . . in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It’s a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

Teachers entered the team in “the expert-level Explorer class instead of the beginner Ranger class. They figured their students would lose anyway, and there was more honor in losing to the college kids in the Explorer division than to the high schoolers in Ranger.”

With the help of some OB tampons to plug a last-minute leak, they went up against MIT — and won.

Read the whole story. It’s fantastic. Here’s a link to contribute to the scholarship fund for the four team members, who aren’t eligible for financial aid or in-state tuition because they’re not legal residents.

Teachers expect less from students with unusual or oddly punctuated names such as Da’Quan and LaQuisha, concludes economist David Figlio, a University of Florida professor. From the Washington Post:

Figlio said these kids also pay a price for their names when teachers and administrators make decisions about who gets promoted to the next grade level or selected to participate in “gifted” student programs: “Drews” are slightly more likely to be recommended for enrichment classes while “Damarcuses” are rejected, even when they have identical test scores.

Low expectations for children with names associated with low socio-economic status may become a “self-fulfilling prophesy,” Figlio writes. (Here’s the paper in pdf form.)

He used birth certificate data “to identify first names that had a high probability of being associated with a mother who was unmarried or a teenager at the time when her child was born, was a high school dropout and came from an impoverished family, independent of the mother’s race.” While blacks are most likely to pick these names, low-income whites and Hispanics also go for names like “Jazzmyn” and “Chlo’e.”

Figlio compared school data on exotically named children with their conventionally named siblings.

Figlio determined that children with names associated with low socioeconomic status scored lower on their reading and mathematics tests than their siblings with less race or class-identifiable names.

. . . Students with identifiable “Asian” first names were more likely to be recommended for special enrichment programs than siblings with more stereotypically American first names and similar test scores.

Thanks to Jeff Boulier of eChickens for the tip.

Clayton Wilcox, superintendent of schools in Pinellas County, Florida, has started a blog dialogue at a St. Petersburg Times site called The Classroom. In the last two weeks, he’s received hundreds of comments, mostly on improving the high schools. It looks like a great way for the superintendent to interact with parents and students. I do wish he’d make the effort to punctuate properly, though. It’s not that hard.

Twenty-six percent of public school students in Dayton, Ohio attend charter schools, reports the New York Times. That’s the highest percentage in the nation.

The flight of students from the public system has prompted the election of reform school board candidates. But Dayton’s school district remains in “academic emergency” status; some of the new charters also post very low test scores.

The story stresses that the school district gets no state funding for students who attend charter schools. Of course, it gets no funding for students whose parents choose private school either.

Fordham, which is located in Dayton, says the city’s charter students outperformed students in district-run schools in fourth and sixth grade proficiency exams.

Black parents are being urged to get to know their children’s teachers, go to PTA meetings, sign their kids up for enrichment and tutoring classes and take their children to libraries and museums. The goal is to improve academic performance.

In Silver Spring, Md., outside Washington, black parents have organized networks to exchange information about enrichment programs and to swap test-taking strategies. In St. Petersburg, Fla., parents have attended summits to learn more about the achievement gap and how to be more involved with their children’s learning.

. . . Some worry that the focus on black parenting amounts to blaming the victims and allowing bad teachers and failing schools to escape responsibility for the poor-quality education they deliver.

Involved, education-first parents can’t do everything, but they can make a big difference for their own kids, and they can pressure schools to improve.

Middle-class black parents do less than comparable whites to push their children to excel academically, according to Ron Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University.

Using his calculations based on a 1998 government survey of parents’ habits, Ferguson determined that about 47 percent of college-educated black parents surveyed read to their children daily, compared with 60 percent of white parents with at least a bachelor’s degree. Black parents with that much education had 65 books in their home on average, while white parents had nearly double that — 114. White parents also were more likely to discuss science or nature with their children.

Relying on the school to educate one’s children is a mistake.