School people are a bit too jumpy these days.

CLOVIS, N.M. – A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped into Marshall Junior High.

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

An eighth grader had created the giant burrito for an extra-credit assignment. He turned it in when he realized it was the cause of the panic.

Democrats believe “We are smart, you are dumb,” writes David Gelernter in the LA Times. For example:

Vouchers let you decide where to spend tax money to educate your children. You give the voucher to any public or private school; it’s your call. But Democrats worry that (among other things) too many parents will spend their vouchers at a local Obedience School for Little Nazis or the neighborhood Witchcraft Academy. That’s what they think of their fellow citizens. That’s what they think of you!

Now some readers will say, hold on, be fair! Democrats only oppose vouchers because the teachers unions ordered them to. Agreed, teachers unions are a big factor in every major decision a good Democrat makes, starting with what cereal to have for breakfast. But Democrats also oppose vouchers out of honest conviction. They are honestly convinced that ordinary Americans don’t have the brains to choose a school for their own kids.

Democrats are professors at heart, Gelernter writes. They see “the people” as dull students.

Even professors aren’t necessarily smart enough, however. In California, the teachers’ union allied with Democrats to kill a bill which would have allowed colleges and universities to charter schools.

I had lunch yesterday in Chicago with Alex Russo of This Week In Education and Michael Lach of Teach and Learn. Go check out their sites. Go on.

Tomorrow, it’s on to New York, where I’m meeting with some non-cyber friends and with my publisher to talk about promoting my charter school book. How lavish will the book tour be?

James Lileks keeps it real with “hooker-in-training dolls” and pimp dog toys.”

When should a child be removed from an alcoholic, addicted or mentally unstable parent? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer follows two Child Protective Services workers in a depressing but illuminating story.

Cynthia Martin, who handles chronic cases, as opposed to (Mary) Marrs’ emergency calls, was preparing to visit Heather, a 33-year-old alcoholic who’d stumbled onto her son’s school bus so drunk that the driver called 911. Last fall, the then-4-year-old child had been seen walking alone along an arterial highway at 11 p.m.

“I hate my mom. I don’t want to be there,” he told a police officer, explaining that he’d been going to Safeway to find food, and planned afterward to sleep in his apartment complex’s pool house. When the cop asked why, the boy said, “Because she hurts me,” smacking himself on the forehead to demonstrate.

The incident had been rated “moderately low risk” by intake workers . . .

The system relies heavily on the CPS worker’s judgment, and there’s little consistency from one office to another in the criteria for placing a child in foster care.

California has learned how not to fix failing schools, write Bill Evers and Lance Izumi in the San Jose Mercury News.

From 1999 until 2003, California sent contractors into the classroom to observe, find out what was being done improperly and then guide each school in creating a tailored improvement plan. Rescue plans based on classroom observations were hands-on, school-specific and collaborative. But they didn’t work.

Intervention teams ignored academic content and made vague or unworkable suggestions.

Now the rescue effort focuses on the subject-matter content in math and English reading and writing that is found in the California Content Standards and judged by the state to be what students need to know.

. . . Special training now helps teachers make better use of textbooks that cover the required academic content. Teachers use electronically recorded data from state tests and from lesson-based tests to determine student weaknesses.

Under the new approach, district officials monitor school progress. If the school continues to make insufficient progress, the state sends in specialists on the math or English curriculum being taught in the school. The new approach is realistic because it does not expect the state to run hundreds (or thousands) of failing schools from Sacramento, nor does it require principals who are superhuman. Instead, the new approach to school recovery asks for steady, systematic work.

Many plans call for state intervention to help low-performing schools, but many such interventions don’t show impressive results.

On Gadfly, Rick Hess analyzes the lessons to be learned from school reform in San Diego. The superintendent’s seven-year effort proved disappointing.

In Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons, it’s orgy time all the time on college campuses.

“Sex! Sex! It was in the air along with the nitrogen and the oxygen! The whole campus was humid with it! tumid with it! lubricated with it! Tingling with it! in a state of around-the-clock arousal with it!”

Not so much, Newsweek claims.

Whereas 79.3 percent of students in a 2001 Princeton survey had zero or one partner, respondents thought that the figure was only 32.5 percent. And while only 20.5 percent of respondents had two or more partners, the perception was that 67.7 of students did.

Of course, it depends what you mean by sex. Most students think oral sex doesn’t count, says a Penn instructor of human sexuality.

Student say they’re too busy for a committed relationship so they “hook up” for a night, complete with “the obligatory blow job,” and then move on.

Girls learn about medicine; boys learn about sexism at UC-San Francisco Medical Center’s “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” today, sponsored by the Center for Gender Equity. Or inequity, as the case may be. The SF Chronicle’s Matier and Ross write:

For example, the 9- and 10-year-old daughters are being invited to participate in 17 hands-on activities such as working with microscopes, slicing brains, doing skull comparisons, seeing what goes on in the operating room, playing surgeon, dentist or nurse for a day, and visiting the intensive care unit nursery, where they can set up blood pressure cuffs and operate the monitors.

They can learn about earthquake and disaster preparedness, how to use a fire extinguisher, how to operate several types of equipment — even fire a laser.

And what do the boys get to do?

Learn about “gender equity in fun, creative ways using media, role playing and group games” — after which, the boys can get a bit of time in with a microscope or learn how the heart works.

Center director Amy Levine, says a mixed program didn’t work.

“It mirrored the same sexism that occurs in the classroom daily,” she said, “where boys raise their hands more often, demand more attention and have discipline problems.”

So now the boys have their own gender sensitivity program, where “they learn about violence prevention and how to be allies to the girls and women in their lives,” Levine said.

Maybe they’ll learn not to raise their hands in class.

Liberals shouldn’t pretend they dislike federal intervention just because they oppose No Child Left Behind, writes Matthew Yglesias.

When you hear Kansas is taking evolution out of the curriculum, you don’t approve. You don’t say, “well, we can teach evolution in Maryland and let them teach whatever they want in Kansas.” Nor do you think it’s okay if Georgia wants to teach “The War of Northern Aggression.” Nor do you think the horrendous inequalities in school funding inside Connecticut is bad, but the inequalities in funding between New Jersey schools and New Mexico schools is a-okay . . .

Let me also just note more broadly that the idea of moral federal spending but less federal “intervention” is a mirage. Where there’s money, there will be strings, and rightly so.

Yglesias also observes that poor kids, who tend to move around more, are disadvantaged by local control.