Job prospects are rosy for 2005 college graduates, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Employers plan to hire 13.1 percent more new graduates in 2005 than they did last year, says Andrea Koncz, employment information manager at the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) in Bethlehem, Pa.

Recent NACE surveys point to particular demand in the fields of accounting, engineering, and computer-science, she says.

About half of graduates work in fields unrelated to their undergraduate majors. Starting salaries range from $29,400 to $35,000 for liberal arts graduates. Engineers can expect $44,300 to $50,000, computer scientists $39,300 to $47,400.

Most college students attend large, impersonal state universities that let them sink, drink or swim. In Survival of the Fittest, the New York Times profiles four students and one ex-student at University of Arizona. The “Boozeday” boy will get the most attention, but I was struck by the girl who got a “C” in a class even though she’d stopped attending in mid-semester and never took the final.

Students say it’s easy to pass without doing much work, yet only 55 percent of University of Arizona students earn a degree in six years; the national average is 54 percent.

Students “work harder and are less disruptive if they sit in rows rather than in groups around tables, according to researchers at the University of Birmingham.

A team led by Dr Kevin Wheldall, of the university’s department of educational psychology, found children spent up to twice as long concentrating on their work when seated in rows and teachers found it easier to praise them and to refrain from disapproval.

“Time on task” rose by 15 percent when students were seated in rows instead of at tables.

A similar study in a special school for children with behavioural difficulties found that on task time doubled in rows and disruptions were reduced to a third of their former frequency.

Education Watch reprinted the study, which dates from 1982. With the emphasis on group work, seating students at tables is more popular than ever.

Thanks to the Wired story about the four Mexican immigrant boys who won a national robotics championship, the La Vida Robot Scholarship Fund has collected nearly $53,000. One team member still in high school has won a full scholarship from Cal Tech. The two who’ve graduated are still working, but one is taking part-time college classes and will use the scholarship fund to enroll full-time as a mechanical engineering major. The other, working as a file clerk, “plans to enroll in business courses this fall to fulfill his dreams of opening a restaurant and buying his parents a home.”

From St. Petersburg, Florida, here’s a fascinating story about an assistant principal’s patient attempt to reason with an out-of-control kindergartener. Finally, she called the police, who handcuffed the 5-year-old girl, and sat her in a squad car until her mother arrived. It’s all on videotape.

Videotape was rolling March 14 when the 5-year-old girl swung again and again, her bantam punches landing on the outstretched palms of Nicole Dibenedetto, the new assistant principal at Fairmount Park Elementary.

She tore papers off Dibenedetto’s bulletin board and desk. She climbed on a table four times. About an hour had passed since she refused to participate in a kindergarten math lesson, which escalated into a series of defiant and destructive acts.

Dibenedetto had used tactics from a Pinellas school district training called Crisis Prevention Intervention:

Let the child know her actions have consequences but also try to “de-escalate.”

Give her opportunities to end the conflict.

Try not to touch her, defend yourself and make sure no one else gets hurt.

I think the moral is that school staffers should be authorized to restrain a child physically, so they’re not tempted to call in the police, who have little experience in dealing with kindergarten tantrums.

Of course, the wild child’s mother is suing.

Nearly half of California State University students, who typically come in with a 3.2 (B) grade point average, must take remedial English; 37 percent require remedial math. How remedial? The Sacramento Bee looks at a class for college freshmen.

Two Sacramento State freshmen scrutinize the sentence projected on the classroom wall, hunting for mistakes: “There over their with they’re friends.”

The students are in a race to find the errors and rewrite the line correctly on a chalkboard. Each of them writes, erases, rewrites, erases and writes again. Their classmates watch and whisper answers.

After several minutes, one has it. He rearranges there, their and they’re and slams down his chalk.

He’s won the final round of Elaine McCollom’s grammar game designed to help these students — all of them native Spanish speakers — sharpen their English writing skills and grammar and prepare them for college-level work.

If distinguishing between there, they’re and their is a challenge, they’re a long way from college-level English. What’s worse is that most CSU students in remedial English are native English speakers who earned B’s in high school.

Students at a Colorado middle school were startled when a guidance counselor led a slightly altered version of the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom.

“One nation, under ‘your belief system.’ ”

It turns out that students and parents at Everitt Middle School in Jefferson County believe the pledge should be recited without modification.

The teachers’ union lawsuit against No Child Left Behind charges improving student performance is an unfunded mandate.

Robert F. Kennedy would roll over in his grave if he knew how the teachers’ union is trying to block accountability for educating poor and minority students, writes Jenny D.

Even the New York Times rejects the anti-NCLB campaign.

The N.E.A. has misrepresented the law to the public from the start, and the primary aim of its suit is to throw out the baby with the bath water. The union doesn’t want a better No Child Left Behind Act; it wants to make the law disappear entirely.

States fighting NCLB have the largest achievement gaps between white and minority students, the Times points out.

The No Child Left Behind law has been a success on many levels – particularly in reorienting the thinking of the school districts that used to average out success by letting the stellar achievements of middle-class students wipe out the failures on the bottom. But it will take years, and far more work and money, before the public sees the kind of improvement it has a right to expect. Right now, everyone who cares about quality education for all children should be working to make that happen, not to dismantle what has already been done.

Eduwonk predicts the suit will backfire by giving Republicans a chance to point out that they’ve raised federal education funding by 40 percent or more than $8 billion to fund NCLB. Check out the link from the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, which attacks the NEA for ignoring state and local governments’ obligation to educate low-income children. It’s not like the feds are supposed to pay for the whole thing.

NCLB funding easily pays for the additional costs of testing. The lawsuit implies that educating poor and minority children is a new cost mandated by NCLB, not the ordinary business of the public schools.

Education Gadfly’s Chester Finn disses The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement, by Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein.

The crucial thing to know about the authors of this 186-pager is that they intensely dislike charter schools and all other threats to the public-school monopoly . . .

The crucial thing to know about the Economic Policy Institute, which sponsored the volume, is that it’s tightly tied to, and supported by, labor unions.

Other than that, he loved it.

Here’s some technology that’s proving useful in the classroom: Teachers can get instant feedback on students’ ability to answer questions.

At Upper Merion High School, students grab their assigned remotes – each remote is numbered so the teacher has a record of responses – as they enter Peter Vreeland’s college-prep physics class.

When a multiple-choice question is displayed on a big screen, the students aim their remotes at a receiver at the front of the room and punch a button on the keypad.

With a click, Vreeland can tally the answers to see how well the students absorbed the lesson.

“It is a serious instructional tool,” Vreeland said. “You can be much more diagnostic if you use it to find out where we’re at and what we need to fix.”

The remotes go over well with students, too.

Using the remote “enhances each class,” said Jason Knox, 18, a senior. “You’re not just listening – you are participating.”

Senior Mike Neufer, 18, said the quizzes generate discussion in which the whole class can participate. “You discuss why different people think it might be this answer or that one,” he said.

The systems are being used everywhere from kindergarten to college to training sessions aboard nuclear subs.