A girl’s best and safest prom date is a gay male friend.

. . . unlike the goofy cousin who might arrive in a ruffled, powder-blue tux and tell embarrassing stories about computer camp, I’m a safe, chic choice. Neither of us will blush with sexual tension when it comes time to attach corsage to bosom. I won’t make a fool of my date or myself with awkward straight-boy dancing. And I’ll help her figure out the details of her dress and hairstyle.

And she doesn’t have to worry about drunken groping.

As Eduwonk notes, this young man writes very well.

Many high schools now name many valedictorians or none at all to avoid hurt feelings, squabbles and lawsuits, writes Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker.

Still, perhaps something is lost if schools eliminate valedictorians. Like spelling bees, the contest for valedictorian offers a pleasing image of a purer meritocracy, in which learning and performing by the rules leave one hardworking person standing. It seems sad to abolish the tradition — and faintly ridiculous to honor too large a group. (If we’re trying to be more sensitive, doesn’t it make ordinary students feel worse when they can’t be one of several dozen valedictorians?) Maybe the answer is to stick to one valedictorian but to make the rules of the contest clear, and to be sure everyone knows them.

My daughter’s high school doesn’t name a valedictorian. Allison was chosen to speak at graduation by a committee that liked the speech she’d submitted. The parents of one of the other finalists demanded that the committee pick multiple speakers, perhaps not realizing their son’s speech was not the second choice. Both were teachers at the school. Most students on the committee — and Allison — had a class from one of the angry parents. The best I can say is that it didn’t lead to a lawsuit.

A Texas schools is giving personality tests to first graders as an experiment. The Dallas Morning News reports:

There is a Mikey Roberts in every elementary school class. He talks a lot, he can’t sit still and he’s pushy — the one most likely to get in trouble.

. . . Mikey also is a people-oriented person with a domineering personality.

Said another way, he’s a natural leader.

That’s what a personality test said about the first-grader at Smith Elementary School in Frisco. He and 370 classmates are part of a rare pilot program designed to help teachers manage their students.

Teachers hope they can understand students better through personality testing. But don’t teachers already know about kids like Mikey?

“Mikey is just a very energetic kid who has to keep busy or he gets bored,” Ms. Roberts said.

It’s not rocket science.

My old boss wanted me to take the Myers-Briggs test when it was fashionable, but I ducked it. I read the hand-out, and told him to mark me down as an INTJ. He agreed that was my category. We saved a lot of time.

Angry because high school officials had disciplined her daughter, a 42-year-old Raleigh, N.C. mother mooned the assistant principal, police say. Donna Maria Thomas was charged with simple assault, indecent exposure and communicating threats.

Ryan Sager analyzes the United Federation of Teachers’ proposal for a union-run charter school in Brooklyn, quoting a New York Post editorial. The union charter would provide more time for teacher planning, but no more class time for students. The principal, called “school leader,” would be burdened with even more red tape than normal.

Lastly, many of the most successful charter schools have pursued a back-to-basics approach to curriculum, making use of traditional, as opposed to “progressive,” instructional methods.

UFT President Randi Weingarten has herself been supportive of such an approach and highly critical of the Bloomberg team’s use of the so-called progressive programs.

Yet, for whatever reason, the UFT decided to use relatively “progressive” math and reading curricula. The union, according to sources, essentially admitted its discomfort with its curricula to SUNY’s board and expressed its intention to strengthen the program later.

The union has fought to maintain a 100-school cap on the number of charters in New York; the union charter would take up one of the few remaining slots. However, the proposal has been side-tracked.

The Phantom Professor lost her job as an adjunct writing instructor at Southern Methodist University, possibly because of her blog, but now has a shot at a movie deal, reports the Houston Chronicle.

The educator’s anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university “in the South,” spun tales of spoiled-rich “Ashleys” with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

. . . Surrounded by students sporting French manicures and plans for spring break in Cabo, the blog’s author told stories like the one about “a certain member of a Middle Eastern royal family who got a new Mercedes by convincing a frat buddy to crash his one-year-old model into a wall” or how one stall in a certain ladies room was known as “the purge-atory.”

Phantom Elaine Liner used no names, but “students and faculty began recognizing themselves in the phantom’s prose. A student in SMU’s corporate communications and public affairs department discovered the blog had quoted the content of e-mail she had sent to one of her teachers.”

Theatre students at a Los Angeles-area high school put up posters of President Bush with a Groucho mustache and cigar to advertise a satirical play on American history. One student complained.

Principal Kenny Lee ordered 100 posters removed from the campus of El Camino Real High School in the Woodland Hills area last week on grounds that they promoted smoking and “endorsing one ideology over another.”

The principal did approve new posters.

The new designs all feature a silhouette of Bush and a burning cigar, along with inscriptions such as “Free Expression for All (unless you are in high school)” and “What First Amendment?”

The new design apparently doesn’t promote smoking.

Let’s hope the play doesn’t offend a single student, teacher or parent, because we all know that one person’s emotions trump the free speech rights of everyone else.

The class struggle today is between the educated elite and the undereducated masses, writes David Brooks, channeling Karl Marx.

(The educated) congregate in exclusive communities walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools. They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony.

. . . it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed.

. . . the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down.

Read the whole thing.

Outsourcing Teaching to India is a great idea, writes James Miller, a Smith econ professor, on TCS.

Like most teachers, I find grading to be the least interesting aspect of my job. I would gladly teach extra classes if I could in return be freed from the drudgery of grading. My employer, Smith College, should hire a few score smart Indians to grade for their faculty and in return Smith should expect its professors to spend more time in the classroom.
 
High schools should similarly outsource their grading to Indians. Because U.S. teachers find grading so mind-numbingly boring, outsourcing grading would make teaching a far more attractive profession, thereby allowing high schools to recruit better teachers without necessarily having to increase salaries.

Indians already are working as offshore tutors. Miller suggests they could teach online high school and college classes to motivated students. Because wages are so much lower in India, class size could be quite low.

Et Tu Bloge likes the idea too.

Teacher Darren of Right on the Left Coast went to the union-sponsored anti-Schwarzenegger rally, and discovered unwanted bedfellows.

Teachers, firefighters, nurses — all of us should be embarrassed, upset, and concerned by the participants in Wednesday’s rally. I’m not talking about the teachers, nurses, and firefighters themselves, who were for the most part very well-behaved, but rather the “outsiders” who were allowed in as part of the rally — the Stalinists, the socialists, and various assorted other lefties. What was billed as a rally to protest specific policies of Governor Schwarzenegger turned out to be an anti-American, anti-capitalist, far-left-wing gathering.

And union dues, my union dues, helped foot the bill for it.

Darren carried a sign attacking the California Teachers Association; the other side said, “I’m a teacher and I vote Republican.” He heard some nasty comments, and one sexual proposal not to his liking. Scroll down for his photos.