The Talent Development model, which focuses on ninth grade success, is making a difference in seven Philadelphia schools with low-income, minority students, a research study concludes.

The school improvement model clusters 9th graders into a separate “Success Academy,” usually located on its own floor or wing. Within the academy, students take classes in small learning communities of up to 125 students that share the same teachers.

Students also take extended, 80- to 90-minute block classes and double doses of courses in mathematics and language arts and reading. Students spend their remaining high school years in small career academies, where they take courses integrating academic content with their career interests.

. . . The researchers found that the percentage of 9th graders passing algebra increased from an average of 33.1 percent to 61 percent in the Talent Development schools. In comparison, that number grew from 45.2 percent to 48.7 percent in the other district schools.

Likewise, 9th grade attendance rates rose 4.6 percentage points in the Talent Development schools, but declined by half a percentage point in the non-Talent Development schools.

TD students average 40 absent days a year versus 49 days off for non-TD students. Philadelphia’s school year runs 188 days, so these kids are missing 21 to 26 percent of instructional time.

From the San Jose Mercury News, here’s a profile of a principal who’s turning around a middle school located at the borders of gang territory: Surenos on one side, Nortenos and Cambodian gangs on the other side.

(Glenn) Vander Zee knows his so-called “Mathson Family” must be about more than just its teachers, who lobbied to work an extra 50 minutes a day to focus on student needs; or its after-school and weekend programs, helping kids get a leg up in math or writing; or self-empowerment strategies, like students planting trees or designing their own cultural festivals. It needs student buy-in big time. For while it may be subtle, this truly is a battle for hearts and minds.

I was at the campus not long ago visiting a KIPP school located in one wing of the building. The footbridge where a student was stabbed is quite lovely; opposite the school is a park.

Lincoln Middle School near San Diego has eliminated separate classes for gifted students in response to complaints by parents who charged the set-up segregated white and Hispanic students. School officials hope mixed classes will raise test scores. “Many parents of Latino students and English-learners said they supported the change because their children would be forced to excel,” reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. In other words, they think mainstream classes set lower expectations and watered down the curriculum.

Lincoln’s white students, who make up 35 percent of enrollment, score 785 on the state’s Academic Performance Index; Hispanic students, who make up 57 percent, average 577, a huge achievement gap.

The school is classified as needing improvement under NCLB; students can transfer to other schools. Of 1,334 students, 192 have asked to transfer. Not counting students who are leaving for high school, that’s more than 20 percent of enrollment. School officials won’t say how many were among 231 GATE students, but it’s a fair guess that test scores will be way down next year.

It’s getting chilly in hell: The New York Times has a front-page story crediting “President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law” with focusing efforts on raising achievement of poor and minority students.

Spurred by President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, educators across the nation are putting extraordinary effort into improving the achievement of minority students, who lag so sharply that by 12th grade, the average black or Hispanic student can read and do arithmetic only as well as the average eighth-grade white student.

Here in Boston, low-achieving students, most of them blacks and Hispanics, are seeing tutors during lunch hours for help with math. In a Sacramento junior high, low-achieving students are barred from orchestra and chorus to free up time for remedial English and math. And in Minnesota, where American Indian students, on average, score lower than whites on standardized tests, educators rearranged schedules so that Chippewa teenagers who once sewed beads onto native costumes during school now work on grammar and algebra.

Another story reports, somewhat belatedly, New York City charter eighth graders are considerably more likely to be reading and writing at grade level than comparable public school students. Charter fourth graders have a slight edge.

Eduwonk suggests stocking up on canned goods and firearms to prepare for the apocalypse. If you’re on a budget, remember that repenting of your sins is a low-cost option.

Update: Betsy describes just what changed when North Carolina linked teacher bonuses to student achievement gains in reading and math. All teachers get a bonus if their school’s students improve by a certain amount. Before: Teachers discussed ideas for improvement but little was implemented. After the law passed, things changed.

I was teaching in a magnet school where middle school students could take three electives a quarter. We had talked for years about requiring kids with low reading and writing skills to take targeted electives. Now, finally, this was put into place. The principal moved some money around to hire a couple of teachers whose sole job was to work with those students. We tried new computer-teaching programs that targeted specific weaknesses in reading. We began new math electives to reteach basic skills. An afterschool tutoring program and even some Saturday classes began.

And, guess what, our school, which had a mix of academically gifted students and neighborhood kids who had low skills, started to see some nice improvement in the basic reading and math skills of those lower-achieving students.

Accountability works.

California schools couldn’t buy textbooks longer than 200 pages under a bill that passed the Assembly yesterday.

Its sponsor, LA Democrat Jackie Goldberg, wants short textbooks with lists of web sites where students can get more information. Publishers warn schools will have to buy several books to cover the same material that’s now in a single book.

Does this really have to be decided by state legislators?

According to Yale study, pre-schoolers are more likely to be “expelled” than older children. You might think that shows some little kids aren’t ready for a group environment. But no. It’s Bush’s fault! Well, it’s the rising academic standards pushed by No Child Left Behind, suggests a New York Times story.

On Gadfly, Chester Finn defends teaching cognitive skills to pre-schoolers. In fact, he suggests emulating France. Middle-class children typically start kindergarten knowing their colors and the difference between “big” and little” and “mine and “yours,” he writes. Children who haven’t learned these things at home need to learn them at pre-school.

. . . lots of other countries (e.g., France) have had structured, cognitive pre-school programs for decades. . . And such programs have done much to reduce their achievement gaps.

The United States is sorely overdue for such a focus in all its pre-school programs. But that doesn’t mean you should picture tiny tots sitting in big school desks with dictionaries in front of them. Anyone who has witnessed a well put together pre-school knows that cognitive skills can usually be imparted with very little pain via activities that are also fun—not to mention nurturing.

I’ve been impressed by the results of the Abcedarian experiment, which greatly improved the school and life success of low-income, black children placed in an educational child care center that stressed developing language skills.

Democrats need to be honest and serious about education policy writes Robert Gordon, a former Kerry education adviser, in The New Republic. Simply calling for more spending and carping at No Child Left Behind is bad politics and bad policy, he argues. This is an excellent and important article, and it seems to be readable without a subscription.

To get the politics right, progressives need to act on a policy principle that Americans understand: Money ain’t everything. The United States has tripled education funding per student since the 1960s, and we now outspend all but a few countries. But our students’ reading and math scores have edged up only modestly, and our achievement remains in the middle of the developed world. Yes, money matters; the shortfall in NCLB funding has hurt the law’s own cause. Democrats deserve credit for supporting more spending on schools. But they squander that credit when they make money their only focus. 

In emphasizing resources, Democrats evade questions of culture and institutions. Those matter, too. It matters whether we set high expectations for schools and teachers or accept mediocrity, and whether we impose consequences for failure or excuse it.

“Progressives are misled by the logic of their own Bush-hatred: Bush is for NCLB, so NCLB must be bad.” Accountability didn’t start as a Republican issue, writes Gordon, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. It shouldn’t be conceded to the GOP by a party that claims to speak for the poor.  

At a time when Americans are unsure what Democrats stand for, Democrats should give some resounding answers: The achievement gap is a national disgrace, and equal opportunity is a national command. Democrats will require greater support for schools, and greater demands on them, than ever before. They will use federal power to pursue equal justice–even at the expense of states’ rights, even in the face of their own constituencies. Democrats will put children first. 

Many Democrats are cheering state lawsuits against NCLB. Gordon points out this belated support for states’ rights simply makes Democrats look unprincipled.

Before NCLB, most states didn’t even track the performance of poor students. Thanks to NCLB, many schools are now offering those students help they desperately need. If the NEA’s suit prevails in court, it won’t even yield more money; it will just yield precedents limiting federal power and enable states to ignore the law’s demands. That would be sad: One of the NEA’s plaintiffs told The New York Times that NCLB had forced her district to offer longer school days and Saturday classes for low-achieving students. Progressives should celebrate that fact, not complain about it.

. . . Schools that fall short under NCLB may indeed be required to offer tutoring after school, or to help students transfer to other public schools, or to reopen as charter schools. These steps may look punitive to many adults inside the schools. For children who aren’t learning, however, these measures offer hope for a better education.

Gordon thinks Democrats can recapture the education issue by focusing on improving teacher quality. But that means paying more for some teachers than others based on their abilities and willingness to tackle difficult assignments. Why “offer $80,000 salaries to middle-aged and mediocre gym teachers while losing bright young chemistry teachers who make only $40,000?” Democrats resist market principles when it comes to education.

Read the whole thing. Gordon is right on. But I wonder if the Democratic leaders are capable of leading on this issue.

This Eduwonk post points to the vehement union hostility to paying some teachers more than others. The Sacramento Bee reports on reaction to the (Republican) governor’s plan to pay teachers more to teach in low-performing schools.

“Does he think teachers are whores – that you have to pay them more to do this?” asked Steve Blazak, a spokesman for United Teachers Los Angeles.

Maybe Schwarzenegger thinks teachers are normal human beings.

From Volokh: Buying a college essay isn’t cheating, says the seller, because “It’s our job to help you in your studies.”

India has well-educated math, engineering and science graduates. U.S. companies want low-cost tutors, especially with all the federal money now available to help students in low-achieving schools. Students are more accustomed to working online.

NEW DELHI AND CHICAGO — Somit Basak’s tutoring style is hardly unusual. The engineering graduate spices up lessons with games, offers rewards for excellent performance, and tries to keep his students’ interest by linking the math formulas they struggle with to real-life examples they can relate to.

Unlike most tutors, however, Mr. Basak lives thousands of miles away from his students — he is a New Delhi resident who goes to work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with American students doing their homework around dinnertime.

Indian tutors get their students’ textbooks and lessons in U.S. teaching styles and American accents.

“I find that we tutors also need to shower a lot of praise for the students’ good work,” (Basak) says, “which is very uncommon in India.”

Teachers’ union officials say there’s no quality control for offshore tutors. As a volunteer tutor, let me add there’s no quality control for face-to-face, American-to-American tutors either.

Tutoring online or by phone is not going to work for everyone, especially for younger students. However, the cost is less than half for Indian tutors, and their math and science knowledge is first-rate. They’ll be a factor.

Dogs go beyond obedience at a canine academy in Monterey. The Onion reports:

Dogs who attend the Kylee Alternative Training Institute are exposed to a “creative canine learning environment where less emphasis is placed on obedience,” director Morgan Kylee said Monday. “We believe in helping our students to discover their own potential, rather than forcing them to conform to the traditional idea of what a dog should be,” Kylee said.

Dogs are encouraged to find their own parameters for carpet messing and barking. School motto: “If it feels good, chew it.”

Parody? Well, it’s from The Onion. Think about it.