Bricks-and-mortar charter schools in California outperformed regular public schools and non-classroom-based charters for students studying at home, according to a new report by Edsource, a respected non-profit.

Among schools with data available, 64 percent of classroom-based charter schools met their performance targets in 2004, compared to 48 percent of noncharters, and 44 percent of nonclassroom-based charters.

Here’s a link to the full report on the “coming of age” of California charters, but you have to pay $8 to download it. I don’t think Edsource people quite get the Internet.

Students suffer from unwarranted self-confidence writes Marlene Zuk, a UC-Riverside biology professor. Her students don’t think their low test scores or inability to answer questions reflects ignorance. They don’t read the book or remember lectures; they can’t discuss the concepts. Yet they believe they deserve high grades. They feel good about their understanding.

On a practice test, a student tried to compare two lines on a graph representing different blackbird nesting habits.

The question asked where a point on one of the lines satisfied a particular condition, and only one answer was correct. The student for some reason had redrawn the lines, as if rewriting the birds’ reproductive history, with the two lines suddenly veering off into a fantasy of communal egg-laying. It was as if she had taken a graph of the exports of China and France and merged them into a new country with a single product.

Once again, I explained how to answer the question, and once again the student was pleased. The error was just a trivial difference of opinion. “Yeah, I get it,” she said. ” I was just thinking of it differently.” You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

No, I wanted to say, you weren’t thinking of it differently, you had it completely wrong; you didn’t understand it at all. But like her many compatriots, she was unlikely to acknowledge that, or admit to a mistake even when she created a version of reality never seen on a map, or in the actions of a blackbird.

. . . confident placidity in the face of error seems to be on the rise. Maybe it’s all that self-esteem this generation of students was inculcated with as youngsters, or maybe it’s the emphasis on respecting everyone else’s opinion, to the point where no answer, even a mathematical one, can be truly wrong because that might offend the one who gave it.

The self-esteem movement has a lot to answer for.

In the new Carnival Of Education, Ms. Frazzled, a student teacher, writes about being spotted at the supermarket — wearing a hoodie and low-slung jeans, braless and tattooed — by a third grader she’d taught and his well-dressed mother.

Meanwhile at Ginny’s school, the police had to be called to escort warring parents off campus. The fight was over unauthorized cupcakes brought to celebrate a teacher’s birthday, thereby violating the luau compromise. Really.

In Arizona, Mountain Ridge High School’s “X Rated” yearbook included “a table of contents that used ‘Hardcore Action’ to refer to sports pages and ‘Obsessions’ for school clubs.”

Students chose the “X” theme as a playful way to note the school’s 10th anniversary. Some parents told officials such racy language has no place in the school, while others have decided to support the yearbook, which was passed out about a week ago.

An expensive reprinting is in the works. And I have a feeling the yearbook will have a new faculty adviser next year.

College drop-outs are “one of the largest and fastest-growing groups of young adults in America,” says the New York Times’ series on social class. Once they’ve left college, most never go back to complete a degree.

Almost one in three Americans in their mid-20′s now fall into this group, up from one in five in the late 1960′s, when the Census Bureau began keeping such data. Most come from poor and working-class families.

Students from low-income and blue-collar families tend to go to colleges where graduation rates are low. Elite colleges with high graduation rates are more tilted toward affluent students. The five-year graduation rate is 41 percent for low-income students, 66 percent for high-income students, concludes a Department of Education study.

“You get there and you start to struggle,” said Leanna Blevins . . . who did get a bachelor’s degree and then went on to earn a Ph.D at Virginia studying the college experiences of poor students. “And at home your parents are trying to be supportive and say, ‘Well, if you’re not happy, if it’s not right for you, come back home. It’s O.K.’ And they think they’re doing the right thing. But they don’t know that maybe what the student needs is to hear them say, ‘Stick it out just one semester. You can do it. Just stay there. Come home on the weekend, but stick it out.’ “

Without a college degree, workers can achieve a middle-class lifestyle but fear they’re vulnerable to changes in the economy.

Science And Politics is hosting the Carnival of Education this week. Send submissions to: Coturnix1 AT aol DOT com by Tuesday at 5 Eastern time.

California school districts are dismissing students early on Wednesday, so teachers can board union-chartered buses to attend a rally in Sacramento to protest the governor’s spending plans and proposed special election. “We get out at 1:20 pm tomorrow, though we’ll make up the time on Thursday,” writes Robert Wright. “It’s probably legal, but it doesn’t feel right.”

Some schools close early on Wednesdays every week, so teachers will have planning time.

North Carolina football fans objected to a math question that asked seventh graders to calculate the average gain for a team on the game’s first six plays.

The team opened with a 6-yard loss, a 3-yard gain and a 2-yard loss, which would have made it fourth down with 15 yards to go for a first down. The team’s fourth play was just a 7-yard gain, yet it maintained possession for a 12-yard gain and a 4-yard gain on two additional plays.

. . . Mildred Bazemore, chief of the state Department of Public Instruction’s test development section, said the question makes sense mathematically and was reviewed thoroughly.

“It has nothing to do with football,” Bazemore said. “It has to do with the mathematical concepts that you’re studying.”

Just throw in a 15-yard penalty for stupidity and it all works out.

Via Best of the Web.

Does your job determine your baby’s gender? I find it hard to believe.

Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a “masculine” profession such as engineering or accountancy, a report said.

Equally, those keen for daughters are more likely to have success if they hold down “caring” jobs such as teaching or nursing, a British study has discovered.

According to a London School of Economics survey printed in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, engineers and other “systemisers” give birth to 140 boys per 100 girls, while nurses have 135 girls for every 100 boys.

(Satoshi) Kanazawa predicted that a physicist and a mathematician would be the most likely pairing to produce a boy, while a therapist and a chat show host would be odds-on favourites for a daughter.

One evolutionary biologist guesses that a fetus would encounter more testosterone in the womb of an engineer mother. So why would the father’s occupation matter?

Update: OK, here’s a link to the article. It doesn’t say that changing jobs will change the sex of your future children. The theory is that people with “systemiser” brains are more likely to have male children, while people with “empathizer” brains are more likely to have girls.

I thought this school yard blog post was funny, probably because I’m no longer the parent of a teen-ager.