School uniforms — a policy originally pushed by parents — reduced gang violence in Ed Wonk’s school. He notes that Turlock plans to expand its clothing restrictions to elementary schools because of gang concerns.

At Seattle’s Garfield High School, 44 out of 406 seniors graduated as valedictorians; all had straight A averages. Bullard High in Fresno had 58 valedictorians this year.

All eighth graders at a middle school near San Diego marched in graduation ceremonies even though one fourth of San Ysidro Middle School’s class didn’t meet graduation requirements, reports the San Diego Union-Trib. After all, they’re all being sent on to high school anyhow. The high school principal says 70 percent of incoming ninth graders are working below grade level.

(San Ysidro Middle counselor Rosemarie)Ponce said she’s heard administrators say that all students should be able to walk in today’s ceremony because it might be the only graduation ceremony they’ll ever have. Such low expectations won’t help them earn a diploma four years from now, she said.

“We’ll never know what they can do unless we raise the bar,” Ponce said.

The principal — the fourth in five years — says the “problem is that low expectations are being communicated daily in classrooms.” There’s little effective help for students who fall behind, and no consequences: Not a single student at the school is being held back.

Most local districts promote nearly every eighth grader; some high schools now have special programs for ninth graders who are working far below grade level.

There’s not much mathematics in the new math, writes Diane Ravitch in the Opinion Journal. First came “innocent dumbing down.”

In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 “contemporary mathematics” textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter “F” included factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions and functions. In the 1998 book, the index listed families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study, feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises and fund-raising carnival.

Now “critical theorists” are politicizing math instruction.

One of its precepts is “ethnomathematics,” that is, the belief that different cultures have evolved different ways of using mathematics, and that students will learn best if taught in the ways that relate to their ancestral culture. From this perspective, traditional mathematics — the mathematics taught in universities around the world — is the property of Western civilization and is inexorably linked with the values of the oppressors and conquerors. The culturally attuned teacher will learn about the counting system of the ancient Mayans, ancient Africans, Papua New Guineans and other “nonmainstream” cultures.

. . . A new textbook, “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers,” shows how problem solving, ethnomathematics and political action can be merged. Among its topics are: “Sweatshop Accounting,” with units on poverty, globalization and the unequal distribution of wealth. Another topic, drawn directly from ethnomathematics, is “Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood.” Others include “The Transnational Capital Auction,” “Multicultural Math,” and “Home Buying While Brown or Black.” Units of study include racial profiling, the war in Iraq, corporate control of the media and environmental racism. The theory behind the book is that “teaching math in a neutral manner is not possible.” Teachers are supposed to vary the teaching of mathematics in relation to their students’ race, sex, ethnicity and community.

That’s not how math is taught in Singapore, Korea or other countries whose students outscore ours in international math tests, Ravitch points out. “They teach them instead that mathematics is a universal language that is as relevant and meaningful in Tokyo as it is in Paris, Nairobi and Chicago.”

Update: Darren, who still teaches about Train A and Train B traveling toward each other at different speeds, doesn’t think it matters which ethnic group’s members first thought up the Pythagorean theorem. Read the comments too.

Update II: That 1998 “contemporary mathematics” textbook has two indexes, according to someone who emailed Kevin Drum’s Political Animal site. The Evers-Clopton list comes from “contexts” not “mathematical topics,” which lists: “Faces, Face-views (3-D drawing), Finding equations (using points, using regression, using situation, using slope and intercept), Five-number summary, Formula (area, perimeter, surface area), Four-color problem, Fractal, Fractional exponents, Frequency table, Front view (3-D drawing), and Function.”

Robot nursery school teachers? Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends reports on an experiment at a UC-San Diego child care center, where “two robots are attending nursery school to teach songs, colors and shapes to one- and two-year old children.”

QRIO (for “Quest for Curiosity”) from Sony, and RUBI (for “Robot Using Bayesian Inference”), developed at the Machine Perception Laboratory of UCSD, are there to study the uses of interactive computers for early childhood education. “RUBI is a three foot tall, pleasantly plump robot with a head and two arms. It stands on four non-motorized rubber wheels for moving it easily from place to place.” Preliminary results show that the children like the robots, and even hug them — until they’re bored.

Check out the photos. According to a UCSD press release:

Tickling RUBI’s sensitive TV belly so she giggles produces laughs from the people too. And, each time QRIO lays down on the floor at the end of a session for system shutdown, it draws a small crowd and a queue forms to cover him with a blanket and wish him “night-night.”

Nursery school teachers see the robots as aides, not competition.

“Baby blues” aren’t just for mothers: Fathers can suffer post-natal depression, a British study concludes. It’s estimated 13 percent of mothers and 3 perent of fathers are depressed, with symptoms ranging from mild to severe, after the birth of a child.

Philadelphia schools will require all students to pass a yearlong African-American and African history class in order to graduate. In theory, studying “their” history will lead black students, who make up 65 percent of enrollment, to feel pride and will boost achievement and reduce violence in schools.

Amritas begs to differ. Well, actually, he’s not begging. He questions the credentials of the African history course designer and his use of linguistics, as well as the idea that 21st century people should feel proud of what people who looked sort of like them did centuries ago, maybe.

Sacramento Bee columnist Peter Schrag slams a small group of professors and students who threatened to boycott the Hayward State (now East Bay State) commence because essayist Richard Rodriguez had been invited to receive an honorary degree and speak.

Rodriguez, according to the declarations of the protesters, opposes bilingual education and affirmative action (as do most California voters), which makes him unfit for such an occasion.

The charge is a caricature of the elegant, nuanced and altogether fresh writing he has produced on the complex relations among race, ethnicity, class and culture in the United States. The threatened boycott was not just a confession of educational failure but another cheer for segregation.

Rodriguez bowed out to avoid disrupting the ceremony. “I didn’t want to make myself the point of the day. The real point of the day is the graduating class, (which) deserved a sunny and happy event, without the Chicanistas turning the day into a witch-burning.”

As Schrag writes, Rodriguez doesn’t fit neatly into any political camp. He’s too sophisticated a thinker for that. Schrag observes that the critics, mostly bilingual education professors and students, planned, before Rodriguez’s withdrawal, “to have their own ceremony in which participants were encouraged to wear serapes and other ethnic garb, as if the whole purpose of their education had been the preservation of various indigenous cultures, not unfettered learning in an 800-year-old Western academic tradition.”

The essence of that tradition is tolerance and openness – the willingness to listen to and consider new ideas and to honor their expression, even in disagreement. By whatever name, Hayward State owes that heritage to Paris, Oxford and Bologna, not to the closed systems from which heretics are banished or, worse, burned.

Rodriguez is the author of Hunger of Memory, in which he credits his educational success to the nuns who persuaded his parents to encourage him to speak English, Brown and Days of Obligation.

It’s time to get honest (pdf) about graduation rates, says an Education Trust report.

Number fudging is blatant, writes the Washington Post.

Earlier this year, North Carolina trumpeted a spectacular high school graduation rate of 97 percent at a time when 1 in 3 students in the state, and nearly 1 in 2 African Americans, routinely fails to receive a high school diploma.

. . . If some of the claims sound too good to be true, it is because they are based on “extremely unreliable” data and “ludicrous definitions” of high school dropout rates that vary widely from state to state, according to a report released yesterday by the Education Trust, an education think tank.

North Carolina’s real graduation rate is 64 percent, Education Trust estimates.

Many states also set “laugably low” progress targets, Education Trust says. Boosting graduation rates by one tenth of one percent is enough to meet No Child Left Behind’s requirements in most states.

In an Educational Testing Service poll, Americans gave high schools a C grade. Only 9 percent of those polled think high school students are challenged academically by their courses.

The “weekend marriage” leads “harried marrieds” to divorce, believes couples therapist Mira Kirshenbaum.

Parents exacerbate those time deficits, she finds, by making too many unnecessary sacrifices for their children, whose lives are often overscheduled. She urges adults to consider their own well-being, too.

Marty Friedman, author of a book for men about staying married, recommends that “couples should agree not to talk about the children when they go out, or to keep it to 10 minutes for the evening.”