Wealthy parents pay SAT tutors as much as $685 an hour, reports Bloomberg.

Inspirica’s only “master” tutor, Donald Viscardi, costs $525 an hour. Advantage Testing Inc. in New York charges $685 for its best tutors. And a top tutor with the Princeton Review can cost as much as $300 an hour.

That doesn’t include the cost of flying the tutor to one’s private yacht in Greece or the vacation home in the Virgin Islands, Monaco or Paris.

Students who can’t afford a tutor usually buy preparation guides such as the “The Official SAT Study Guide: For the New SAT” for $14.

My daughter, who had higher SAT scores than any of the hyper-tutored kids quoted in the story, worked as an SAT tutor for a summer. I think she made $18 an hour. Not the premium service, I guess. The “A” students worked the hardest and went from very good to excellent; the slackers didn’t improve very much.

Bush was right about school reform and the educrats were wrong again, writes Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Look at any reform that has boosted student performance — phonics, direct instruction, English immersion — and the chances are, the educrats were against it.

When parents revolted against whole language — which teaches children to read language as a whole, without teaching them to decode words — the educrats argued against a return to phonics, which they dismissed as “drill and kill.” When reformers pushed for tests that could show which curricula worked best, educrats denounced testing. If children steeped in phonics scored well on reading tests, they were not impressed; it is because the children were brainwashed, not literate. And if whole-language learners scored poorly, well, it was because they were so creative.

When Bush and company demanded accountability, they complained that standards would hurt poor children — as if undereducating poor and minority students didn’t hurt poor and minority kids.

“Educrats are scrambling to make sure that no credit goes to President Bush or his No Child Left Behind program,” Saunders writes. Standards and accountability started in the states — including Bush’s Texas — before being enshrined in federal law.

A long-time Milwaukee teacher and administrator thinks the schools have gotten worse since he started his career. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel quotes Willie Jude:

–”Did my parents give me basic tools (for succeeding in school)? No, because they didn’t have them themselves. But what they did have was respect, discipline and courtesy.”

– Show up and show up on time. Both in his years in the MPS central office and in its high schools, Jude made a priority of fighting truancy and – something he considered just as serious – tardiness. He says parents and MPS don’t do enough in dealing with these.

“There are two major things that businesses are complaining about (related to the high school graduates). Tardiness and attendance. They go together into attitude and relationships. (Business executives say) if a kid comes in here punctually and they have a pleasant attitude, we can train them. But I can’t train them if they’re not on time or they’re arguing with every supervisor and co-worker they come into contact with. . . .

“Once a student is punctual and in school, a lot of other problems begin to disappear.” Jude said MPS policy since the late 1980s has barred principals from taking strong stands against tardiness.

As Eduwonk says, it’s a must read.

Colleges are luring older students with “extras like on-campus child care, evening office hours, and commuter lounges,” writes the Boston Globe.

Broadly defined as financially independent, working adults, nontraditional students age 25 and up now make up 38 percent of postsecondary enrollment, compared with 28 percent in 1970, according to US Department of Education estimates. On many campuses, they have become the majority. Only about a quarter of the nation’s 14.9 million undergraduates fit the ”traditional” mold of enrolling right out of high school, attending full time, and relying on their parents’ purse strings.

Many people drop in and out of college for years in pursuit of a degree.

On the National Education Association site, Dave Arnold tells parents to leave education to the professionals.

There’s nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Certain jobs are best left to the pros, such as, formal education.

. . . why would some parents assume they know enough about every academic subject to home-school their children? You would think that they might leave this — the shaping of their children’s minds, careers, and futures — to trained professionals. That is, to those who have worked steadily at their profession for 10, 20, 30 years! Teachers!

Arnold, a member of the Illinois Education Association, is “head custodian at Brownstown Elementary School in Southern Illinois.”

Parents, don’t try to clean up your own home. Leave it to the professionals!

Update: Natalie posts a sarcastic letter to Arnold and his clueless response. Dominick Cancilla writes:

You’re completely spot on about religion in schools, too. Parents should be fighting to get their schools more in line with proper religious beliefs instead of denying their child a real education. And you’re also right about the stupidity of retreating from a fight. Who ever won a battle by boycotting? Gandhi? Now there’s a man who didn’t spend enough time on the school yard!

Missing the sarcasm, Arnold replies with thanks for the “fantastic comments and compliments.”

I’m acquainted with a couple that have adopted two very cute and fairly inelleligent little boys, but they are turning them into social misfits by not allowing them to attend public school. The only friends they have are home schooled as well and social misfits also. They spend the great majority of their lives within the confines of their own home being home schooled so their lives won’t be corrupted by the evils of this world. Perhaps their lives won’t be corrupted, but it is primarily because these poor children aren’t being allowed to have a life.

When I was letters editor of the San Jose Mercury News, I learned that many readers will miss the most blatant sarcasm. A San Jose cop risked his life to save people taken hostage in a doughnut shop; a letter writer wrote that it just proves cops are lazy slobs who will do anything for a doughnut. I thought it was crystal clear that the letter writer was knocking people for knocking the police, but numerous readers wrote in to ask, “Is he joking?” They didn’t stop to think the answer was “yes.” I declared a sarcasm ban in the letters section.

“Dramatic” progress in narrowing racial learning gaps on the National Assessment of Educational Progress received only tepid applause, a USA Today editorial observes.

Long-standing achievement gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students fell to the lowest levels ever. Plus, the gains didn’t come as a result of white students falling behind. Everybody won.

The news was nearly as good for 13-year-olds. Black and Latino students showed big gains in math.

Loudly cheering were Democrats and Republicans who championed the No Child Left Behind law that set out with a mission of closing racial learning gaps. No cheers, however, came from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, which has filed suit to cripple No Child Left Behind.

Also silent was the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Earlier this month, the group issued a report essentially accusing the federal law of being racially discriminatory because its accountability net caught too many poor and minority school districts. Huh?

For years, poor and minority students have suffered from attending schools that have failed them. Holding those schools accountable is the law’s bedrock.

Via Russo, who also wonders why NPR thinks school reformers should give up on children in poverty.

Joe Williams’ Eduwonk drinking game is posted.

The rules are simple: Each time you hear one of these often-used words from the education world, take a swig of whatever makes you happy. If you have no beverage (as often happens when these words come up) feel free to giggle, as long as you promise to do it in a manner that is completely condescending to those around you!

Naturally, “rubric” tops the list with “paradigm” a close second.

17. Self-directed learning (Sounds too much like something that causes hair to grow on palms.)

Read ‘em all and construct your own meaning.

Kitchen Table Math is featured in Linda Seebach’s column in the Rocky Mountain News. Learn what a “bliki” is.

New Criterion links to a San Francisco Chronicle interview with Christopher Hitchens in which he answers the question, “What kind of world do you want your children to inherit?” Hitchens replies:

Struggle. I think most people want their friends or family to have a peaceful future. I don’t think that’s possible or desirable. Far too much work is done to make children feel their world is safe and reassuring. That’s a tremendous waste of time for teachers, who should be spending time teaching poetry, history and science. For Valentine’s Day at school, my youngest daughter, who is 12, sends a Valentine and gets one. When I was a kid, it was a day of extreme anxiety and tension, as it can only be and should be. One: Will you get a Valentine at all? Second, will you know who it is from? Because it would mean someone had or hadn’t made an effort, and yours had already been sent. These anxieties are important. They prepare you for life. She gets a Valentine from the entire class. They might as well e-mail one from the headmaster to everyone. It’s painless. Excitement-free. Risk-free.

By turning against the left-liberal consensus, Hitchens has ensured plenty of struggle in his own life.

The UN is giving Afghan children a board game called The Road to Peace to promote reconstruction.

The foldable cardboard game is illustrated with a swirling path from one corner labeled The Past — with tanks, explosions and a Taliban-style execution — to The Future, which shows cheery family scenes, factories and a sweeping blue river.

Along the way, up to six players take turns spinning a numbered wheel and moving improvised game pieces — a button, twig or coin will do — to corresponding numbers on the path representing events or trends in Afghanistan’s recent past.

A player who lands on a bad space, such as girls being denied education, must move the game piece backwards. “Landing on a positive scenario, such as the signing of the Bonn agreement in 2001 that established a political process and transitional government, lets a player advance toward the brighter future,” AP writes.