The reality of college admissions — you need a hard-luck story — was displayed by “The Scholar,” in which 10 top students competed for a $250,000 scholarship, writes Naomi Schaefer Riley in Opinion Journal.

Melissa had to cut short her gymnastics career at the age of 13 because of scoliosis. Jeremy’s parents came from Vietnam and spent seven days on a boat with only a cup of water between them. Gerald experiences “occasional brushes with overt racism.”

There is no reason to belittle such hardship tales, but they have little to do with the students’ actual accomplishments. As “The Scholar” shows, the college-admissions process has become a kind of victim pageant.

The students on the show are portrayed as financial victims, too–as if, according to that ominous announcer’s voice, the “price of admission is threatening the American dream.” This claim is the show’s one glaring inaccuracy. Show me a black girl with a single mother, early admission to Harvard, near perfect SATs and a 4.0 GPA with AP classes in her schedule and I’ll show you a girl on a full scholarship.

Average students are the ones who can get into college but have to take heavy loans to pay for it.

Campgrounds are going wireless, reports the Baltimore Sun, so kids don’t have to rough it without their PlayStations.

Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Camp Resort, a private campground in Williamsport that has already gone wireless, is looking for ways to use that access to let kids use more game systems in cabins, said resort owner Ron Vitkun.

Michael Lee, a spokesman for the Outdoor Industry Foundation, said his group is exploring ways to use technology to hook kids on camping. One example is geocaching, a kind of high-tech treasure hunting that uses handheld global positioning system devices.

“Kids who are used to interfacing with a screen can be doing that in the woods,” he said.

Camping and backpacking are declining in popularity, perhaps a function of the aging of the baby boomers.

Rarely does the chance come to avenge oneself on a large corporation’s incompetent customer service department. The power of vengeance is now in my hands. Too bad I’m a wimp.

You may remember that five weeks ago, I told my online bill pay service to send $11,000 to pay off my Capitol One credit card bill of $1,100. As soon I realized my mistake, I called and begged for a speedy refund.

The first Cap One person I talked to said it would take 15 days to begin the 10-day process of refunding the overpayment. After deducting for recent credit-card charges, it would be $9,112.07.

The second said they’d wire the money in 48 hours to my bank, Wells Fargo. That would have been great, if they’d actually done it.

The third person said they’d mailed the money; a Wells Fargo guy said Cap One had used the wrong address. That check was lost. The Cap One guy agreed, under pressure, to send a refund check by express mail to the correct Wells Fargo address and to knock off the $75 “balance transfer” fee charged me for . . . Well, for keeping my money.

Wells Fargo never got the check. The fourth person said it hadn’t been sent because the Wells address was a post office box and UPS wouldn’t deliver express mail to a post office box. Instead of sending the check by regular mail, Cap One had done nothing. Which was OK, because they still were using the wrong address. The woman said she couldn’t mail a check to me, but eventually put me on hold for a very long time, came back and said she could mail it to me. But she couldn’t waive the $75, which was still on the bill. I asked her what service they’d performed for $75. She said “balance transfer.” I pointed out nothing had been transferred. She didn’t get my point.

The fifth person was supposed to be her supervisor but had never heard of her. He spoke with such a heavy (unidentifiable) accent I couldn’t understand him most of the time. I did get the fax number and address of Capital One from him, which enabled me to send a complaint letter.

I never heard back from Cap One. But this morning, I got an express letter with my $9,112.07 refund; the check was dated July 20. Then the regular mail came with another check, dated July 15, for $9,112.07. I checked my account on the web and discovered both checks listed, plus a refund of the $75. Here was the perfect opportunity for revenge. I could deposit both checks, then make Capital One wait five weeks to get its money back. Or I could wait till they noticed the double payment, which, given their level of incompetence, might be never.

Every now and then you hear about someone who gets in trouble for withdrawing money erroneously deposited into a checking account. I don’t have the guts to deposit both checks. I’m holding the second check, just in case the first one doesn’t clear. Once it does, I’ll have to decide whether to inform Cap One that they’re even stupider than I thought or just let them wonder why the books never balance.

In the New York Times, Julie Salamon writes about her love for Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd books, international bestsellers in the 1940s — the third won a Pulitzer Prize — that are now largely forgotten and out of print, except in on-demand editions.

My mother first read the series in the early 1950′s, about the time it was completed. She found Lanny Budd by accident. She was a recent immigrant, and went to the library hoping to find another book by Sinclair Lewis, whose writing she had enjoyed in Hungarian translation back in Europe. Perhaps flummoxed by her accent, the librarian sent her home with “Dragon’s Teeth” by Upton Sinclair.

That case of mistaken literary identity evolved into a literary infatuation. Sinclair’s Lanny Budd – worldly, dashing, but possessed of a social conscience – meshed perfectly with my mother’s own romantic, political and historic yearnings. She has always been a persistent optimist, despite her own grim World War II experiences as a European Jew and concentration-camp survivor. Lanny was a bon vivant who had the means to avoid engagement with the world’s misery, but instead became a behind-the-scenes player, often at great risk but always escaping to face the next chapter’s conundrum.

My mother had the first nine books in the series, a gift from a friend of her father who was a Budd fan. Like Salamon, I read them all in my early teens, then went to the library for the final volumes. I liked Lanny best as a boy growing up on the Riviera, illegitimate son of an American arms dealer and his beautiful mistress. It had little in common with my upbringing. As he grows up, Lanny experiences virtually every significant event in the mid-20th century, becoming an agent for FDR. The books declined steadily in quality — Lanny grows into a well-meaning bore in the final postwar book — but I couldn’t stop reading.

There’s a blog called the Lanny Budd Project.

After three years of litigation, a New York City teacher and counselor convicted of possessing cocaine can be fired from his job adminstering an anti-drug program.

The state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division decided today that returning Michael Campbell to his job running Intermediate School 72′s “Safe Cities-Safe Streets” program would “defy common sense.”

Campbell, a dean and teacher at I.S. 72, was arrested on felony drug charges in Brooklyn in 2002. The court said he had a bag of marijuana on him and was in a car with 10 bags of cocaine.

Campbell entered a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to attempted criminal possession of a controlled substance in the fourth degree and went to a court program for drug counseling.

The teachers’ union backed Campbell’s suit to get his job back, and won the early rounds.

Ten bags of cocaine is a lot, isn’t it?

The Gates Foundation is spending $1 billion to convert large high schools into small schools that are supposed to improve teacher-student relationships, thereby improving achievement and graduation rates. Seattle Weekly looks at the Gates-funded conversion of a high school near Seattle with 1,800 students, one third of whom don’t graduate. With $833,000 in Gates’ money, the old school was carved into five new schools. Success isn’t guaranteed, the Weekly story points out.

Student test results in “conversion” schools (large high schools divided into smaller schools) have yet to show dramatic changes, graduation rates remain flat, teachers are split about the effectiveness of the changes, and students are generally lukewarm.

Mountlake Terrace teachers had voted overwhelmingly for conversion but the effort of creating new schools was exhausting. Students could choose:

Achievement, Opportunity and Service (AOS), a “traditional high school experience in a small school setting”; Discovery, where students “design your own projects instead of taking tests”; Innovation, “aimed at creative thinkers: writers, artists, inventors”; Renaissance, a bridge to four-year colleges with the bulk of Mountlake’s advanced placement classes; and Terrace Arts and Academic School (TAAS), a 2-D and 3-D arts-oriented program.

Soon Discovery became the “ghetto school,” while AOS was the preppy, white school. Staff members complained that competing for students was divisive. The workload was high; one quarter of the teachers quit after the first year. Tom Vander Ark, who runs the Gates Foundation, concedes the results have been disappointing.

Vander Ark readily admits the foundation is on a steep learning curve. “Many of the schools are spending two years figuring out what to do, and another two years making structural changes. They never get to the heart of the matter, which is improving teaching and learning.” The experiences at Mountlake Terrace and other struggling large schools are changing the foundation’s approach. “It is harder and more expensive than our first grants provided. In our early grant making, small became the goal. To the extent it became the main focus, that wasn’t productive. It’s probably more important to improve the curriculum, the school culture, the relationships in the school. That’s my mistake. I should have formed programs with the initial focus on teaching and learning, and ended with structure.”

This is a very well-written story on — thanks to Gates — a very hot topic in education.

At Kitchen Table Math, Catherine Johnson highly recommends Fred Frankel’s book, Good Friends Are Hard to Find: Help Your Child Find, Make and Keep Friends. Children can learn to interact with others — including how to stop a bully.

Johnson’s second-grade son was being bullied at school. She learned bullies tend to pick on kids with two characteristics:

1. they cry easily, giving the bully bang for the buck
2. they are compliant to other children

Both of these things were true of Christopher.

. . . Our neighbor . . . taught Christopher “how to fight,” which in Christopher’s case meant how to defend himself in a very loud voice accompanied by an equally loud glare & the all-important step forward.

There was also a whole dramatic Second Act Christopher was supposed to launch into if the bully dared to mouth off after he’d been Warned. It was basically Robert DeNiro for the 2nd grade. Christopher spent the afternoon running through the whole thing with the neighbor and his son, and then we rehearsed him at home.

It worked.

She shared the technique with the mother of Christopher’s friend.

When other kids bullied him he ran.

Talk about bang for your buck. Number one, motion triggers everyone’s ‘prey chase drive;’ and number two, chasing a running target is fun whether you’re planning to kill and eat your prey when you catch him or not.

I told his mother: Tell him not to run.

I also told her that not only should he not run, he should make direct eye contact with the lead bully, and take a step forward.

His message: There are 5 of you and 1 of me, so you can stuff me in a garbage can if you want to.

But I’m not the only one coming out of this with bruises.

The bully backed off.

Education Gadfly is amused to see various groups claim credit for the rise in NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reading and math scores for elementary students. Gadfly notes a strange analysis in a New York Times editorial, which stressed there’s been little progress at the middle and high school level.

But the strangest interpretation of the NAEP long-term trend results must come from the Grey Lady herself, the New York Times, whose editorial page theorized that “the constant flow of data that shows poor and diminished performance in middle schools and high schools” is caused by school systems “placing their most well-trained and experienced teachers in the early grades, a strategy that means the teachers become less and less qualified over all as the students move up the grades.” Not even a shred of proof is adduced, but hey, when you’re the Times, who needs evidence?

The Times editorial board must not have anyone who knows much about education. This is an obvious error. Secondary and elementary teachers aren’t switched back and forth at will. Secondary teachers are credentialed to teach a particular subject; elementary teachers earn an all-subject credential.

There are more would-be kindergarten teachers than high school physics teachers out there, so the elementary ranks are more likely to be credentialed, which is what the Times means by “qualified.” The real problem is that public schools don’t pay a premium for teachers with skills that are in high demand, and rarely compensate teachers for taking difficult assignments or for teaching well. We don’t get what we don’t pay for.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, an English professor mourns the loss of browsable stacks in favor of newly digitized libraries without books.

What does it mean when the University of Texas at Austin removes nearly all of the books from its undergraduate library to make room for coffee bars, computer terminals, and lounge chairs? . . .

Many entering students come from nearly book-free homes. Many have not read a single book all the way through; they are instead trained to surf and skim. Teachers increasingly find it difficult to get students to consult printed materials, and yet we are making those materials even harder to obtain. Online journal articles are suitable for searching and extraction, but how conducive is a computer for reading a novel?

I also suspect that retrieval of books in the context of food service and roving helpers inculcates in students a disturbing combination of passivity and entitlement, as if they are diners in a fancy restaurant rather than students doing their homework. The “learning commons” seems consistent with the consumerist model of education that we all recognize: “I deserve an ‘A’ because I’m paying a lot of money to come here (even if I spend all my time playing video games and hanging out at the new campus fitness center).”

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Birth rates for girls age 15 to 17 dropped to a record low of 22 per 1,000 in 2003, according to a federal study. In 1991, teen birth rates peaked at 39 per 1,000. The birth rate is 12 per 1,000 for white girls, 39 for blacks and 50 for Hispanics. Child mortality also declined; the child vaccination rate is up. However, child poverty rate increased; there was no change in alcohol use.