Spelling bees are hot these days with several bee books, a Broadway show, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” and three movies, the documentary “Spellbound,” “Bee Season” and now “Akeelah and the Bee.” ABC will broadcast the finals of this year’s National Spelling Bee, which starts tomorrow, in primetime, notes USA Today. Indo-Americans and homeschool children have dominated the bee in recent years.

One of the favorites for this year’s competition is 12-year-old Samir Patel of Texas, who is both of Indian descent and home-schooled. He tied for second last year, a bump up from tying for third when he was only 9.

Another speller to keep an eye on is Katharine “Kerry” Close of New Jersey, a public school eighth-grader who achieved the rare feat of making it to the nationals five times. She tied for seventh last year, beating 11th-place John Tamplin of Kentucky, the only other competitor to make a fifth appearance.

I saw the Broadway show a few weeks ago. I knew or guessed correctly the spelling of all but one word. I coulda been a contender,

Children who enter kindergarten a year late — –red shirts — are slightly ahead of classmates in reading and behind in math by the end of first grade, concludes a Mathematica study. Children who’ve repeated kindergarten are behind in both reading and math by the end of first grade.

Hasbro’s plans to release a line of Pussycat Dolls based on an all-female pop group has been canceled amid charges the “stripper dolls” encourage children to “engage in eroticized play,” reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Parents’ groups wrote letters protesting the dolls. Hasbro claims it pulled the line because testing showed the girls who like the pop group are too old to play with dolls.

SAT scores fell this year because the revised test puts a premium on reading and high-level math writes David Kahn, an SAT tutor, in Opinion Journal.

. . . ETS has increased the penalty for not reading throughout one’s school years. Studying vocabulary lists before the test — a long-favored shortcut to lifting scores — just won’t cut it anymore. Students who read widely and often throughout their elementary and high-school years develop the kinds of reading skills measured by the new SAT. Students who avoid reading don’t — and can’t develop them in a cram course.

The new math section is harder because it includes pre-calculus questions.

The test is “biased against people who aren’t well-educated,” Kahn writes.

At University of Maryland in Baltimore County, Meyerhoff Scholars, most of whom are black, excel in science and engineering, writes Brent Staples in the New York Times.

The students are encouraged to study in groups and taught to solve complex problems collectively, as teams of scientists do. Most important, they are quickly exposed to cutting-edge science in laboratory settings, which demystifies the profession and gives them early access to work that often leads to early publication in scientific journals. At the same time, however, the students are pushed to perform at the highest level. Those who earn C’s, for example, are encouraged to repeat those courses so they can master basic concepts before moving on.

A very high percentage graduate with science or engineering degrees and go on to graduate or professional programs. And it’s not just that they’re smart to begin with.

Meyerhoff students are twice as likely to earn undergraduate degrees in science or engineering as similar students who declined the scholarships and went to school elsewhere. Most significantly, students who completed the Meyerhoff program are 5.3 times as likely to enroll in graduate study as the students who said no and went elsewhere.

To simplify, students get the cachet of being “scholars,” a kinship with fellow science students, access to professors and lab work and a constant message that C work isn’t good enough. The Meyerhoff program once was restricted to minority students, but that was thrown out in court.

Science is hot these days: Here’s a great LA Times story on a contract science teacher who’s turned on students at a low-income, all-minority LA school.

The children of 112th Street are on fire about science because a teacher named Stan White came into their lives last fall like a blowtorch — a large blowtorch with a wide smile, a shaved head, a crisp no-nonsense manner and a deep-seated belief that these children are as capable of excelling as any children anywhere.

The elementary school’s science team competes against high-achieving charter schools. The kids think they can win.

If you’re not registered for the LA Times, try bugmenot@mailinator.com with bugmenot as the password or go to, ahem, Bug Me Not for a fresh sign-in. It’s definitely a read-the-whole-thing story.

The presidential Mathematics Advisory Panel is supposed to come to some conclusion about what works in teaching math, but constructivists think the group is tilted toward traditionalists.

The panel, which will begin meeting next week, includes several prominent players from both sides of the ongoing debate over whether recent curricular reforms provide students with enough mathematical rigor while also fostering a deeper understanding of the subject.

One camp is represented by two professional mathematicians — Harvard’s Wilfried Schmid and Hung-His Wu of the University of California, Berkeley — who have been vocal critics of the reforms. The other camp’s roster includes Francis “Skip” Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the nation’s leading math education organization, which has championed many of those reforms, and math educator Deborah Loewenberg Ball of the University of Michigan. But Ball and Schmid are also members of a small group that has pushed to find common ground between the reformers and their critics.

On Edspresso, Barry Garelick argues that teaching content is what matters.

The real issue is about math content, but few people get that yet. Instead, the arguments center around pedagogy and how the brain works—anything except what are the basic facts, skills and concepts of math that students must master (like they do in Asian countries). Maybe that’s why the panel has five psychologists but only two mathematicians. It doesn’t take a PhD in cognitive science to know that to teach students how to think you need to teach them things to think about. Nevertheless, the panel’s discussions about content may be eclipsed by discussions about learning and teaching theory.

. . . What I hope does not happen is that the panel ends up in polite agreement that it’s important to learn facts but then publishes a report recommending that students continue to discover what they haven’t been taught.

The national reading panel’s report proved to be the end of major combat operations in the reading wars. It’s possible this panel could have a similar impact.

Lance Izumi attacks the Top 10 Myths about California’s preschool initiative on the June 6 ballot, while the indefatigable Lisa Snell points out that universal preschool didn’t improve reading in Oklahoma or Georgia, which are supposed to have model programs.

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina wants school funding to follow students, regardless of where they live, to equalize spending. Education Gadfly explains the benefits of weighted student funding:

Sanford wants to delegate responsibility for education funding to the state (instead of to school districts) and then distribute the dollars based on the educational needs of individual students, not the tax base of the district in which they reside. As students change schools, their funding follows them. This is called “weighted student funding (WSF),” various forms of which exist in a few cities—including Cincinnati and San Francisco. . . . WSF holds advantages for both liberals and conservatives. It’s a fair way to solve funding inequities between districts, and by allowing money to follow individual students, it also opens the door to more school choice.

Fordham is working on a report on weighted student funding.

Teachers who believe they’re responsible for their students learning improve achievement, according to a study of first-grade teachers reported in the new Education Next.

. . . children with teachers who have a greater sense of responsibility for student outcomes learn more in reading during the 1st grade.

Laura Lofergo asked teachers if they agreed with four statements:

* I make a difference in the lives of the children I teach.
* Many of the children I teach are not capable of learning the material I am supposed to teach them.
* The level of child misbehavior (noise, horseplay, or fighting) in this school interferes with my teaching.
* Routine duties and paperwork interfere with my teaching.

Teachers of low-income students are less likely to say they’re responsible for their learning, and more likely to cite out-of-school factors as critical. The school environment encourages teachers to feel they can make a difference — or to give up.

Teachers who report that their school’s leadership is supportive of their efforts in the classroom have a much greater sense of responsibility, as do teachers in Catholic schools. Improving the quality of school leadership could also be an effective means of staffing our nation’s classrooms with responsible teachers.

TMAO writes that he knows his students are disadvantaged in many ways but believes he can make a difference.

I believe in the power of teachers and schools to overcome those inequities and the obstacles they erect. I believe that the adults who run schools have the power to create environments where students are capable of meeting (at least!) these basic requirements. This is a belief I held in college and the last four years of teaching have only served to strengthen and reinforce it. Lack of motivation, poverty, ELL status, family troubles — there is no excuse for the failure to educate kids, only poor attempts to rationalize and explain away that failure.

It’s hard to keep that faith, but it’s critical.

Which states define proficiency as “has a pulse?” Paul Peterson and Rick Hess answer the question in Education Next by comparing state reports on percentages of students who’ve met state proficiency standards with results on the federal NAEP exam.

While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires all students to be “proficient” in math and reading by 2014, the precedent-setting 2002 federal law also allows each state to determine its own level of proficiency. It’s an odd discordance at best. It has led to the bizarre situation in which some states achieve handsome proficiency results by grading their students against low standards, while other states suffer poor proficiency ratings only because they have high standards.

Massachusetts, South Carolina, Wyoming, Maine, Missouri and Washington, D.C. earn A’s for keeping it real: Students who are proficient there are proficient on NAEP as well.