SUNY Fredonia’s president denied promotion to a well-regarded professor because of his criticisms of university policy, states FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).

(Stephen) Kershnar, an associate professor of philosophy, was nominated for promotion to full professor in January 2006, with strong support from his colleagues, department head, and top administrators, because of his outstanding professional record. An outspoken member of the Fredonia community, Kershnar writes a bi-weekly column for the local newspaper, in which he questioned Fredonia’s affirmative action practices and examined the lack of conservatives in higher education. In 2005, Kershnar publicly condemned a new rule that targets students who fail to report violations of the student conduct code. He was quoted in a Buffalo News article saying the new policy would “turn the student population into a group of snitches.”

SUNY Fredonia President Dennis L. Hefner issued a letter to the university community defending the conduct policy against “media misrepresentations.”

A few weeks later, the president sent a letter denying Kershnar’s promotion.

Hefner explained that although Kershnar’s “teaching has been described as excellent,” he would not be promoted because of his “deliberate and repeated misrepresentations of campus policies and procedures…to the media,” which Hefner claimed “impugned the reputation of SUNY Fredonia.”

Kershnar told FIRE that Hefner subsequently “suggested that he would approve the promotion if Kershnar agreed to refrain from such statements in the future.” The professor offered to submit his written statements to a “Prior-Consent Committee,” which would decide if he was deliberately misrepresenting facts. Hefner proposed requiring “unanimous consent” from a university committee for all writing regarding the university. Kershnar rejected this and turned to FIRE for help.

Under FIRE, Hefner sent a new denial of promotion letter removing all reference to Kershnar’s statements. The letter says Kershnar’s teaching is excellent and his publications sufficient but the “quantity and quality of your performance in the area of service is inadequate for early promotion to full professor.”

I believe that means insufficient toadying.

Of course, if he’d been teaching that Dick Cheney, the pope and Mickey Mouse had blown up the World Trade Center, he’d be untouchable.

Update: Arguing about Israel with Palestinian students at a student activities fair can get an adjunct professor fired, without a hearing. That falls under insufficient toadying to students.

Schools shortchange boys by labeling their aggressive, rational natures as behavioral disorders, writes teacher Gerry Garibaldi in the summer issue of City Journal.

Special ed is the great spangled elephant in the education parade. Each year, it grows larger and more lumbering, drawing more and more boys into the procession . . . Special ed now is the single largest budget item, outside of basic operations, in most school districts across the country.

Boys know exactly how little they can get away with doing — or having the special ed aide do for them, he writes.

The Chicago Sun-Times is following the third graders at a new University of Chicago charter school that’s trying to educate low-income black kids from the projects with middle-class black students. Even in third grade, the range of skills is wide: Some kids are at kindergarten level, including the daughter of a woman studying to become a teacher, while others are working at grade level, including the daughter of a recovering drug addict living on a disability check.

Behavior is a problem, but it’s not always the project kids who are disrupting class.

Update: U of C recommends “guided reading” to enable students at different reading levels to learn in the same class. In mid-year, a literacy specialist was brought in to give more help to the lowest group of readers.

When a professor is desperate for a good course evaluation, it’s hard to resist the pressure to please, reports The Onion, a satirical online journal.

Alan Gilchrist, an associate professor of English literature at the University of Arkansas infamous for his tough grading standards and dry lecturing style, was coerced into sleeping with an undergraduate on Monday in order to earn a good course evaluation. “My tenure’s on the line here, so I allowed a student to take advantage of me,” said an emotional Gilchrist of the experience, which he hopes will earn him at least six “very much enjoyed” responses on the eight-item evaluation form. “I told myself it would be just this once, and that it would be over soon, and that it wouldn’t be that bad, but I was used. And I can’t stop showering.”

Via Virginia Postrel.

If Johnny can’t read by the end of first grade, should he repeat the grade or move on with his friends? Texas schools are struggling with the question, reports the Houston Chronicle. Most studies show students who are held back never catch up, but some educators think retention helps if it’s done before students fall too far behind.

A study by University of Houston sociology professor Gary Dworkin showed that students who were held back because they failed Texas’ standardized test went on to greater academic and social success.

“Higher retention rates, when it’s done very early, ends up to be somewhat beneficial to the kids, as opposed to doing nothing or to socially promoting them and hoping they pick up the material,” Dworkin said.

“The best we could say is that it was not harmful in ways that earlier studies conveyed,” Dworkin said.

Some schools are trying “partial promotion,” which lets students take most classes with students their own age but do remedial work in reading or math. Texas is trying intensive reading remediation in the summer for first graders who aren’t quite ready for second grade.

Even if holding students back doesn’t help them catch up, it arguably helps teachers and other students by narrowing the range of skills in higher grades.

Four years ago today, I put Sitemeter on the blog to track visits and page views. In that time, I’ve logged 1,615,840 visits and more than 2.2 million page views. Not bad for a one-woman specialty blog.

Quick and the Ed’s Elena Silva is dubious about Michigan’s flirtation with single-sex classes, arguing there’s no evidence children learn more in single-sex classes. Our history of separate-but-equal should make us cautious about segregating students by gender, Silva writes.

I’m willing to give it a try, but I agree the evidence of effectiveness is anecdotal.

This Week has more on the “problem with boys,” including a warning about boomerang boys.

Parents are paying the price for boys’ failure to achieve. The Census Bureau reports that almost 14 percent of 25- to 34-year-old American men still live with their parents. (Only 8 percent of women in that age group live at home.) The trend holds for all races, ethnic groups, and economic classes, and has become so widespread that it has entered the popular culture. The recent film Failure to Launch centers on a 35-year-old man who still lives with his exasperated mom and dad. A similar premise underlies a new Fox sitcom, Free Ride.

Boys take longer to mature than girls, but this is ridiculous.

In a diverse society, too many religious groups want school holidays, reports CNN. If the Jews get off for High Holy Days, the Muslims want a few days off too, and then the Hindus and Buddhists feel left out.

Some districts mark “special observance days” when no test or exam can be scheduled. Other districts find inspiration in the business world — each student gets a number of “floating” days to celebrate his or her own holidays with an excused absence.

. . . New Jersey’s board of education now lists 76 excused religious holidays, from Russian Orthodox to Sikh.

The Ed Wonk wants a teacher’s holiday every other Monday. Three-Day Weekendism probably has more adherents than a number of better-known religions.

In Camping Alone in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus longs for the days when camp meant groups named after furry animals, silly songs and lanyards.

The modern camp is specialized and short-term; the modern camper spends a week at tennis camp and a week at computer camp, a week at baseball camp and a week at art camp. Think of it as Attention Deficit Disorder Goes to Camp.

I know children this summer who are going to horseback-riding camp, rafting camp, caving camp, science camp and something called “rock star day jam camp” — and that’s just two kids (not mine!) for part of the summer. A tae kwon do camp may be added to the mix.

Whatever happened to camp camp?

On 11D, Laura asks readers what defines a good summer camp and comments on a Judith Warner column on parents’ reluctance to send kids off for four to eight weeks of sleepover camp.

I made lanyards at various day camps: At Merry Oaks, we were not allowed to name our group “the Sharks.” Then I went off to a wonderful sleepover camp for girls, Brown Ledge Camp on Lake Champlain in Winooski Vermont. It did allow a lot of individual choice under the “freedom plan,” but we had plenty of silly songs. I valued the chance to get away from my family and experiment with a new persona, even if it did turn out to be very much like my home and school persona. The camp is now a nonprofit run by a former bunkie of mine.

Pittsburgh has hired a private company to write a coherent curriculum for city schools, reports the Post-Gazette.

Because course content is uneven and out of sync with state standards, the Pittsburgh Public School district is paying New York-based Kaplan K12 Learning Services $8.4 million to write standardized curricula for grades six through 12.

. . . Teachers in other districts have complained that Kaplan’s detailed curriculum turned them into automatons and deprived them of time to cover material in adequate detail or help students with individual needs.

. . . Pittsburgh school officials cite an urgent need to bring coherence and rigor to what’s taught and tested in the district’s classrooms.

Not just a test-prep company any more, Kaplan went into curricula writing three years ago.

In 2003, the company began providing professional development and instructional materials to the 97 schools in low-performing District 5 in the New York City school system. Two years later, Kaplan said, District 5 was leading the school system in test gains.

Kaplan will tie the curriculum to state standards and test student progress every six weeks. Superintendent Mark Roosevelt wants to “use the results to provide extra help to struggling students. But he also wants to provide coaching or other assistance to teachers when results show large groups of their students falling behind.” I predict teachers will interpret “coaching” as monitoring for bad teachers.

Education Gadfly writes that the state standards are so weak that a standards-linked curriculum may not do students much good.