High school is a lot like Dante’s divine comedy, writes Ms. Cornelius of A Shrewdness of Apes.

. . . high school is organized into concentric circles of despair and Sisyphean drudgery which align quite nicely with the Nine Circles of Hell our friend and eternal optimist Dante Alighieri described so fully.

My favorite is Circle 5 for the “wrathful and sullen” seniors.

The ones who SWORE that they would never want to go to college or trade school have lost a bit of that sneer as they are slowly coming to the realization that after antagonizing Mom and Dad for the last six years, what with the brushes with the law and the suspensions and the phone calls from school and the poor grades, their parents are COUNTING the days until they can tell their offspring that their bedroom has become an exercise room, and seven bucks an hour at TWO part time jobs at fast food joints minus something called FICA and social security will get them a run-down one bedroom apartment with three roommates, rides to work on a bus, peanut butter sandwiches, no vacations EVER– much less three months in a row off, no health care, and tennis shoes from K-Mart, not Foot Locker. No bling, no phat threads, and no pimpin’ any rides. Suddenly four years of sitting in a classroom listening to someone drone on and on about 18th century British literature or the principles of accounting doesn’t sound nearly as stupefying as fifty years of soul-destroying repetitive labor where you come home at the end of the day with the smell of fried food permeating even your HAIR, which you now have to get cut at Great Clips four times a year.

Read it all.

Eighth-grade boys learn more from male teachers and girls do better with female teachers, concludes a study by Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore, which will appear in the fall Education Next. The study relied on federal data collected in 1988 on nearly 25,000 eighth graders nationwide.

Dee found that having a female teacher instead of a male teacher raised the achievement of girls and lowered that of boys in science, social studies and English.

Looked at the other way, when a man led the class, boys did better and girls did worse.

. . . with a female teacher, boys were more likely to be seen as disruptive. Girls were less likely to be considered inattentive or disorderly.

In a class taught by a man, girls were more likely to say the subject was not useful for their future. They were less likely to look forward to the class or to ask questions.

The study is sure to be controversial. Eighty percent of U.S. teachers are women, the highest proportion in 40 years.

On Children of the Code, Dr. Mark Greenberg talks about language and emotion.

Here’s a list of school-related web sites for students, parents and others.

High school football coaches in Texas earn more — a lot more — than teachers, reports the Austin American-Statesman. Head coaches in schools with 950 students or more average $73,804; teachers in those schools average close to $42,400 in pay. Frankly, I was surprised that principals, who average $90,837, are ahead of football coaches.

Sixty percent of New Orleans schools are charter schools a year after Katrina destroyed the city. Students who attended school elsewhere after the hurricane have higher expectations and don’t want to slip back, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Many students in New Orleans say their schools were ravaged well before the storm, something they saw more clearly after spending months in other schools as evacuees. “There was a sign to wash your hands, but how can you wash your hands when you got no soap and you got rust coming out of the faucets?” says Isaiah of his former elementary school.

Before Katrina, 60,000 students attended public schools in New Orleans. About half that number are expected to enroll in the next few weeks.

Hooded sweatshirts are now banned in some Boston-area schools, reports the Globe.

Hoodies pose a safety threat, area school officials say, for several reasons. Students, perhaps after doing something wrong, can make a quick, anonymous exit from school by shielding their faces from security cameras. Nonstudents can blend in and sneak in and out of the school. Also, students can hide contraband more easily.

Hoodie-banning schools also tend to ban pajamas, flip-flops and midriff-baring tops.

An Indiana principal suspended more than 10 percent of her high school’s students on the first day of class for dress code violations, including “baggy pants, low-cut shirts, tank tops and graphic T-shirts.”

More time in phys ed classes doesn’t make students slimmer or fitter, a new study finds. A third of high school students took daily PE classes in 2005, down from 42 percent in 1991. Some states are boosting PE requirements to fight the obesity epidemic: About a third of young Americans are overweight or at risk of crossing the line. But PE doesn’t seem to get kids moving, much less reducing.

(Researchers) found that when states required an extra year of PE for high school students, which is roughly 200 more minutes a week of physical education:

• Male students said they spent another 7.6 minutes a week exercising or playing sports in gym class.

• Female students spent an extra eight minutes and six seconds a week doing exercise in PE.

The study found that girls who exercise more in school cut back their physical activity outside of school, especially the girls who are least active to start with.

Boosting PE time has no effect on teens’ weight, apparently because some schools don’t comply with the PE rules and some PE teachers don’t keep students moving during class. I wonder if schools are dumping “health” (sex ed, drugs, etc.) requirements on PE teachers to free classroom teachers’ time.

Elementary PE classes are even less physical:

. . . research on elementary school students in a county in Texas showed that the children did moderate to vigorous activity for 3.4 minutes of a 40-minute class. About two-thirds of class time was spent in sedentary activity; one-quarter of the time was spent doing minimal activity.

Education Next will have a story on the study in the fall issue, which will be out soon.

Education analysts adopt different standards of proof depending on whether they support or oppose a particular innovation, writes Mike Petrilli on Education Gadfly. Charter supporters say charters should continue to grow if most are no worse than traditional schools and some are much better or if they improve the whole system by introducing competition. Charter opponents demand rigorous studies showing charters are superior “at scale.”

But flip the issue and watch what happens. Take universal preschool — which the AFT and most of the education establishment adore. Do they base their support on rigorous studies showing preschool succeeding at scale? Heavens no. Those studies (mostly of Head Start) show that typical pre-K programs confer scant benefit on poor children over the long term.

A few programs have proven to make a difference over the long run, yet conservatives argue “these exceptions are not enough to justify an expansion of publicly-funded preschool — though high-flying charters are enough to justify the expansion of the charter movement.”

There are plenty of other examples. Ed schools pick on Teach for America because no one has ever proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that alternative certification is more effective; conservatives decry “small schools” for much the same reason, though they are popular with parents.

Petrilli suggests advocates admit they’re picking the data that supports their preferences.

Check out the Edspresso debate on alternative certification for teachers. Kevin Carey of Education Sector writes that certification is expensive and cumbersome and screens out potentially good teachers with little evidence that conventionally certified teachers are better in the classroom.

States could maintain certification processes but simply remove the legal prohibition against hiring teachers without those credentials. If schools of education provide the benefits they say they do, then schools hiring teachers will still require most new teachers to have that training, and most people wanting to be new teachers will seek out those credentials to enhance their prospects in the job market. But if the balance of other qualities makes a particular non-certified candidate the right person for the job, schools should be able to hire them.

One alternative program is the rigorous Passport to Teaching, developed by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE). The goal is to “develop portable teacher credentials that would identify qualified beginning teachers and recognize accomplished veterans,” notes Mathematica. Passport teachers are rated by their principals as equally or more qualified than conventionally certified teachers, Mathematica researchers found. Most Passport teachers are working in Idaho.