The new issue of Teacher Magazine includes a story on the effect of higher standards in San Jose Unified, which requires all students to take college-prep courses to earn a diploma, unless they apply for a waiver.

If you can’t access Teacher without registration, let me know. I lose track of what I can read and what everyone can read.

As Eduwonk writes, Russlynn Ali of Education Trust-West has produced an eloquent defense in “California at the Crossroads” of the state graduation exam, which requires all students — however disadvantaged — to demonstrate mastery of basic literacy and math skills to earn a diploma. Students must earn a 55 percent on a multiple-choice test of math skills, up to algebra, and 60 percent on a test of language skills, up to 10th grade English.

California standards were adopted when this year’s senior class was in the first grade. And we haven’t taught many of them even up to middle school standards. It only punishes them more to give them an empty piece of paper we call a diploma when their high school experience hasn’t prepared for any of the skills they’ll need after high school. We give them a diploma that is a doorway to a street corner or unemployment line.

The exit exam “shines a bright spotlight on inequities,” Ali writes, forcing adults to stop making excuses and start doing something to bring all students up to minimal standards. For example, Los Angeles school officials looked at English Language Learners who kept failing the test and realized that two-thirds had been in special programs for non-fluent students for more than 10 years. The district decided to rethink its approach.

At Downtown College Prep, 10th graders pass the state exam at rates much higher than the California average or the average at all the nearby public schools. Ninety percent of students come from Hispanic families; 38 percent are classified as English Language Learners. In all categories, students outdo the state and district average. I explain how the charter school succeeds with kids who’ve earned D’s and F’s in middle school in Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds.

Statewide, pass rates are up slightly for students hoping to graduate in 2007 and 2008 — except for English Language Learners. A new survey finds minority parents strongly support the graduation exam, even if their own children have failed it on the first try.

In Texas, some former students keep retaking the graduation exam for years after they’ve left school, reports the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which focuses on a woman who passed the math portion on her 15th try.

Center on Education Policy report concludes legal challenges are discouraging more states from adopting exit exams and encouraging more flexibility in ways to qualify for a diploma. Twenty-five states with two-thirds of all public school students now require a graduation exam. CEP finds the exams have a slight negative effect on graduation rates and a significant influence on curriculum, leading to more focus on language arts, math and science.

In the succinctly titled Why Some Schools with Latino Children Beat the Odds and Others Don’t, the Center for the Future of Arizona reports on high-performing Latino schools. The six keys to success, which surely apply to all schools, are: clear bottom line, ongoing assessment, strong, steady principal, collaborative solutions, stick with the program and build to suit.

Phi Delta Kappa misrepresents its own poll of public attitudes to choice when it comes to vouchers, points out Cato @ Liberty. The professional educators’ group says support for vouchers has fallen, but support was rising till PDK changed the question’s wording significantly.

The Education Wonks are hosting the new back-to-school Carnival Of Education.

What do you when you don’t get into college and don’t want to disappoint Mom and Dad? In Accepted, a new movie, rejects band together to create their own do-your-own-thing university. Inside Higher Ed says helicopter parents are the prime target.

Most community college students must take basic skills classes before moving on to college-level courses, observes a Carnegie report. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, up to 80 percent of new community college students are placed in remedial English and math classes.

Facing a long series of “catch-up” courses, only a small percentage of these students ever make it to college-level work and thus to the opportunities that come with higher education.

Teaching reading, writing and ‘rithmetic in grade school and high school is the only solution, says Carnegie, though not so clearly.

Fourth graders in charter schools score somewhat lower in reading and math than students in district-run public schools, according to a new National Center for Education Statistics analysis of 2003 NAEP data. Researchers included caveats

Parents may have been attracted to charter schools because they felt that their children were not well-served by public schools, and these children may have lagged behind their classmates. On the other hand, the parents of these children may be more involved in their children’s schooling and provide greater support and encouragement. Without further information, such as measures of prior achievement, there is no way to determine how patterns of self-selection may have affected the estimates presented.

The study tries to compare similar students, but the measure of poverty is how many students qualify for a free lunch, a notoriously unreliable indicator. Many charter schools don’t participate in the federal lunch program, notes Center for Education Reform, which says its surveys show a higher poverty rate in charter schools than in traditional public schools.

Eduwonk criticizes the AP coverage, recommends Education Week and concludes for story-skippers’ benefit, that the study doesn’t answer the critical questions about effectiveness because it’s not randomized, tells nothing about students’ performance before enrolling, doesn’t track students over time and is based on dubious poverty data.

In addition, the charter sector is getting so heterogeneous (for good and ill) that increasingly “charter” is a meaningless label for a school. For instance what does MATCH, the best open-admission high school in Boston, have in common with some out-of-control online school in Ohio? That problem is going to become even more pronounced if lots of low-performing charter schools get converted into “charter” schools.

As Eduwonk writes, we need neutral foundation-funded research to settle some of these questions. It shouldn’t be that hard to establish the poverty rate of charter students.

Update: In the Washington Post story, the NCES head says the study provides no guidance for parents trying to choose a school and Fordham’s Checker Finn calls it a “big yawn.”

Washington, D.C. schools are losing so many students to charters that some wonder if the system will go all charter, reports the Washington Post. District-run schools are trying to compete with charters but not showing much success.

With public confidence in the schools at an all-time low, more than 17,000 public school students — nearly one in four — have rejected the traditional system in favor of 51 independently run, publicly funded charter schools. That share is one of the largest in the nation and is expected to rise when six more charter schools open their doors this fall.

Superintendent Clifford B. Janey wants a moratorium on new charter schools, though he’s not likely to get it. “Two recent studies show D.C. charters outperforming traditional schools,” the Post reports, though scores remain well below the national average.

Charters started in D.C.’s poorest black neighborhoods but are expanding to middle-class areas, offering a free education to parents who can’t afford private schools and might otherwise move to the suburbs.

Next month, the Washington Latin School, a charter for grades five through 12, is scheduled to open in the same Northwest Washington neighborhood as St. Albans, Sidwell Friends and other exclusive private schools. Washington Latin will offer a “classical education” that is “rich in antique and global literary sources,” according to its Web site.

Charter critics complain these new, integrated charter schools will remove the last remaining middle-class students from the district-run schools. On the other hand, that battle seems to be lost: “A recent Washington Post poll found that 15 percent of D.C. voters have confidence in the regular school system, the lowest recorded in a Post survey.”

Phalanxes of Los Angeles parents of color — blue T-shirts support the mayor’s takeover of the school district and yellow T-shirts that back the district — are being “used as pawns” in Sacramento hearings writes Bob Sipchen, LA Times columnist and School Me blogger.

It was 2 1/2 hours before an important Senate committee would discuss the bill that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hoped would let him take control of Los Angeles’ sprawling school district. The yellow-shirted parents had arrived by bus the night before to stop him, and they weren’t pleased to march into the hearing room and find every seat taken. By parents and children in blue T-shirts — the color of the enemy.

Anyone who cares to understand why Los Angeles’ mayor will soon succeed in his public school power grab might consider that scene and ponder the touchingly naive slogan that the mayor’s opponents displayed on their LAUSD-issued yellow shirts: “Parents, not politics.”

As if.

Yellow shirts are parents who’ve been involved in their children’s schools, writes Sipchen.

Along the way, many have picked up official titles — “community rep,” “parent facilitator” — as well as tolerance for the bureaucracy’s devout commitment to “process.”

Yellow-shirt parents feel ignored by the mayor’s Sacramento power play. Blue-shirt parents don’t believe district leaders are capable of real change.

The blue shirts I met, on the other hand, are a more goal-oriented lot, eager to push full steam ahead for sweeping reform, and damn the details — including the fact that, behind closed doors, teachers unions made sure the mayor’s bill offers no encouragement for the sort of charter schools to which many of these rebellious parents send their kids.

Los Angeles Unified’s elementary schools are doing a better job, but improving middle and high schools remains very difficult. I’m dubious about the mayor’s takeover plan, which makes so many compromises that nobody will be accountable if schools fail to improve.

The state legislative counsel thinks the takeover bill is unconstitutional; lawsuits are inevitable.

Pollywog Creek Porch hosts this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling. It’s a swamp thing.