College rankings can be reformed to reflect teaching excellence, not just prestige and exclusiveness, writes Kevin Carey on Education Sector. His new ranking system relies on newly available data that can answer the most important questions:

Where are students taught the best? Where do students learn the most? Where do students have the best chance of earning a degree? Where are students best prepared to succeed in their lives and careers?

. . . New research and advances in technology in the last several years have led to a host of new metrics and data sources that together offer an unprecedented opportunity to measure how well colleges and universities are preparing their undergraduate students. The new measures provide information about a range of important factors like teaching quality, student learning, graduation rates, and success after college.

Some colleges that ace the U.S. News rankings do poorly; some unknown colleges do very well.

In a speech on college accessibility, affordability and accountability, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings also called for a ranking system that “directly measures the most critical point — student performance and learning.” However, she doesn’t think we yet have enough information on student outcomes.

You’d never buy a house without an inspection, take a vacation without researching your destination, or these days, buy groceries without reading the nutritional label.

. . . ACTION FOUR under my plan will provide matching funds to colleges, universities, and states that collect and publicly report student learning outcomes.

She also wants accreditation on whether students are learning, not on how many books are in the library.

Should average students take challenging Advanced Placement classes?

They can’t handle it, writes Patrick Welsh, a Virginia high school teacher and columnist in USA Today.

What is happening more and more around the country is that average students are being pushed into Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes to make schools appear as though they have high standards. In a sense, average kids have become a pawn of school boards and administrators who want to get good PR for boosting the numbers in supposedly rigorous courses. Administrators here in Northern Virginia boast about the numbers of kids taking AP courses but don’t talk much about students’ test scores.

Welsh calls for a middle track for average students who don’t want to be stuck with the slow students but can’t keep up with the best.

Yes, average students can learn in AP classes, replies Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. At Welsh’s school, requiring all AP students to take the end-of-year exam drastically lowered the passing rate. But students at a demographically similar high school nearby take even more AP classes and tests with a higher passing rate.

The Wakefield teachers have seen the studies that show that based on PSAT scores, far more students are capable of taking AP courses than actually do so. Those students that Pat thinks are average may just be underchallenged. Wakefield teachers find ways to lure them into demanding preparatory courses and then into AP and give them the time and encouragement they need to succeed.

I’m convinced that too much academic challenge is not an issue for most American high school students.

Chicago teachers with the neediest students are the most likely to skip school, reports the Chicago Tribune.

Teachers endured curses from pupils at Jensen Scholastic Academy last year, and one took a punch from a parent. They dodged puddles in classrooms caused by a leaky ceiling. Their principal ignored the problems, they say, and publicly punished those who complained.

So teachers took “mental health days.”

The turmoil at Jensen translated into the second-worst teacher absence rate in the system, with the average teacher gone 28 days, or nearly six weeks out of a 39-week work year.

At the worst Chicago school, teachers missed an average of 35 days a year. At the best school, a small Montessori magnet, teachers missed an average two days a year. At 15 of 22 schools at which teacher absenteeism averaged more than 20 days a year, all the students are black.

If children fear their father and their mother says her ex was abusive, the father can sue for custody on grounds of “parental alienation.” MSNBC reports:

Under the theory, children fear or reject one parent because they have been corrupted or coached to lie by the other. Parental alienation is now the leading defense for parents accused of abuse in custody cases, according to domestic-violence advocates. And it’s working. The few current studies done on the subject consider only small samples. But according to one 2004 survey in Massachusetts by Harvard’s Jay Silverman, 54 percent of custody cases involving documented spousal abuse were decided in favor of the alleged batterers. Parental alienation was used as an argument in nearly every case.

I did a column on a housing program for battered women and their children. I learned that judges did not consider a father’s violence in deciding custody or visitation, as long as he’d beaten the mother but not the children.

For those of you who plan ahead, I’ve got some book events on the October schedule:

Oct. 11, I’ll be talking about my charter school book, Our School, at a noon lunch at the Reason Foundation, 3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #400, Los Angeles, just north of Sepulveda and Palms. RSVP to Mary Toledo at mary.toledo@reason.org or 310-391-2245.

On Oct. 24 at 9 am and 10:45 am, I’ll be part of two Conversations with Authors sessions at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers conference at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla in San Diego.

Oct. 26, I’ll be the post-lunch speaker at the Colorado League of Charter Schools convention at the Sheraton Denver West in Lakewood.

PalmTree Pundit hosts the autumn edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling.

First-year teachers shouldn’t be writing lesson plans from scratch, writes EdWahoo, a first-year Teach for America teacher working with fourth graders in Arizona.

Teachers have been teaching multiplication for decades upon decades, some of them quite well. Surely, I can be handed a template for teaching multiplication that is battle-tested, instead of my ad hoc, I-hope-this-works system.

Online data banks with lesson plans — and a rating system to indicate which plans work — would help new teachers, writes EdWahoo.

Alternatively, recruit a small group of top educators — 10 or 15 from each grade/secondary subject — and cull their lessons and start from there.

I think the second idea makes more sense, since master teachers will be able to point to evidence of their effectiveness. A commenter suggests Teach for America develop such a site.

Wyoming, which had a $1.8 billion budget surplus last year, is investing its natural gas windfall in schools with hopes of being number one in the nation in education. Don’t count on it, writes Matthew Ladner of the Goldwater Institute, who’s mean enough to cite Jethro of the Beverly Hillbillies.

Wyoming’s real spending per pupil almost quadrupled before the gas windfall and was already among the highest in the nation. But Wyoming doesn’t score much better on the NAEP than Utah, despite spending almost twice as much per pupil.

This will be an interesting experiment: How good will Wyoming get with virtually unlimited education spending?

In response to the audit by the Office of the Inspector General of the Reading First program, which found officials favored certain reading programs, D-Ed Reckoning argues here and here that the real scandal is that advocates of “whole language” in the guise of “balanced literacy” tried to get federal funding for programs unsupported by “scientifically based reading research.” In short, Reading First was supposed to favor certain programs — the ones based on what we know about how students learn to read.

Looks like DoE stacked the panel with DI and other non-balanced reading program people in an effort to keep the balanaced/whole reading people off the panel who would undoubtedly permit non-scientifically based programs, like Reading Recovery, to get Reading First grants. Such is life when you are in an industry with an ideological agenda. It’s like battling the communists.

The audit complained that three people with “professional connections” to Direct Instruction were appointed to the panel that reviews state grant applications. D-Ed Reckoning quotes comments on a bulletin board by Martin Kozloff, an education professor who’s a Reading First panelist.

As to the finding that six panelists had some kind of professional connections to DI programs, this does not reveal a bias towards DI. Everyone on the panel must have had a professional connection to SOME program (Open Court, Success for All, Orton Gillingham); that is, they must have used a program; trained teachers to use it; or owned it. Can you imagine an expert in math who has no professional connection to a math text—is not partial to and has never used any? At the time the panel was created there were only three SBRR (scientifically based reading research) programs—Open Court, Reading Mastery, and Success for All. If there were six persons with connections to DI in the whole panel, this would be well below chance.

Eduwonk has more on the politics, and notes that Reading First just got a good review from the Center on Education Policy.

Update: In response to the response, Eduwonk notes that process does matter, not just results.

Scottish students 14 and over who are failing academic classes will be placed in “skills academies” to learn a trade, under a new proposal. First Minister Jack O’Connell hopes prospective drop-outs will “become plumbers, electricians, joiners and other skilled workers,” reports The Scotsman.

McConnell, in an astonishingly blunt outburst, declared there was no point in such youngsters sitting through French lessons when they can’t speak English properly.

Teachers’ union leaders don’t like the idea.

Scotland has high rates of youths “not in education or employment” and a shortage of plumbers. Britain is importing skilled blue-collar workers from Eastern Europe. “The Polish plumber” is in high demand.