The Oregonian passes on email from a middle-school teacher named Tim Smart who’s spending a year in Afghanistan as a major in the Army National Guard. He’s working to get Afghan soldiers to interact with the community in a city that was one of the last in the north to drive out the Taliban. Not surprisingly, he’s keeping an eye on the schools.

School growth: Five years ago, Kunduz had 15 schools. Today, it has 134. All told, the Kunduz province has about 250 schools, including 143 under trees, in tents, outdoors. A teacher salary ranges from roughly $42 a month for a high school graduate to $55 a month for a teacher with formal training. Some schools have 120 students in one classroom. School needs: Each building is supplied with about 10 percent of the necessary supplies, teachers, and furniture, primarily rugs and desks. Schools need pens, paper tablets, chalk, chalk boards, white board and markers, highlighters, stuffed animals, maps, globes, teacher supplies, grade books, staff notebooks, and grant money for sponsoring projects in the community. Ideas under consideration: Renting cabs to transport teachers to and from the schools. Hiring a carpenter to build needed desks. Buying bikes for the teachers and staff — an excellent Chinese bike costs $60 U.S.

Via EIA Intercepts.

In Hope for Katrina in the new Education Next — yes, it’s online — explains the transformation of New Orleans’ battered school system: 70 percent of public students are enrolled in schools of choice and even the district-run schools have considerably more independence.

According to the plan’s “educational network model,” the school system would include a mix of charter, contract, and system-run schools, organized in small “networks” of similar schools. . . .

All schools will have considerable autonomy — including control over staffing, the authority to set their own budgets, and the freedom to offer extended school days or longer school years — but will be held accountable for results, and funds will follow students as they choose the schools that best meet their needs. A network manager will provide support and accountability for each network of schools. A “lean” district office will focus on policymaking instead of top-down operational decisions, including a small “strategy group” that will set learning standards and ensure the equitable allocation of resources, but will not mandate teaching methods or control school spending. The other major component of the district organization will be a new central support-services office that will provide optional assistance to help schools obtain services such as food preparation and transportation. One superintendent will direct the network managers, strategy group, and services office and report to the school board, whose role will be oversight, not execution.

Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days.

One of the authors, Kathryn Newmark, blogs at Constrained Vision; she’s leaving the American Enterprise Institute to go to graduate school.

Barry Garelick’s Miracle Math on U.S. schools’ experiments with Singapore’s math curriculum, also is in the new Education Next.

A spiritualist puts an education reformer in touch with the late education philosopher John Dewey:

I asked (John Dewey) the question that is most on my mind, ‘Is it possible, really, to fix America’s schools?’ Dewey said, ‘Yes. Yes. There are two ways you can do it. You can do it the miraculous way, or you can do it the natural way.’ And I said, ‘What is the natural way?’ He said, ‘Well, the natural way would be if a band of angels descended from heaven and scattered across the landscape, and went into every school in the land, and waved their hands and fixed the schools.’ I said, ‘My God, what’s the miraculous way?’ And Dewey said, ‘The miraculous way would be if the people did it themselves.’”

Mike Klonsky of Small Talk got the quote from PEN, which was quoting a speech by Ron Wolk, founder of Education Week and Chronicle of Higher Education. Wolk says the story originated with the late Al Shanker, founder of the American Federation of Teachers.

A plagiarism detective service, Turnitin, is under fire from Virginia high school students who claim their intellectual property rights in their school assignments are being violated.

The for-profit service known as Turnitin checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals.

. . . But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students’ Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin’s automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights.

Students also objected to the presumption of guilt.

Thousands of colleges and high schools submit papers to Turnitin, which adds 60,000 student assignments to the database daily. At some schools, students can submit their drafts to the service to get an “originality report.”

Turnitin is an effective deterrent for Betsy’s high school history students.

I wonder what lawyers would say about students’ rights to keep their writing from being added to a data base. It seems thin to me — and nobody’s sued yet — but this is a new area.

Update: Here’s more on tech-aided cheating from the San Jose Mercury News.

Fifteen years after the first charter law passed, with more than a million students attending nearly 4,000 charter schools, most people think charter schools are private, charge tuition, teach religion and pick and choose their students, writes Rick Hess on Gadfly, citing the Phi Delta Kappan poll. But they like charters anyhow.

Being mislabeled as “private” and selective is damning because Americans embrace what Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe has termed the “public school ideology.” Moe, a staunch advocate of school choice, has reported, for instance, that 41% of non-parents and 40% of public school parents agree with the statement, “The more children attend public schools, rather than private or parochial schools, the better it is for American society.”

. . . Now for the surprise twist. Although most Americans think charters are tuition-charging, student-selecting private schools, a clear majority now tells Gallup that it nonetheless favors charter schooling. When these schools are described as “operat[ing] under a charter or contract that frees them from many of the state regulations imposed on public schools,” respondents supported charters 53% to 34%. Among public school parents, that lead stretched to 28 points-59% to 31%. Among non-parents, charters are favored 50% to 37%.

Support for charters has grown dramatically in the last seven years, Hess writes.

What if they gave a Mommy War and nobody came? Reviewing books by Caitlin Flanagan and Carrie Lukas on Reason Online, Shannon Chamberlain comes out for the principle that women can decide to work for pay or be stay-at-home moms without help from theorists.

Although they start at different points, the Flanagans and Lukases, leftist and rightist critics of women’s choices, arrive at the same place for the same reason: a refusal to see women as autonomous beings, capable of weighing alternatives and arriving at conclusions based on information about individual circumstances that the commanders of the Mommy Wars simply can’t possess, no matter how many polls they conduct.

Women who choose to work as nannies and house cleaners are making choices too, Chamberlain points out.

The case for national testing is made by William J. Bennett and Rod Paige in the Washington Post.

Washington should set sound national academic standards and administer a high-quality national test. Publicize everybody’s results, right down to the school level. Then Washington should butt out.

States could decide what to do to raise their students’ scores — or do nothing at all, if voters would accept that.

Bennett and Paige tell Republicans that states rights has limits. No Child Left Behind, in deferring to the states, has made it too easy to set low standards, administer an easy test and declare success.

Eduwonk has more on the issue.

“Honors” or “advanced” classes don’t necessarily require high-level learning, writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. In addition to grade inflation, schools have succumbed to course-label inflation.

In an American education system full of plans for better high schools, more and more courses have impressive labels, such as “honors,” “advanced,” “college prep” and “Advanced Placement.” But many researchers and educators say the teaching often does not match the title.

Low-income and minority students are the most likely to be placed in title-inflated classes, researchers say.

They said 60 percent of low-income students, 65 percent of African American students and 57 percent of Hispanic students who had received course credit for geometry or algebra 2 in Texas failed a state exam covering material from geometry and algebra 1. By contrast, the failure rates for non-low-income and white students were 36 and 32 percent, respectively.

“Pre-calculus” can mean just about anything.

AP courses at least have final exams, written and scored by outside experts, that reveal whether students have mastered the material. Wayne Bishop, a math professor at California State University in Los Angeles, examined an AP calculus class in a Pasadena, Calif., high school. All 23 students, Bishop found, got As and Bs from their teacher, but their grades on the AP exam were the college equivalent of 21 Fs and two Ds.

When both grades and course titles become meaningless, test scores become even more powerful.

In a study of public school choice in San Diego, researchers found “such programs do seem to have helped to integrate San Diego’s student bodies, not only along racial-ethnic lines but also in terms of students’ parental education levels.” While choice programs are very popular, evidence of higher achievement is unclear, concluded the Public Policy Institute of California.

With some exceptions—elevated math achievement for students in magnet high schools — those who won lotteries that allowed them to attend choice programs did about the same on standardized tests as non-winners one to three years later.

Stuart Buck claims to be baffled by reaction to the study.

Educators often state in no uncertain terms that you can’t measure the value of education solely by looking at test scores. Education is about much more than filling in the right circles on a multiple-choice math test, they say. But whenever a study comes out showing that, contrary to a lot of previous research, kids in private or charter schools don’t necessarily have higher scores, some of the same people leap all over the news as proof that vouchers or charter schools are “not the answer.” It’s almost as if they switch their position on the validity of tests based on what’s politically convenient at the time.

Surely not.

The Median Sib (I was one myself) hosts this week’s Carnival of Education.

Scheduling chaos has kept some of La Maestra’s students in the wrong classes for weeks.

Tomorrow begins the fourth week of school, and I’m still trying to get scheduling changes for four students in one of my classes, students who should have never been placed in that class to begin with and who requested the change before school began. On Friday, I was told that, with luck, they’ll be out of the class by the end of the month, 5 weeks after the start of school.

She’s responding to a column on the can’t do culture by School Me’s Bob Sipchen, who writes about a mother, a former union organizer, who fought to get her ninth-grade son into the college-prep classes he needed.

Fairfax had enrolled him in a regular English class despite his previous teacher’s recommendation that he take AP or honors. Fairfax placed him in algebra, even though he’d already aced it.

She kept hammering at administrators until, after wasting his first week in high school, he got the right schedule. Most parents aren’t that aggressive and persistent, Sipchen writes.

I also believe, however, that the district often works on the premise that most aggrieved parents will eventually slump off in frustration, rather than dog bureaucrats until their students get the education to which they’re entitled.

Check out the other attractions at the carnival too.