In “Dismantling a Community,” the Institute for Community Change attacks the “drive to sell-off New Orleans schools” and mourns the “dual tragedies of Katrina and school privatization.” In short, while few district-run public schools have reopened in New Orleans, new charter schools have opened to provide choices for children previously trapped in a disastrously bad school system. Quite a tragedy.

“Dismantling” decries charter founders’ vision.

It is a vision that disdains the public sector and those who work within it. It is a vision based on competition and economic markets. It is a vision of private hands spending public funds.

Most disturbing, it is a vision that casts families and students as “customers,” who shop for schools in isolation from – and even in competition with – their neighbors.

Will the horrors never cease?

On Edspresso, Ryan Boots critiques the picture of a rich mosaic of happy learners who just happened to have very low achievement scores. Boots writes:

I’m glad they were learning some “important life lessons” in those schools, because they weren’t learning much else. To my mind, this begs the question: so long as the schools were serving the purpose of socialization, how bad would the schools have had to deteriorate academically before the authors considered them failures? Go back and look at the stats: New Orleans wasn’t even bringing half of its students to basic levels of understanding in English and math.

. . . As they openly acknowledge, public schools in New Orleans have long been fractured along lines of race and class. I’d say this shows the schools demonstrably failed in what the authors assert is the school’s higher calling: to unite, integrate, and collectivize.

Schools of choice organized around a shared mission really can create a sense of community. That’s harder to do when parents can’t shop around for a school that fits their child’s needs and interests. I’d bet very few parents, given a choice, would list “rich mosaic” as a higher priority than academic achievement for their child’s school.

Hot sauce is not a deadly weapon, after all.

CONCORD, Calif. — A 16-year-old girl is back in school Friday after school officials recanted their decision to suspend her for bringing hot sauce to school, NBC11′s Jodi Hernandez reported.

Laura Martin said she and a friend were given a two-day suspension for possession of a deadly weapon, Mad Dog 357 hot sauce. The principal said the girls were suspended for letting friends test their ability to handle the heat.

A 16-year-old boy drank some sauce, became breathless and started shaking. Paramedics examined him and found nothing wrong. Paramedics were called again after another student got sauce in his eye.

Stroller license plates for HowsMyNanny.com urge passersby to turn in the nanny to parents via e-mail. Actually, it’s probably Mom pushing the stroller because the nanny just quit.

Video games can redefine education, says a study by the Federation of American Scientists. AP reports:

Capping a year of study, the group called for federal research into how the addictive pizzazz of video games can be converted into serious learning tools for schools.

The theory is that games teach skills that employers want: analytical thinking, team building, multitasking and problem solving under duress.

At a book signing, I ran into a science-fiction writer who moonlights as a designer of educational video games with a biotech theme.

Women do well in math if they’re told women have as many math genes as men. If they’re told there’s a genetic difference in math ability linked to gender, women’s math scores fall sharply.

In a Canadian experiment on “stereotype threat,” women were tested on math, asked to read an essay and given a second math test. Researchers wanted to see if the reasoning behind the stereotype would affect results. They divided college-age women into four groups.

Each took a three-part test, two math sections separated by a reading comprehension essay. The first essay argued that sex differences in math were due to genetic differences between men and women. The second cited a person’s experiences as the main factor. A third essay talked about gender differences but did not discuss mathematical ability. The final essay stated that there were no differences in mathematical ability between men and women.

Women given the essay focusing on genetic factors performed the worst of the four groups. Those focusing on experience did significantly better, and their performance was as good as the group that was told that gender differences do not exist, the team reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science.

Differences were significant. Low scorers got five to 10 questions right on average; high scores got 15 to 20 questions right.

Teachers are satisfied with their jobs –more so today than at any point in the past twenty years — notes Gadfly’s Liam Julian, reporting on the MetLife survey of teachers. But “teachers predisposed to leave are also apt to have the greatest potential.”

The Economist recently focused a special section on “The battle for brainpower,” the crux of which is that talent (young, driven, skilled, educated, and innovative workers) is far and away the primary competitive tool driving corporate and national success.

. . . Talented individuals are drawn to places where their skills and abilities won’t be wasted. They typically want to work in dynamic environments without excessive bureaucracy; they want to be held accountable for their actions and given the freedom to meet expectations in their own ways; they want mentors and leaders whom they respect (leaders who set goals and demand that their workers meet them); they want to be decently compensated; and they want to feel that they have the opportunity to excel in their chosen field. More than a few of them also hope to improve their society if not the world.

Schools rarely create the environment in which talented teachers can thrive, Julian writes. Smart people don’t bang their heads against a brick wall year after year.

To build a sense of identity and sort out 3,000 students, a Maryland high school produced color-coded ID tags — “black for seniors, white for magnet kids and a particularly loud shade of yellow for students of limited English proficiency,” reports the Washington Post.

Ninth-graders at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring took particular umbrage at being forced to advertise their status with bright red badges and optional matching lanyards.

IDs come in 11 colors to designate enrollment in various classes or “academies” — entrepreneurship, communication arts, international studies, etc. — within the mega-school.

First they banned dodgeball. Now a Boston area elementary school has banned tag, touch football and “any other unsupervised chasing games over concerns about the risk of injury and liability for the school,” reports the Boston Globe. Someone might get hurt.

Rockstar Games’ new PlayStation 2 video game, Bully, isn’t the violent bad boy that was expected, reports the Washington Post.

It follows a year in the life of a young toughie named Jimmy Hopkins, who gets dropped off at a boarding school as Mom leaves for her fifth honeymoon. Jimmy finds jocks and preppies at Bullworth Academy, of course, and soon meets bullies predictably picking on nerds. . . . The game, rated T for ages 13 and older, is about climbing — and navigating — the social ladder at school. When a chubby kid with owl glasses nicknamed Pee Stein gets hassled, Jimmy can either leave Pee alone or get in a scuffle to save him. And guess what Jimmy does?

. . . In “Bully,” Jimmy relies on such classic moves as giving wedgies, firing a slingshot and dunking someone’s head in the toilet. He can slug someone with a baseball bat, but it breaks after a few swings.

The lead producer says the game is inspired by his memories of defending a seventh-grade friend in a wheelchair from the school bully.

Arizona’s private schools spend one third less money than public schools, concludes a Goldwater Institute survey by Andrew Coulson. Private teachers make about 60 percent of the pay of public teachers. At private schools, 72 percent of the staff are teachers; in the public sector less than half of school employees are teachers.