Via EclectEcon’s nephew: Funny exam answers. Click on the image to make it larger.

“Adam,” a Hispanic high school junior in California, is “a bright, hard-working student who has lived a tough life, yet still maintains a very positive attitude about his future,” writes an adult who’s come to know him. Despite his excellent grades, he’s not prepared for college, she fears.

Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail he sent her:

. . . last year i reported some of my teachers who didn’t teach me to the state, all we did was watch “R”movies and my other teacher fight and drew chairs, but the school did nothing and they gave me “A’s.

(The principal) is doing nothing about it he tells my mom that the SCHOOL has more rights and power than me and the parent.

As an A student, he’ll get into college, even with low test scores. But he’ll be assigned to remedial English with all the other students who were cheated out of a college-prep education by low expectations. He’d like to improve his writing skills now.

I suggested he ask his English teacher for help, as the first step. You never know till you ask. He also could check into community college courses he could take over the summer.

Another option is EPGY (Education Program for Gifted Youth), which offers online grammar and writing classes in addition to an array of math and science classes. However, Adam will need a scholarship. The grammar course costs $495; expository writing costs $600.

Adam is willing to try anything to achieve his college goals. Teachers (and others), what would you advise to help Adam prepare for college?

What if a huge federal study didn’t produce the expected results? Columnist Linda Seebach bashes the education elite for rejecting the results of Project Follow Through, which showed Zig Engelmann’s Direct Instruction curriculum works far better than other models.

The models started in 1968 with a cohort of kindergartners, if the schools had a kindergarten, and added a grade each year up to grade 3. After full implementation, 40,000 children were tested.

When the results were analyzed, Direct Instruction had won the horse race going away. It was first in basic skills, but it was also the only model that had positive results on all three higher-order cognitive skills, and it was also first in affective measures, how children feel about themselves. It was first with high performers and with low performers, with different ethnic groups and with non-English speakers. After DI training, teachers were able to get even very low-performing children reading by the end of kindergarten.

Many of the models that proved ineffective continued to receive funding. DI remained a pariah.

Philadelphia schools — now run by a mix of public and private managers — are improving, concludes a study by Rand and Research for Action. However, progress in Philadelphia matched progress in other low-performing schools in the state, says the report. Privately managed schools did not improve more than district-run schools. The report’s co-authors write:

So many different reforms have been implemented in Philadelphia since 2002 that it is impossible to clearly identify which ones may be responsible for the achievement gains of the district as a whole.

Our own conclusion is that competition from private managers is unlikely to be a major factor in student achievement gains, because private management was not implemented in a way designed to promote competitive effects. In particular, private management did not include a regime of open parental choice of schools.

Reform advocates say the report underestimates the public-private model’s successes. In the Inquirer, Charles Zogby, former state secretary of education now a K12 executive, complains that the report reads like an autopsy of a patient brought back from death.

. . . the authors glossed over what should have been their most fundamental finding: In the five years since state and local officials worked together to create the School Reform Commission, academic performance in Philadelphia’s public schools literally has catapulted upward. After decades of stagnation, learning success rates in the last five years have doubled, tripled and, in some cases, quadrupled.

Paul Peterson questions the study’s methodology, pointing out that private managers took over the city’s worst schools, which were scoring well below the already low citywide average. The column is available only to Wall St. Journal subscribers,

Before she became an English teacher, RedKudu worked for years in airline sales and as a waitress. She draws on her experience to write about her challenges as a teacher. To start with, the training’s not as good in teaching as it is in sales or waitressing.

What strategies I’ve learned that work in teaching I learned from reading on my own, or from listening to teachers who knew what they were doing. Strategies I learned in training were fuzzy, one-size-fits-all approaches with abstract scope, and how to feel good about being a teacher.

She feels good about teaching, but lousy about high school students without basic skills or knowledge.

Minimum skills tests be damned — we’re talking about kids who don’t know how language influences the decisions they make every day, from politics to credit cards. Students who do not know how to question “information” they’re receiving, who don’t know how to express themselves intelligibly verbally or in writing.

She doesn’t think “it’s as simple as apathy or disinterest,” because she’s been there herself. RedKudu recalls training for a new job in business travel. Other trainees had some experience; she had none.

There was lingo I didn’t know, codes others knew like scripture that I’d never encountered, and, to be honest, I failed miserably.

… I probably spent much more time studying in the evenings than many of my fellow trainees. But all that came to nothing as I was bewildered daily, as my fellow trainees surpassed me and the instruction itself kept up with them.

After awhile, she stopped trying. She was fired.

Many of her students don’t have the background knowledge they need to keep up.

So I wonder, if they knew what they were supposed to know when they get to us, what more might they learn? If we, as teachers, explore the notion of letting go the past and our fear of lost autonomy — in a profession which just might be clinging too tightly to the ideal of individuality for employees over the general welfare/benefit of its consumers — what might we accomplish?

It’s hard to build on your knowledge if you don’t know much.