At low-performing Lawrence High in Massachusetts, two sets of twin sisters from immigrant families — Dominican and Vietnamese — are headed for the Ivy League. The Boston Globe reports:

Cristina and Karina Ovalles — twin daughters of a Dominican immigrant — are headed to Harvard University after years of disciplined studying and a firm nudge from their mother and a school counselor. Meanwhile, their friends, Van and Tu Le , twin sisters who emigrated from Vietnam to Lawrence 10 years ago with their parents, will head to Brown University in Providence.

The Les’ father works in a metal shop; their mother works at a microchip factory. Neither speaks much English. They consider “A” the only acceptable grade.

“To me it doesn’t really matter what school I go to, because wherever I go to in Lawrence, it’s going to be better than Vietnam,” says Van, a baby-faced 19-year-old. “I don’t look at Lawrence and say ‘wow, this is a bad city.’ It’s my way out. It’s my opportunity to succeed.”

Van graduated fourth in the class, Tu was third and the Ovalles sisters were co-valedictorians. Their mother is a cafeteria worker who speaks little English. Like the Le parents, she pushed her children to study hard and excel.

The Vietnamese twins attended an English-language class for Asian immigrants in first and second grade before joining the mainstream. The Dominican girls started in Spanish-language classes and moved to English mainstream classes in second grade.

“English Learners” in California will be tested in English, ruled Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, in response to a lawsuit by eight school districts. The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

The lawsuit claims that testing students only in English does not accurately measure their abilities because they get many questions wrong simply because they don’t understand English, which makes it harder to do word problems in math or show mastery of grammar.

No Child Left Behind lets states to test students in their native languages for up to three years, but California requires Spanish-speaking students to take the tests after one year.

Typically, English Learners do much better in math than in reading or writing on state exams. When California students graduate to “fluent English proficient” status, their scores are counted in the EL category until they’ve tested as proficient in English language arts for three years in a row. So the EL category used for state and federal accountability includes students who’ve mastered English, those who’ve been learning in English for years and newcomers enrolled for more than 12 months.

For more, see my Lexington Institute paper, “How Good is Good Enough: Moving California’s English Learners to English Proficiency.” Or read my book, Our School, about a charter high school that prepares students from Mexican immigrant families for four-year colleges.

Update: This story on rising test scores for eighth graders in New York City notes that New York has been forced by the feds to give immigrant students the same test, in English, as their classmates. Scores are down in elementary school because of the inclusion of English Learners. I predict attention to EL’s learning needs will rise.

Newsweek’s Challenge Index, which rates high schools based on the percentage of students who take Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests, is out.

My daughter’s alma mater, Palo Alto High School, and sister school Gunn High refused to participate in the rankings.

School officials say they didn’t want to expose students to the shallowness, stress and unwanted publicity that comes with the survey, which ranks the top 1,200 U.S. high schools.

“It’s a very simplistic premise that the quality of a school can be measured by the number of AP tests students take,” said Marilyn Cook, associate superintendent of the wealthy district in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Some Palo Alto parents worry that students are overloading on AP courses and stressing out, but that’s all about getting into an elite college. Nobody takes an extra AP to raise their school’s rank. I’m guessing Paly and Gunn didn’t rate as high as parents thought they should.

The Challenge Index has limitations: It rewards schools even if students take AP-labeled classes but can’t pass the AP exam. But I think it’s a useful exercise.

Update: In a column, index creator Jay Mathews explains why he thinks it measures an important factor and reprints an e-mail from an AP chemistry teacher about the long-term effects of her class on Sleepy, Grumpy, Sweetie and Angry.

Candidate Hillary Clinton proposes $10 billion in federal matching funds for state pre-kindergarten programs open to all four-year-olds.

On Early Stories, Richard Colvin wonders if this will be covered as political or education.

If only political reporters cover it, the stories are likely to focus on political strategy and positioning. That’s not unimportant, because the politics of an expanded federal role in a program serving young children are tricky, even more so than other federal efforts, such as the No Child Left Behind act. But the outline of the Clinton program — requiring all teachers to have bachelor’s degrees and special training, standards, use of certain curricula and so forth — have educational implications. (Just one: where will all the well-trained teachers come from? There isn’t much a of a pipeline to produce such teachers.) So, one hopes that education writers will jump in as well.

In an earlier post, Colvin reports on a “webinar” on research showing the best pre-K teachers aren’t necessarily those with college degrees. Researcher Robert C. Pianta has developed a quality scale for pre-k teachers that “predicts quite accurately how much children learn.” In most classes studied, Pianta found only a quarter of teachers provided high-quality instruction.

Fortunately, however, Pianta and his colleagues have developed some training tools that help pre-k teachers get better. He asserts that it is the skill and knowledge of the teachers — not their degrees or certifications — that matters. In fact, his data show no correlation between degree attainment and teacher performance. What does matter is training and professional development tied to knowledge and skill about teaching in actual classrooms.

So why require that pre-k or preschool teachers have a college degree? To raise their pay and status, Colvin replies

In other words, it’s about positioning pre-k as part of the formal education system, which requires formal degrees and credentials.

Pre-kindergarten is valuable to children from disadvantaged and non-English-speaking families; many children with disabilities or learning problems also benefit from a head start. But most children do not need to start a formal educational program at the age of four in order to be successful in school. And, if we’re going to spend billions of dollars to provide pre-k, why not spend the money on training shown to be effective rather than college credits shown to be irrelevant?

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles is trying out a new vision, response and memory test that may identify drivers who aren’t as sharp as they think they are.

At Right on the Left Coast, Darren objects to a government-mandated test that could blight the elderly’s love of driving.

1. It stifles the creativity of drivers.
2. It’s not testing the “whole driver”.
3. There’s plenty that goes into driving that can’t be evaluated by a machine.
4. This is just “drill and kill” — why aren’t they testing critical thinking skills, which the research shows is more important to driving than merely being able to see?
5. This is a one-size-fits-all, high-stakes test.
6. Why should we test, anyway? Testing doesn’t make anyone a better driver.

Of course, it’s possible he’s being sarcastic.

Bronx Assemblyman Peter Rivera wants to require schools to show Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” to every student every year, starting in first grade. Andrew Wolf writes in the New York Sun:

Mr. Rivera, who up until now never seemed to be particularly interested in the education issues of his community, where test scores rise a lot slower than the temperature of the earth, seems to have found a new cause.

“Al Gore has suggested that every science class in America watch this film,” Mr. Rivera says. “My legislation will mandate the showing to all students in grades 1 through 12 because the message of this documentary must be seen by every member of the next generation. They are the ones most likely to listen.”

Via KitchenTable Math.

In Canada, a high school student complained Gore’s movie is inescapable.

First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.

Those Canadian kids would be grateful to see the movie only once a year.

At George Jackson Academy, an all-minority private school in New York City’s East Village, boys in fourth through eighth grade learn civility, reports the New York Times. They also learn academic skills that qualify them for scholarships at elite private high schools.

Jackson, which is nonsectarian, was started by the principal of a Christian Brothers school who wondered why so many boys were vanishing from the college track so early. The school recruits boys — 51 percent black, 33 percent Latino and 16 percent Asian — with high IQs. Donations cover 92 percent of the $12,500 tuition.

In contrast to Charleston’s Brentwood Middle School (see previous post), where rudeness is assumed to be students’ authentic culture, Jackson students are taught to be courteous and helpful to each other.

A visitor is immediately struck by the fact that the boys, wearing ties as if they were corporate lawyers, greet visitors by looking them squarely in the eye and offering a handshake. There’s none of the roughhousing common to middle school hallways.

Even the brightest boys may lose their motivation at schools where academic success brings on the bullies.

“Guidance counselors in the public schools are sending us these kids because they see they are bored, being warehoused and veering off into drugs or other things,” said (David) Arnold, the school’s head.

I’ve talked to black parents seeking a school — charter or private — where it would be socially acceptable for their sons to excel academically. They were much less worried that their daughters would mocked for studying.

In Maryland, a task force looking at ways to raise the achievement of black male students proposes — among other ideas — creating single-sex classes for troubled students at predominantly black high schools.

“For historically disadvantaged students, single-sex classes have shown a consistently positive effect on academic outcomes,” the report says. “In classes where gender and racial differences are suppressed — rather than served — it’s almost always the African-American male who loses out.”

Many single-sex experiments have fizzled; it’s clear that boys-only or girls-only classes don’t make a difference unless there’s a significant difference in teaching. However, so many black boys are growing up fatherless that they may benefit from classes with male teachers.

The Maryland task force also suggested recruiting non-violent criminals to serve as mentors to black boys. It’s hard to imagine a stupider idea.

A white teacher at a black school in Charleston, South Carolina was subjected to a “racially hostile workplace” ruled a federal court because school officials did nothing to protect her from verbal abuse by her middle school students. They argued the profanity — with “white” as the adjective” — was “part of the students’ culture,” writes columnist Kathy Parker. Elizabeth Kandrac, who was fired when she filed a complaint, settled with the district for $200,000.

Kandrac’s attorney, Larry Kobrovsky, argued that the repeated use of “white” made these slurs racists in nature. But school officials insisted that because black students were equally abusive to other blacks, the language wasn’t inherently racist.

So, it’s OK to let students shout vulgar insults at teachers as long as they’re destroying the learning environment in all their clases? Parker writes:

. . . the worst racists are those teachers and administrators who denied these empowered brats the expectation of civilized behavior.

These students are capable of better. Someone should teach them.

In the comments, Hube links to a Colossus of Rhodey post about Brandy Stokes, another teacher who sued Brentwood Middle School for racial discrimination. I can’t figure out what happened to that suit, filed after Kandrac’s, but it turns out that a white male teacher also sued and won $50,000 in a mediated settlement.

On Teacher Voices, Ellen asks about homework and grades:

You have a student who does/turns in NONE of the homework. However, s/he receives an A on every test and/or project assigned. What grade to you assign, and why?

Colleagues respond.

Triticale found this quote:

Children used to learn to read one letter, or, at least, one syllable, at a time, and to furnish forth a complete word by piecing together its component parts. Now, rumor says, the method is to encourage them to grasp whole words, long or short, at once, by instantaneous observation, or, as often happens, by an effort of the imagination. When the word grasped is the word the letters spell, that is observation. When it is some other word, that is imagination. The development of either faculty is considered by contemporary educators to be useful.

The quote comes from Edward Sandford Martin’s Lucid Intervals — great title! — written in 1900.