Accused of changing courses in mid-semester — “Computer Science” to “Cooking,” “AP History” to “Cinema” — to match titles with textbooks (see “Travesty”), Vince Carbino has been removed as principal of low-performing Santee High School in Los Angeles. Carbino will work in an administrative job at the district office while the charges by teachers and students are being investigated. Teachers had threatened to petition to turn Santee into a Green Dot charter if Carbino remained at the school. That’s a potent threat in LA.

Today the LA Unified board votes on whether to convert low-performing Locke High School into 10 small, Green Dot charters, as teachers have requested.

Merit pay for teachers is proving popular in Denver, opines the Christian Science Monitor.

One triumph for this accountability tool is that hundreds of additional teachers have applied to work at the city’s worst schools, drawn by new higher pay. And even though teachers already on the payroll didn’t have to participate in the “ProComp” bonus pay program, nearly half have signed up. (Those hired since 2006 are automatically enrolled.)

Denver administrators and union leaders are working on a plan to link test score gains to bonuses while supporting teacher collaboration. Other cities may follow Denver’s model.

Seattle’s K-8 African American Academy, a persistently low-performing school, is getting more district funding, a new principal and academic coaches for one last try at success. In 1991, black activists “wanted a school the African-American community could rally around, where black students felt accepted,” reports the Seattle Times.

They planned a K-12 school where any student could enroll, but with an African-American focus, where curriculum is grounded in cultural principles such as unity, purpose and creativity, and where African-American history doesn’t start with slavery. Students wear uniforms and are called “scholars.” Some of the curriculum focuses on identity issues. For example, in one unit, middle-school kids watched the evening news and discussed its portrayal of African Americans.

In 2006, fourth graders at the academy outperformed black students in the district and matched state averages. However, achievement was dismal in other grades. Seventh grade was the worst.

In the 2005-06 school year, less than 4 percent of the academy’s seventh-graders passed the reading, writing and math portions of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL).

Black community leaders complain the district hasn’t supported the schol; district leaders say the activists, most of whom aren’t parents of academy students, have resisted district input.

As a parent, Linda Kennedy helped establish the school and enrolled her son in 1991 as a first-grader. After two years, she left — “heartbroken” but unwilling to risk her son’s education for the vision of an African-American school. The academy seemed doomed by a mediocre teaching corps, tension between two principals sharing a building and lukewarm district support, she said. She enrolled her son in private school.

When the principal asked her to stay, she said, she told him: “This is my child. I can’t experiment with him … I need a school that’s going to work now.”

She wasn’t the only one. She said middle- and upper-class parents “left in droves.”

When the school opened, it had a long waiting list. Now the building is half full. Only 16 percent of students come from a two-parent household; 89 percent are poor enough to qualify for a free lunch.

Although 93.3 percent of California students now pass the exit exam by spring of their senior year, Democratic legislators, the California Teachers Association, the California School Boards Association and the California Federation of Teachers want an alternative.

“This bill really is about a higher and richer standard,” said Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, a Santa Monica Democrat who said her Assembly Bill 1379 is designed to complement the exit exam — not eliminate it.

The hardest questions on the exam ask for 10th-grade reading and eighth-grade math skills; students need a 60 percent in language arts and a 55 percent in math to pass. It’s a four-option multiple-choice test. Students can take it six times, starting in sophomore year. Most eventually pass the reading test but continue to struggle with the math, even though mastery of elementary math and guessing on harder questions should generate a 55 percent. What “higher and richer standard” could these students meet? What standard would they meet if they knew they could get a diploma by an easier route?

Not all students necessarily receive equal learning opportunities with qualified teachers and adequate support systems, so it’s unfair to use a single test to deny diplomas, said Liz Guillen of Public Advocates, a civil rights law firm.

I think it’s unfair to give them diplomas and send them out in the world without basic literacy and math skills. But it’s a lot easier to base a diploma on inflated grades, projects or “coursework portfolios” than to get low achievers caught up. Students who can’t pass the exit exam on repeated tries will not be able to pass “alternative tests that are aligned to state content standards and as rigorous as the exit exam.” They don’t have the skills.

The governor vetoed a similar bill last year; he’ll almost certainly veto this one.

New teachers at high-poverty schools get frustrated, quit after a year or two and need to be replaced by new teachers. The New York Times looks at high turnover.

Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation’s largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I.

“We had schools where we didn’t have a single certified math teacher,” said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. “We needed an incentive, because we couldn’t convince teachers to go to these schools without one.”

After three years, nearly a third of new teachers have quit the profession, estimates the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. After five years almost half are gone. Since it takes a few years for a new teacher to get up to speed, the neediest students tend to be taught year after year by novices.

Many districts are paying a bonus to lure new teachers but few pay experienced teachers a bonus to work at the most challenging schools.

Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a group that helps urban districts recruit teachers, said attrition often resulted from chaotic hiring practices, because novice teachers are often assigned at the last moment to positions for which they have not even interviewed. Later, overwhelmed by classroom stress, many leave the field.

. . . “most of the urban districts have no coherent hiring strategy,” he said. Many receive thousands of teacher applications in the spring but leave them unprocessed until principals return from August vacations, when more organized suburban districts have already hired the most-qualified teachers, he said.

Robert Wright, a veteran middle school teacher, thinks teachers leave because of “lack of support for enforcing discipline and being treated without respect.”

If you pay them more and treat them better, there won’t be a shortage. Mostly, it’s a question of being treated better. Money comes in a distant second.

Hire novices at the last minute to teach the neediest kids in the most chaotic schools. Forget to order supplies and books. Ask sociology majors to teach math or science. Act surprised when they quit.

In Los Angeles, which still needs to fill hundreds of teaching positions, one of seven new teachers comes from the Philippines, India, Spain and Canada, reports the Daily News. If not for the Philippines, the shortage of math, science and special education teachers would be even more critical. The foreign teachers are supposed to go home after three years, keeping that revolving door spinning.

Update: At a launch for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence in South Carolina, Dave Saba ran into 40 Pakistani teachers “with varying degrees of English proficiency” imported to teach math and science. Check out Saba’s new blog.

Ken DeRosa of D-Ed Reckoning mocks a gee-whiz story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette on new technology in local schools. DeRosa advises:

When journalist arrives to see your new toy make sure you have a young student available to demonstrate something that looks like education. Bonus points if the student is photogenic and young enough to cuddle. Extra bonus points if the student comes from an historically underperforming minority group.

Sure enough, the story starts with cute, little Angel Chavez, 5, writing his name on the new white board.

Instead of chalk or marker, Angel picked up an electronic pen and scrawled his name, as best he could, across the class’s new interactive white board, a computer screen sensitive to touch that also runs computer programs, streaming videos and Web sites.

Will Angel learn more writing with an electronic pen than he would with a marker or a piece of chalk? How will the teacher use the new board to teach more effectively? That’s not clear, admits the Democrat Gazette reporter.

The (Metiri Group) report found that technology provides a “small, but significant” boost in learning when implemented carefully.

“Small but significant” is unlikely to outweigh the opportunity costs for the time and money devoted to technology, DeRosa writes.

In Back to School Blues, Victor Davis Hanson complains that the public schools that served six generations of his families are turning out young people who can’t read a warranty or calculate the price per pound of a tri-tip roast. He has some suggestions for coping with an “epidemic of ignorance.”