Math teacher Darren is shocked to discover he agrees with his superintendent on No Child Left Behind. The supe writes to teachers:

As much as have concerns about the NCLB, I do give credit to this law for unveiling the performance of our subgroups, which is data that was once ignored in our profession. The achievement gap is incredibly difficult to solve, but as long as there are schools that have managed to close or even eliminate the gap (such as the Ralph J. Bunche School in Compton) then we must continue to believe that this is possible and to strive to make it happen.

Again, I recommend Karin Chenoweth’s It’s Being Done, which profiles more than a dozen non-choice public schools that are closing or eliminating the achievement gap. It takes gutsy leaders like this superintendent and teachers like Darren.

I wrote a “proximity is not destiny” column for the Reason Foundation that’s running on the McClatchy news wire. So far, the Sacramento Bee, Pasadena Star-News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have picked it up.

Proximity is not destiny, educationally speaking. A generation of experience with racial integration has taught a clear lesson: Sitting black kids next to white kids in school is not a silver bullet that zaps unequal achievement.

However, the faith that proximity leads to equal achievement remains the cargo cult of education. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred school assignments based on race to increase racial diversity. So school leaders immediately began considering economic integration plans instead.

Sit poor kids next to middle-class kids. That should work!

Or not.

I see by the ID line that I am an adjunct scholar at the Reason Foundation. Nice to know.

When presenter Dan Hodgins told preschool teachers that boys’ brains are wired to see the big picture and girls’ brains to see details, teacher Heidi W. was dubious. She wondered especially about the claim that girls have a bigger “crockus.” She e-mailed Language Log’s Mark Liberman, who critiqued the theory of brain-sex differences and set out to discover: What’s a crockus?

Hodgins, early childhood education director at Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan, replied to Liberman’s e-mail query:

The Crockus was actually just recently named by Dr. Alfred Crockus. It is the detailed section of the brain, a part of the frontal lope (sic). It is the detailed section of the brain. You are right, it is four times larger in females then males from birth. This part of the brain supports the Corpus Callosum (the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemisphere. The larger the crockus the more details are percieved (sic) by the two sides of the brain.

But Dr. Alfred Crockus doesn’t appear to exist online. Neither does Boston Medical University Hospital, where Hodgins says he works, but there is a Boston University Hospital run by BU’s School of Medicine. Crockus is not on the faculty. Several researchers cited by Hodgins also remain elusive, writes Liberman.

For more on the elusive Dr. C and the history of Crosley Shelvador of MIT, go here and here.

Update: At I Speak of Dreams, Liz reports on her attempts to confirm Hodgins’ alleged PhD and “national awards.”

Elementary students will spend two months studying Africa before going on to U.S. history, according to Michigan’s new social studies curriculum. From the Detroit News:

Currently, teachers would need as many as eight weeks to cover the Africa portion of the American History section for elementary school, experts say. Some 800-plus African tribal nations — which existed prior to the 16th century — would need to be covered under this proposal.

That’s not sensitivity; that’s overkill. Two months of African history does not belong in American history; it belongs in world history.

In the original version, the K-12 curriculum avoided “America” to refer to the U.S., reports the News. In response to protests, “America” is back.

Education Gadfly praises the curriculum’s rigor and college-prep focus while agreeing the study of U.S. history should focus on the U.S.

“Alternative” teacher certification isn’t much of an alternative, concludes a Fordham report. Nearly 20 percent of new teachers go through an alternative program rather than a traditional college of education. But many of the alternative programs aren’t much different from the traditional route.

Entry standards are abysmally low: Two-thirds of the programs surveyed accept half or more of their teacher applicants; one-quarter accept virtually everyone who applies.

Rather than providing streamlined and effective coursework, about a third of the programs require at least 30 hours of education school courses-the same amount needed for a master’s degree.

Most disturbing, nearly 70 percent of alternative programs studied in the report are run by education schools themselves. Education schools have kept their market monopoly by moving into the alternative certification business.

Insider Higher Ed has more.

Everybody cheats, cheaters tell the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s no big deal.

Well, not to them anyhow.

Not only is cheating on the rise nationally – a 2005 Duke University study found that 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating, and if you include copying another person’s homework, that number climbs to 90 percent – but there has also been a cultural shift in who cheats and why.

It used to be that cheating was done by the few, and most often they were the weaker students who couldn’t get good grades on their own. There was fear of reprisal and shame if apprehended. Today, there is no stigma left. It is accepted as a normal part of school life, and is more likely to be done by the good students, who are fully capable of getting high marks without cheating. “It’s not the dumb kids who cheat,” one Bay Area prep school student told me. “It’s the kids with a 4.6 grade-point average who are under so much pressure to keep their grades up and get into the best colleges. They’re the ones who are smart enough to figure out how to cheat without getting caught.”

According to Denise Pope, a Stanford education professor, “Eighty percent of honors and AP students cheat on a regular basis.” Good students think they have to be perfect.

Athletes, only prone to cheating, believe in winning at all costs.

Some of the cheating involves sharing homework answers, which is encouraged by all the collaborative projects students are assigned. Students think they’re helping each other by “networking.” They don’t see it as cheating.

Technology has made cheating easier: Students may text-message answers to each other, copy questions with their cell phone camera, download formulas into their graphing calculator or turn in essays bought online. Often when students are caught, the punishment is light.

Suppose someone gets to the end of several hours of homework and it’s 10 p.m. and she still has an English paper to write. If she turns in nothing, she knows it’s a guaranteed zero. If she downloads a paper from the Internet, she might get caught and get a zero. But if she doesn’t get caught, she might get an A. So it seems worth it to many to turn in the plagiarized paper.

I don’t recall feeling a need to be perfect when I was in high school or college. I did feel a need to manage my time so I didn’t leave things to the last minute.

Via math teacher Darren, an ex-cheater.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez vows to close or take over private schools that refuse to adopt the socialist government’s new curriculum and textbooks.

“Society cannot allow the private sector to do whatever it wants,” said Chavez, speaking on the first day of classes.

Chavez’s brother, who’s the education minister, says the new education system will encourage “critical thinking” rather than indoctrinating the “new citizen.”