Teach for America should stop sending neophytes into tough inner-city schools, argues Robert Pondiscio on Core Knowledge Blog. Instead, let recruits learn to teach in high-performing schools “as pinch-hitters for some of our best, most experienced teachers.” Send the master teachers to the tough schools for two-year stints with bonus pay.

Our toughest schools are no place for rookies, even well-educated, data-driven rookies. Being a first year teacher in a tough school makes for great memoirs, but all the good intentions and Ivy League degrees under the sun don’t make you a great teacher. We’re certainly not going to turn around thousands of underperforming schools on the backs of 22-year olds.

. . . Our kids who are furthest behind would get what they really need-the best teachers, not just the best-intentioned teachers.

Some TFA teachers would leave after two years; others would be prepared to handle tougher teaching assignments.

TFA chief Wendy Kopp responds:

It is a rare person who has what it takes to excel as a teacher in a low-income community, and it’s not at all a given that teachers who do well in more privileged communities will do well in urban and rural areas. . . The individuals who come to Teach For America are coming because they want to work with the nation’s most disadvantaged children (and it is unlikely that most of them would decide to channel their energy toward teaching in more privileged contexts), and in fact their motivation to level the playing field for them is one reason for their success.

I’d prefer to see first-year teachers work as assistants for master teachers before getting their own classroom. Maybe having an assistant teacher to share the workload would serve as a lure to get experienced teachers to commit to high-need schools. Asking TFA recruits to commit to three years of teaching would screen out those most likely to leave the profession.

But teachers who might choose a difficult teaching job won’t choose an impossible job. If the high-need school is chaotic and dangerous or if it’s all fads and no substance, people with choices won’t choose to be there.

Education Next hosts a TFA debate and Eduwonk wonders why the education industry doesn’t try to replicate a better mousetrap.

Update: New teachers say they’re unprepared for the diversity they encounter in their classrooms, reports Public Agenda.

Update II: On a New York state English exam, students were told to listen to a speech by Wendy Kopp, who founded TFA, and write about why young leaders don’t need experience. Disagreeing with the thesis was not an option. Skoolboy provides an example of an essay that got the top score.

England’s science exam for 14-year-olds requires little science knowledge, complains the Royal Society of Chemistry. Instead of chemistry, biology, physics or geology, the test requires students to “read English, compare graphs and do simple tasks,” critics complain.

Questions include:

Where does the energy come from for a solar-powered mole-scarer?

Sharon, pictured on the left, is riding her horse. She is wearing a riding hat. Give the name of one organ the riding hat protects.

Students were asked why electric wires are made from copper. The four possible answers were that copper was brown, was not magnetic, conducted electricity, or that it conducted heat.

What animal might have produced a star-shaped fossil? Choices are: a snail, a starfish, a ladybird or a slug.

Last year, students needed only 57 percent correct to pass. Twenty-seven percent failed. Presumably they lack reading skills.

Since 2000, England has dropped from fourth to 14th place in international science tests given to 15-year-olds.

Via Critical Mass.

Five-year-old Alex Barton was voted out of kindergarten class by his fellow students in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Before the vote, his teacher told classmates to say what they didn’t like about Alex: He was labeled “disgusting” and “annoying.” They voted 14 to 2 to kick him out of class.

The boy apparently has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism that’s linked to poor social skills. Children can learn how to function in a group but they need to be taught explicitly and they may always be awkward, withdrawn or odd.

Alex has had disciplinary issues because of his disabilities, Barton said. The school and district has met with Barton and her son to create an individual education plan, she said. His teacher, Wendy Portillo, has attended these meetings, she said.

I’ll bet the plan doesn’t call for public humiliation and isolation.

Barton said after the vote, Alex’s teacher asked him how he felt.

“He said, ‘I feel sad,’” she said.

He hasn’t been back to class since the vote. When his mother takes him to school to drop off his sibling, he starts screaming.

Barton filed a complaint. The teacher “confirmed the incident did occur,” says a police spokeswoman. The state attorney’s office decided not to file charges for emotional child abuse. Apparently, the school district has taken no action. The mother is considering filing a lawsuit.

This is the equivalent of putting a slow child at the front of the class and asking students to vote on whether he’s too stupid to be in the class. It doesn’t have to be a criminal case of emotional abuse for it to be cause to remove the teacher from contact with children.

Thanks to Cardinal Fang and Daily Kos diarist MaccaJ.

Update: The district has reassigned the teacher to a desk job while the incident is being investigated.

Update II: Melissa Clouthier, mother of an Asperger’s child, links to a CBS interview in which the mother says Alex’s best friend — the only friend he’s ever made — didn’t want him kicked out of class but when the teacher asked him a second time he changed his vote to side with the majority.

Update III: The teacher says she only meant to kick Alex out of class for the rest of the day, not permanently. He’d been removed by the school resource officer for lying under a table and kicking it with his feet; she thought he should stay out longer.

Update IV: Slate has the police report.

A children’s web site called Planet Slayer linked to Australian Broadcasting’s science site shows Aussies as fat pigs who explode when they produce too much carbon. A Greenhouse Calculator lets users estimate “at what age a person should die so they don’t use more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources.”

“I know there’s a little bit of goth in all of us, but this might be taking it just a little too far,” (Victorian) Senator (Mitch) Fifield said of the quasi life-expectancy calculator.

“Do you think it’s appropriate that the ABC portray the average Australian as a pig and is it appropriate for a website obviously geared towards kids to depict people who are average Australians as massive overweight ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts?”

I can’t imagine a U.S. senator talking about “a little bit of Goth in all of us,” can you?

Critics complain the site portrays farmers using genetically modified seed, woodsmen, meat eaters and nuclear power advocates as planet slayers.

Don’t sing Alice Cooper in school, writes The Wine Commonsewer. You’ll be expelled.

School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
School’s been blown to pieces

Here’s Alice singing the “terrorist screed.” I note it starts with a call for choice.

TWC’s kid got in trouble for bringing a plastic replica of a rifle to school, at his teacher’s request, to serve as a prop for a boy playing Daniel Boone in the school play.

Later, in the office retrieving the offending item: Good grief, Ma’am, it’s not like someone just handed you a live grenade with the pin pulled. Handling it gingerly doesn’t make it less likely that a toy rifle is going to explode and take the admin office out with it.

Alice Cooper said he was inspired by:

…..the last three minutes of the last day of school when you’re sitting there and it’s like a slow fuse burning. If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it’s going to be so big.

Burning fuse? Oh, no.

Via Lisa Snell of Education Weak. As Mrs. TWC, she advised that bringing a toy gun to school would go badly.

Paul, a teaching coach in a failing district, writes in Kitchen Table Math about the challenge of teaching a group of students that range from above grade level to five years below. Who does the teacher throw under the bus?

. . . if you follow the rules, and it’s perilous not to, you are by definition throwing 80% of your class under the bus. Teachers adjust the curriculum to try to push as many of the distribution as possible through the eye of the needle. They teach to their median. So by definition 40% of your class is bored and 40% don’t get it.

But I thought today’s teachers could differentiate instruction for every child’s needs. In my day, they couldn’t and there always was a bored group and a lost group. I survived by reading surreptitiously under the desk. I relied on friends to kick my chair if the teacher called on me.

Math teachers, your anthem has been YouTubed: I Will Derive!

Via Slashdot.

States are wimping out on graduation exams, write Checker Finn and Liam Julian on Education Gadfly.

Our attention was seized by Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, who days ago signed into law a bill that weakens her state’s exit exam requirement by allowing high school students who don’t pass the AIMS test (thousands don’t) to supplement their meager scores with good grades. The legislation’s justification resides in the statements of students such as Maria Cami, an 18-year-old who maintains a 3.2 GPA but does not, by her own admission, understand math. “I feel like I’m being penalized for something I’m not good at,” said Cami.

Cami believes a high school diploma is an entitlement.

How did she pass her math classes?

Several other states are weakening their requirements, worried that low scorers will give up and drop out.

Gadfly offers ideas to encourage students to complete high school, such as alternative paths to graduation and an end to the “college-or-bust” mentality. The kicker: “Don’t make promises or threats that you don’t intend to keep.”