The culture of a class is more important than its size in determining whether students will learn, writes a Los Angeles teacher.

I have two 10th-grade classes of about 30 students each. One of them is an “honors” class; the other, “regular.” In my honors class, the 30 students are engaged and demanding. They probe texts, cultivate questions, encourage discourse and write analytically. My regular class, on the other hand, is allergic to homework; students belch aloud and feel no shame because this is “just school”; they bully and curse at one another; they cannot sit still; they cannot listen; and their distraction is heightened by the gadgets they carry.

Each of these classes has its own culture. At the root of the culture are expectations — mine and theirs. In both classes my expectations exceed the students’, as it should be, but in the honors class, the students feed on one another’s enthusiasm. Sometimes the parts fare worse than the whole, but when the whole grows, so do the individuals. In the regular class, the parts are often better than the whole, but when the whole fails, as it too often does, so do the individuals.

It’s hard for teachers to create a positive culture in a large class, she writes, though some teachers never stop trying.

School is out but you can visit a struggling Baltimore high school in HBO’s Hard Times at Douglass High, subtitled “a No Child Left Behind Report Card.” At Thurgood Marshall’s alma mater, ninth graders come in four or five years below grade level; half drop out by the end of the first year. In this clip, a college counselor says only one student in the whole school broke 1000 on the SATs (with 1600 maximum); the low score was 440.

Eventually, Douglass fails to make the adequate yearly progress required by the No Child Left Behind Act and the city and state wrestle for control of the school.

These kids were failing in elementary school, before NCLB was passed. The solutions have to start long before high school.

Also on HBO, Resolved highlights debaters from urban schools. Here’s a clip from the documentary.

The Urban Debate League is hot right now. (Despite its woes, Douglass High has a successful debate squad.) I recommend Joe Miller’s Cross X on great debaters at a failing school. My book, Our School, features Downtown College Prep’s Mock Trial team, which lost with pride.

Update: Liam Julian concludes that Douglass High’s principal and teachers are kindly, devoted and not up to the challenges of teaching very difficult students. The New York Times review of Hard Times is here.

Rhode Island now requires a “performance-based assessment,” such as a senior project, to qualify for graduation. Bill Tucker visited Portsmouth High:

Beginning this year, to graduate, all 200 seniors at Portsmouth are required to complete a year-long senior project, consisting of the “4Ps” — a research paper, a tangible product, a process portfolio, and today’s oral presentation. Students select their projects, submit a letter of intent, and work closely with a school or community mentor. And, the projects really are diverse. The first student I saw today presented the stage set she’d designed for the school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Another student’s project consisted of running a marathon and fundraising to support leukemia research.

Education Gadfly warns of subjectivity: Vermont tried portfolios years ago, but gave up the experiment because RAND found the results were unreliable: Different raters would give different grades to the same portfolio. Gadfly asks:

. . . how can assessors be qualified to judge such varied types of presentations, from light saber exhibitions, to egg-poaching demonstrations, to harmonica jamborees? Furthermore, states are famously reticent to bar students from graduating even when objective measures of those pupils’ skills show them unambiguously unprepared for the real world and undeserving of a diploma. Will Rhode Island really hold back a student who flubs a flute recital?

With other “members of the community,” I once served as a judge for students’ demonstrations at a K-8 school. I found it very hard to evaluate the quality of their work. I didn’t know what was reasonable to expect. I discovered belatedly that I was praising younger students for the teacher’s creativity. The older kids were writing sonnets. They weren’t very good. But were they not very good for eighth graders? I couldn’t tell. Fortunately, the stakes were nonexistent.

In Britain, white working-class boys are becoming an underclass, some fear.

Just six per cent of white boys eligible for free school meals went to university compared to 26 per cent of working class young men from ethnic minority backgrounds. Some 34 per cent of girls from deprived ethnic minority families went to university, according to researchers.

College-going rates are very high for students of Chinese and Indian descent, lower for those from black Caribbean families. As in the U.S., females have overtaken males on campus. Overall, about half of British girls but only a third of boys are studying for a college degree.

Two-thirds of students diagnosed with learning disabilities are normal kids who’ve been taught poorly, argued Jay Greene and Greg Forster on Pajamas Media. The blame the “special education epidemic” on financial incentives to classify struggling students as disabled.

Not so, counters Laura McKenna of 11D, who’s dealt with the system as a parent. Most special-education students have real disabilities that may not have been recognized in the past, she writes.

Many of us can think back to our own childhoods and remember the kids who were ostracized, lonely, strange, smelly, weird, hyper, and angry. Today, those kids have a much better shot at life, and at an education because they are getting appropriate services. With help, they are more likely to finish high school and even attend college. They will be able to more fully function in society and provide for themselves, rather than spend a lifetime on welfare.

Anecdotally, I haven’t seen a single kid in my kid’s special needs classrooms that I thought should not be there. In fact, after having compulsively reading every article and book on neurological disabilities, I see undiagnosed kids (and adults) all the time.

In her suburban school district, administrators see special ed as a huge financial burden.