Young people are spending less time reading books and more time reading online. Does online reading count as real reading? From the New York Times:

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

A would-be English major, 15-year-old Nadia doesn’t like to read books.

On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. . . . Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers.

Nationally, teens’ reading scores are flat or declining as fewer youths say they read for fun. But some say reading tests don’t measure the “digital literacy” skills young people are developing online.

On traditional reading tests, young people who read novels outscore other readers. The better readers may be reading novels or reading novels may create better readers — or a bit of both.

Reading and writing online beats watching television. But does it beat reading books? As the world’s most linear person, I find it hard to believe that “digital literacy,” whatever that is, is just as good as plain old-fashioned literacy.

Integrating schools by economic and social class raises achievement, argues a New York Times Magazine story, which looks at “the new integration” in Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina and Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky.

But it can’t be done in large cities, writes Kevin Drum. Matt Yglesias also is dubious. There aren’t enough middle-class students to go around.

Yes, it can, counters Richard Kahlenberg on Taking Note. It’s possible to expand urban school district boundaries and bus kids to the suburbs. Progress is possible even if total integration is not.

Even if class integration is possible, it’s not the best way to improve achievement, argues Liam Julian in Gadfly. “Is it not eminently more sensible to devote resources to, say, attracting knowledgeable teachers and building solid curricula?”

He fears “diversity creep.” The diverse school can’t segregate students by achievement.

If increasing academic achievement is the goal, then muddying course rosters by amalgamating pupils of all different academic abilities is foolhardy. It disserves the high-achievers, who must patiently wait while the material they’ve already mastered is repeatedly explained to the low-achievers and who must watch the level of their classroom discourse plunge. And it disserves the low-achievers, who may simply be unable to keep up with the curriculum, no matter how much their teacher waters it down. Teachers know this.

On Flypaper he adds:

The push for socially engineered ratios of white to black, poor to middle-class in schools manages to detract from parents’ wishes and to distract from a focus on academic achievement and improving the schools that currently exist.

In some cases, social integration is doable and worth doing. But I think many disadvantaged children would benefit more from well-organized schools designed to meet their learning needs. The children of poorly educated parents and the children of educated, middle-class parents come to school with different challenges. What works for one group may not work well for the other.

Some 19,000 Washington, D.C. youths are learning that work means getting paid for showing up for summer classes — except you might get paid even if you don’t show up and you might not get paid if you do. And don’t count on there being classes or anything else to do. Hundreds of students in the “summer jobs” program sat in a hot auditorium for a month with nothing to do and no pay, reports the Washington Post.

Dianna Robinson, the summer academy director, said students were stuck in the auditorium for the first two weeks because proper permissions for the site — the P.R. Harris Elementary School — had not been secured from the school system. She said programs in the next two weeks had been delayed because she was registering more than 500 students not on the payroll.

Students are supposed to be doing arts programs, such as jewelry-making, painting and singing in a choir, Robinson said, as well as learning such “life skills” as job readiness.

The kids are going to get an odd idea of what it means to have a job. According to some commenters, students who flunk a class and make it up in summer school also get paid, a reward for failure.

Robinson told the Post that the first month hadn’t been a waste.

“Some of these 14-year-olds are the only ones earning a salary in a three-generation household,” Robinson said. “If that means sitting in a hot auditorium, then I’m okay with that.”

To teach job readiness, D.C. could hire students to do real clean-up work during the summer, reserving paid jobs for students who worked hard during the school year. Your record shows you’re a slacker? Nobody will want to hire you, kid. Think about it.

Girls have caught up with boys in math scores, conclude a team of Wisconsin and Berkeley researchers in an article in the July 25 issue of Science. Girls now are as likely as boys to take high-level math classes — and it shows. Not only are scores the same through high school, women now earn 48 percent of bachelor’s degrees in math.

Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. (Wisconsin’s Janet) Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.

Researchers had difficult measuring ability to solve complex problems because many state tests asked few or no complex questions.

“The tests we are currently using are really not asking students to perform the types of tasks they are likely to encounter in the workforce,” (Berkeley’s Marcia) Linn said. The lack of complex problems on assessment tests “doesn’t motivate teachers or textbook developers to create material that challenges students, and it sends the wrong message to schools with regard to what should be emphasized in math courses.”

While males continue to outscore females on the math SAT, that’s skewed by the fact that a larger percentage of female students take the test.

Female students have stronger reading and writing skills, equal math skills and higher college aspirations. The males aren’t keeping up. At Why Boys Fail, Richard Whitmire’s new blog, he wonders if the shift toward word problems has helped girls and made math harder for boys.

Jay Greene, a fan of macaroni art, wonders why school can’t be more like summer camp, which his kids find enjoyable and often educational.

Forget it, responds Rory, a parent of five, at Parentalcation.

Is he crazy… my kids waste enough time at school on silly projects with no educational value.

My son’s gifted class last year was a lot like camp. The teachers idea of math enrichment was having them do some crazy number wheel..

I think camp is fun because it’s designed to be fun. If kids don’t learn Hebrew (two of Greene’s kids go to Jewish camp) or tennis or how to sprinkle the glitter on the glue, that’s OK. If they go to school and don’t learn reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, that’s not OK, no matter how much fun they had doing arts and crafts.

‘Fun and Interesting’ is overrated, writes Ken of D-Ed Reckoning. He quotes Vicki Snider, author of Myths and Misconceptions about Teaching, on the risks of overemphasizing fun activities.

First, fun activities lead to a lot of wasted instructional time. Second, activity-based instruction can make it difficult for learners to focus on what it is they are supposed to learn. Knowing what to pay attention to is called selective attention in the psychological literature and it is often a problem for young or naive learners or those with learning disabilities. Third, rather than increase motivation to learn, activities with a high entertainment value but a low content value may actually decrease the probability that a child will become a lifelong learner. Fourth, without effort and practice, individuals cannot master any intellectual or creative endeavor.

Snider also thinks that learning the basics to fluency makes further learning a lot less arduous and potentially more fun.

Many of the allegedly fun activities my daughter did in school didn’t strike me as fun at all, probably because I have no ability or interest in arts and crafts. I’m still suffering post-traumatic stress from trying to make her a George Washington wig in third grade. Cotton balls, Elmer’s Glue, no, no, no . . .

Update: Catching Sparrows defends age and experience in teaching.