Locke High School, a disorderly, low-performing Los Angeles school, has reopened as a Green Dot charter school. LA Times columnist Steve Lopez reports on uniformed students tucking in their shirts and hustling to get to summer school on time. Can Locke change?

Zeus Cubias, who has taught at Locke for 14 years after graduating from the school and going on to UC Santa Barbara, says the early indicators are encouraging. There were skeptics who said the uniforms alone would doom the experiment. Not only has there been compliance, but only a couple of the boys seem to feel bold enough to test the ban on sagging pants.

But will higher pockets mean higher grades?

“Part of it is setting the right tone,” says Cubias. Right off the bat, you step onto campus knowing there’s control, discipline and high expectations, and the reality is that’s something most kids wanted.

“We had to step up our game, too,” Cubias says. “I’m wearing a tie every day now.”

Only 40 of 120 teachers are returning in the fall. Some quit and some were fired. Green Dot will cut class sizes from 40 students to 28 students.

Cubias was opposed to the Green Dot takeover at first, but was won over. He’s mentioned in Relentless Pursuit, Donna Foote’s book on four novice Teach for America teachers assigned to work at Locke. In addition to describing how TFA tries to fulfill its mission, Foote describes the incredible frustrations of teaching at an out-of-control school. I’m planning to write more on the book soon.

California legislators want to encourage schools to reward middle and high school students for achievement or improvement on standardized tests. The bill ban cash incentives — and provides no extra cash to schools — but suggests principals offer freebies donated by local businesses. Reach “proficient,” get a pizza.

California’s standardized tests (STAR) are high stakes for schools but not for students, who start to catch on to that in high school. It would make more sense to exempt students from the graduation exam or the college entrance test if they ace STAR.

The $20,000 question, posed by the Chicago Tribune, is why Illinois “is squandering taxpayer money on dubious after-school grants, including many that rewarded one lawmaker’s political supporters.” Senate Democrats have handed out 48 grants worth $20,000 each; only 11 went to established tutoring or mentoring programs, the Tribune found. State Sen. Rickey Herndon, D-Chicago, didn’t manage to fund a single legitimate after-school program.

In a church on Chicago’s West Side, two homeless children fiddled aimlessly on unplugged computers, awaiting their “tutor.”

Another church sat darkened and padlocked during after-school hours even though it was presented as a tutoring center.

A woman used her grant for billboard ads that would encourage teens to attend community college, but she pocketed nearly half the money. The billboards have yet to appear.

In three cases, education officials rubber-stamped legislator-selected grants to “programs where felons, one a convicted murderer, worked with children,” reports the Tribune

Education officials also didn’t heed red flags in the applications. One grantee promised to tutor on a “dailey bases,” another to teach “fluenty in speaking.” A third wrote that he’d pay himself $475 a month for a year to tutor children. When state officials e-mailed back that the grant lasted only six months, he replied that he’d pay himself $950 a month.

. . . The Al Malik Temple for Universal Truth spent its $20,000 to teach children how their birth date and name influence their destiny.

The Trib quotes a West Side principal who’d love to have $20,000 for band instruments or an after-school arts program. But would kids learn fluenty on a dailey bases? Would they learn Universal Truth?

Update: Michigan paid sex offenders, child abusers and ex-cons to provide day care, an audit revealed.

Twiggs County in central Georgia will let principals paddle misbehaving students, with their parents’ permission.

In a visit to Oakland Military Institute, a college-prep charter school, teacher-blogger Darren Miller finds explicit standards.

There are standards of behavior, standards of academic work, standards of discipline/bearing/decorum. The students know what those standards are, and the standards are not flexible.

Students typically come from low-income and working-class Hispanic, black and Asian families. The goal is to prepare students for college, not for the military, and nearly all grads go on to a four-year or two-year college.

While utilizing a military model, OMI is not a soldier factory, it’s not a recruiting arm of the military, and they’re not teaching warmongering there. . . . In addition to academic subjects OMI teaches leadership, it teaches respect, it teaches self-discipline, it teaches peaceful resolution to problems — values sorely needed given the environment so many of the students come from. Uniforms, formations, military-type discipline–these are just effective tools, very efficient tools, for instilling those values in students. They are merely a means to an end, and that end is college.

Jerry Brown, the former governor and current attorney general, fought to get the military charter started when he was mayor of Oakland, a troubled city with a very troubled school system. OMI, which works with the California National Guard, has proven popular with students and parents. There’s a big demand for structure, discipline and standards.

In The Unlived Life Is Not Worth Examining (great headline), argues Robert Pondiscio of Core Knowledge Blog in response to an AP story on college admissions essays. Why not drop the personal essay and require applicants to submit a research paper?

Which is more predictive of college success, past academic work, or a personal essay, where student students labor to make themselves seem well-rounded, fascinating and irresistible to schools?

If colleges demanded a research paper, parents would demand that teachers assign such papers. Pondiscio hopes it would trickle down to elementary schools.

The “curriculum” in my elementary school (the tedious and content-free Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop), forces children as young as third grade to grind out endless personal essays, “small moment” stories and memoirs (!) designed to plumb the depths of their eight-year old souls. But it seldom, if ever, called for kids to write anything approaching a simple five-paragraph expository essay, let alone a research paper. That might change if doing so became an requirement for college admissions.

. . . At the risk of sounding churlish, the unlived life is not worth examining. Rather than require 17 year old to unburden themselves of their life experiences, how about three pieces of actual academic work, graded by the student’s high school teachers?

Of course, the personal essay is a way for students to describe their disadvantages; those with comfortable lives are tempted to embellish or invent, sometimes with the help of a paid “editor” who knows how to find a defining moment in an undefined life.

At the University of Virginia, Parke Muth, the associate dean of admissions, shares essay tips with the AP.

“It shouldn’t be an essay about community service. It should be about a moment of time,” he said. “Start writing an essay about John who you met at a homeless shelter who talked to you about his life. Like any piece of good writing, then you’re going to make that come alive.”

You’re going to make up the whole thing, aren’t you? Tip: Pretend you met “John” at a bus stop, so you won’t have to supply the name of a shelter director. (This is so Season 5 of The Wire.)

It would be healthier to focus students on demonstrating their mastery of college skills.

In Our School, I write about helping a boy with a college essay asking him to describe a challenge he’d overcome. It didn’t occur to Frank to write about being Mexican-American. He explained how he’d overcome his math fears to become an A student. That college turned him down, but he was accepted elsewhere and earned his BA (theater arts) in four years.

A four-year college degree is no guarantee of prosperity, reports the Wall Street Journal. College graduates’ wages “rose well above inflation” for decades but plateaued in 2001. Adjusting for inflation, a college-educated worker earns 1.7% below the 2001 level.

College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only. What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.

To be sure, the average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed. Yet while that so-called college premium is up from 40% in 1979, it is little changed from 2001, according to data compiled by Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank.

A small subset of workers with financial skills are earning enormous salaries in finance and corporate law. But most college graduates are finding that a BA or even a BS is not a ticket on the gravy train.

In Intellectual Dishonesty on Sex Bias?, NY Timesman John Tierney continues the debate, started here, on whether women are underrepresented in the physical sciences and engineering due to choice or discrimination. (Also see my post, Title Nining Science.)

Tierney points out that today’s full professors were hired decades ago, when very few women were earning doctorates. Thanks to tenure and federal age discrimination laws, old profs can’t be forced to retire and make way for younger and more diverse PhDs.

Given the slow turnover of faculty and its bad effect on opportunities for young female (and male) scientists, should advocates for more women in science be trying to eliminate tenure? (Some Title Niners have advocated its abolition.)

The comments are unusually intelligent.

Let women choose non-STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers, writes Carrie Lukas of Independent Women’s Forum.