You’ve heard talk of change? Mickey Kaus found it at an Ed Challenge for Change event at the Democratic convention: Dems rally against unions!

One panelist — I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children’s agenda meets the adult agenda, the “adult agenda wins too often.” Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically–and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention! “The politics are so vicious,” Booker complained, remembering how he’d been told his political career would be over if he kept pushing school choice, how early on he’d gotten help from Republicans rather than from Democrats. The party would “have to admit as Democrats we have been wrong on education.” Loud applause! Mayor Adrian Fenty of D.C. joined in, describing the AFT’s attempt to block the proposed pathbreaking D.C. teacher contract. Booker denounced “insane work rules,” and Groff talked about doing the bidding of “those folks who are giving money [for campaigns], and you know who I’m talking about.” Yes, they did!

Interrresting.

Update: Education Week has more on “tensions” between union members and education reformers at the convention. But Joe Biden takes the straight union stand: Dump NCLB (for which he voted), no pay for performance, spend more on pre-K and lowering class size.

College Summit is encouraging C students from low-income families to apply to college, reports the LA Times.

Krystal Greene, an Inglewood High teacher and College Summit advisor, says, “They need to know that even if you have [a grade point average in the] twos, you can still go to a college; you can go to a Cal State. I see more students who are excited and expecting to go to college now.”

Maybe they can get into Cal State. But will they have the reading and math skills to take for-credit classes and earn a degree? Boosting college enrollment rates is meaningless if the students who go to college get stuck in remedial classes and then quit in frustration.

My niece, who’s starting her sophomore year in college, tutors low-income high school students and worked in a summer program that brought students on campus to study and live in the dorms. The focus is on helping students improve academically so that college is not just a dream but a realistic choice.

Ellie Herman, a professional writer for 20 years, set out to become a high school English teacher in Los Angeles. It’s not easy, she found. Her years of experience were irrelevant. So was her Bryn Mawr English degree. After passing the CBEST, a test of basic reading, writing and math skills, she was told she needed to prove “subject matter competence.”

For that, I would have to fill the apparent gaps in my transcript with five courses in linguistics, expository writing, adolescent literature and American literature — or pass something called the CSET, an Orwellian, five-hour sequence of four exams with some questions so obscure I would defy most Ph.D.s to answer them. What is a modal verb? What’s an embedded appositional phrase? A grapheme?

She passed. Then she was hired as an intern by a charter school.

To enroll in the intern program, I had to fill out more applications and then complete 40 hours of pre-service training in teaching English language learners, a course that in theory would have been very useful but in fact only entailed reading a stack of paperwork and writing essays I suspected would be stuck in my file unread. I also had to summarize what I’d learned in a page of sentences that began with “I used to think,” and ended with “but now I know ….” Whatever the actual purpose of this exercise, writing about my former state of ignorance felt deeply sinister, like some kind of forced confession by a totalitarian state.

And I had to pass an 80-question, unbelievably arcane and ambiguously worded test on the U.S. Constitution. . . . Because if I hadn’t memorized the Bill of Rights I might march into the classroom and try my students twice for the same crime? What is being tested here? My patriotism? My sanity? My level of desperation? What’s next … eating centipedes?

These aren’t high standards, she argues. They are “just a high pile of standards.”

Via Edspresso.

Universal preschool hasn’t helped Oklahoma and Georgia children do better in school, write Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell of the Reason Foundation in the Wall Street Journal. A Tennessee study showed gains vanish by second grade. Head Start grads also lose their edge quickly.

Why don’t preschool gains stick? Possibly because the K-12 system is too dysfunctional to maintain them. More likely, because early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don’t begin formal education until they are 7. Subsidized preschool is available for parents who opt for it, but only when their kids turn 6.

Intensive, expensive preschool programs help the children of poor, uneducated single mothers, they write. Even then, the benefits aren’t as dramatic as proponents claim. James Heckman, a University of Chicago economist quoted by preschool proponents, “calculated that the Michigan program produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent — not even remotely close to the $10 return that Mr. Obama and his fellow advocates bandy about.”

I don’t think preschool harms kids, despite some evidence of behavior issues for those who attend more than 15 hours a week. Most children enjoy the experience. But “universal” inevitably means funding preschools that are adequate for kids who don’t need a boost and not good enough to make a difference for disadvantaged children.

Taking open-book tests a step further, a girls school in Sydney, Australia is letting students phone a friend, surf the net or use information stored on i-Pods during exams. Students must cite the sources of information they use on the exam.

“In terms of preparing them for the world, we need to redefine our attitudes towards traditional ideas of ‘cheating’,” (English teacher Dierdre) Coleman said. “Unless the students have a conceptual understanding of the topic or what they are working on, they can’t access bits and pieces of information to support them in a task effectively.

“In their working lives they will never need to carry enormous amounts of information around in their heads. What they will need to do is access information from all their sources quickly and they will need to check the reliability of their information.”

The “phone a friend” angle is the only thing that distinguishes this from open-book tests. Perhaps, students will be encouraged to make well-informed friends.

Via Textually.org.

The Sept. 5 kick-off of Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” will feature Georgia Superintendent Kathy Cox and supermodel Kathy Ireland trying to answer elementary questions on spelling, grammar, math, history, geography and science.

Via Flypaper.

Paying cash to students and their teachers for passing scores on Advanced Placement tests is boosting achievement in Texas, writes C. Kirabo Jackson in Education Next. The Advanced Placement Incentive Program (APIP) “results in a 30 percent increase in the number of students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or above 24 on the ACT, and an 8 percent increase in the number of students at a high school who enroll in a college or university in Texas.”

My evidence suggests that these outcomes are likely the result of stronger encouragement from teachers and guidance counselors to enroll in AP courses, better information provided to students, and changes in teacher and peer norms. The program is not associated with improved high school graduation rates or increases in the number of students taking college entrance exams, suggesting that the APIP improves the outcomes of high-achieving students rather than those students who may not have graduated from high school or even applied to college.

In New York City, students are receiving big bucks for scoring well on AP tests, reports the New York Times. REACH spends more than APIP: Students can get $1,000 for a 5, which is the top score, $750 for a 4 and $500 for a 3. In the first year of the privately funded experiment, more students tackled AP exams, but slightly fewer earned passing scores.

New York City also is paying middle school students for higher test scores. Results will be released in October.

Update: Bribing students is a bad idea whether it boosts scores or not, argues Liam Julian.

The Generation Project‘s “share your passion” idea could win $10,000 if it gets enough votes on IdeaBlob. Voting starts today and runs till the end of the month.

The Generation Project allows donors to create personalized gifts for high-need students. Donors’ gifts are shaped by their own passions: A musician might give a school drum sets, a writer might sponsor a poetry contest, a cancer survivor might sponsor hospital internships for students interested in medicine.

The hope is that donors will “build meaningful and lasting relationships in low-income communities.”

Gold! On Day 10, the U.S. won its first gold medal in the Education Olympics! Our ninth graders rocked on a civics subtest which “measures the abilities of a country’s students to distinguish fact from opinion, interpret political cartoons, and comprehend political messages.”

Cristo Rey Catholic schools, which require students to pay tuition by working one day a week, teach more than academics, concludes a Reason Magazine story. Low-income minority students learn about the professional world they hope to join.

Almost every weekday, 14-year-old Tiffany Adams rises before 6 a.m. in the Newark, New Jersey, home she shares with her grandmother and sisters. She dons her school uniform and catches two New Jersey Transit buses across the city, arriving at Christ the King Preparatory School, a Catholic high school that opened in September 2007, at 8.

. . . five school days a month, Adams skips the uniform and dons business attire. On those days, after a morning assembly, she bypasses the classrooms and hops instead into a van bound for Essex County College. There Adams works in the human resources department from 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. or so, scheduling résumé appointments, doing clerical work, and generally keeping the place functioning.

. . . talk to students at Cristo Rey schools, and they tell you that, for all their hours spent graphing algebraic equations, it is their jobs that get them thinking most about the future. In their gleaming office buildings, they see men and women who earn enough to afford nice, safe homes. They see how people set priorities and deadlines and execute projects. It’s easy to mock corporate America, but compared with the chaos of inner-city life, a cubicle with your name on it can seem like heaven.

A Cristo Rey school in Chicago is one of the “relentless” schools profiled in David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism.

Work is the motivator for the low-income and working-class Mexican-American students I met in writing my book. They want an education so they can get decent jobs, live in a safe neighborhood and drive a car that starts reliably. Many don’t know college-educated people, except for their teachers. They don’t know what possibilities are out there.