Poteau, Oklahoma boasts Pansy Kidd Middle School.

In condemning educational romanticism, Charles Murray advocates defeatism, writes Liam Julian in The Weekly Standard. Murray attacks the idea that all children can achieve proficiency and a college degree. Julian agrees with that, but not with Murray’s belief that below-average students wouldn’t learn more in better schools.

Just because 50 percent of children will always be below average, it does not follow that the average itself cannot be shifted — that what it means to be “average” cannot be substantially improved. And it does not follow that a lot of students in dismal, depressing, decaying public schools could not be learning a lot more than they currently are.

A third of students don’t earn a high school diploma. It’s not romantic to think that most could master the high school curriculum if taught well from kindergarten on. College? Maybe not. But they need enough education to be self-sufficient adults.

To avoid discouraging losers, British youth soccer (known as “football”) for seven- and eight-year-olds has banned coaches from publicizing which team has the best record in the league, reports The Telegraph. No prizes may be given. Some local associations have banned tracking results or awarding trophies for nine-, ten- and 11-year olds as well.

Scott Ager, who last season managed Priory Parkside under-9s ‘A’ team in Huntingdon, was sharply reprimanded after declaring that his team had won the league and having them photographed with a trophy by their local newspaper.

The theory is that children need time to build their skills and enjoy the game before worrying about winning and losing. However, it’s rare to see kids who don’t know which is the best team in their league.

All this has national implications.

During a visit to the Olympics in Beijing last month, (Prime Minister) Gordon Brown admitted that Labour’s decision to reduce competitive school sport had been a “tragic mistake” and promised to re-introduce it.

“We want to encourage competitive sports in schools, not the ‘medals for all’ culture we have seen in previous years,” the Prime Minister said. “It was wrong because it doesn’t work. In sport you get better by challenging yourself against other people.”

Fewer British children play on school sports teams each year. Perhaps it’s boring if nobody wins and nobody loses.

Michigan Technical Academy students are making biodiesel to power two school buses at 80 cents a gallon. They use cooking oil from a nearby tortilla factory.

The charter-school students’ next challenge is to keep the fuel from congealing when the temperature dips below 40 degrees.

“We have a lot of students good at solving puzzles, diagnosing problems, coming up with creative solutions, working with their hands, and taking things apart to find out how to make them work better,” (Superintendent Jeremy) Gilliam said. “These are our type of kids, and their skills are still in short supply.”

Via Education Gadfly.

More than 90 percent of elementary students get a 24 to 30-minute recess every day, reports the Center for Public Education. However, schools that once scheduled more than half an hour for recess report shaving minutes. High-minority, high-poverty and urban schools are the most likely to drop recess altogether.

Eighteen percent of elementary schools with a poverty rate over 75 percent do not provide first graders with recess compared to 3 percent of schools with 50–74 percent poverty rate, 4 percent with 35–49 percent poverty rate, and 4 percent of schools with less than 35 percent poverty rate.

These are the kids who are unlikely to have a backyard to play in or a safe park around the corner or an after-school gymnastics class.

Kids’ Science Challenge lets third- through sixth-graders design experiments for real scientists and engineers.

How do you get a ten year old turned on to science? By empowering them to create designs for a new skateboard, join SETI astronomers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, explore new ways to improve the quality of our drinking water, or invent a new candy flavor.

The National Science Foundation is funding the project, which kicks off Oct. 1.

Christina Jeronomo was an “A” student in high school English classes; she thought she was prepared for college. But she had to take remedial English at Long Beach Community College, delaying her goal of transferring to a four-year college where she can earn a psychology degree. From AP:

. . . a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.

“That is a very large cost, but there is an additional cost and that’s the cost to the students,” said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chair of the group Strong American Schools, which is issuing the report “Diploma to Nowhere” on Monday. “These students come out of high school really misled. They think they’re prepared. They got a 3.0 and got through the curriculum they needed to get admitted, but they find what they learned wasn’t adequate.”

High school was too easy, Jeronimo says. She wishes she’d been told to work harder.

Boys compete to solve problems quickly, while girls converse in an Arkansas elementary school that offers all-boy and all-girl classes in fifth grade.

Boys sit at clusters of desks in Pam Long’s fifth-grade classroom, forming teams that race to answer questions and complete math drills.

In a typical classroom, the boys are asked to sit calmly in desks, complete story problems and answer questions after raising their hands. But speed, enthusiasm and competition get the pupils in Long’s all-boys class motivated to learn and to participate, she said.

. . . (Monitor Elementary School) has three fifth-grade classrooms. In the girls-only room, pupils use a natural drive for conversation to discuss assignments, unhindered by the watching eyes of boys. Long focuses on competition in her boys-only room, while a third teacher leads a typical class that absorbs additional pupils of either sex who come throughout the year.

Researcher Sara Mead warns that “boy-friendly” teaching can mean lowering standards.

“Writing across the curriculum” is supposed to help students build writing skills. But does writing teach math skills? Lefty of Out in Left Field describes the Connected Math curriculum for sixth grade, which instructs students to choose a number between 10 and 100 “that you especially like.”

In your journal
*record your number
*explain why you chose that number
*list three or four mathematical things about your number
*list three or four connections you can make between your number and your world

By contrast, Singapore Math poses an algebra question.

Lefty also complains that his son’s sixth-grade teacher gives full credit for “I don’t know” when accompanied by a written explanation of the student’s questions about the problem but only partial credit for a correct answer without an explanation of how the student solved the problem.

Left thinks left-brained, math-loving students should be able to do math in math class.