A kindergarten teacher may be fired for a Facebook comment that she was “teaching in the most ghetto school in Charlotte.”

Charlotte Superintendent Peter Gorman recommended she be fired.

The teacher’s attorney, John Gresham, said his client didn’t intend to offend her students and was telling the truth about the resegregated school, where only 3 percent of students are white and 93 percent qualify for lunch subsidies to low-income families.

Be careful what you write online.

At Newcomers High, a New York City school for recently arrived immigrants, students understand Thanksgiving, writes Melanie Kirkpatrick in the Wall Street Journal.

History teacher Tim Becker includes a unit on the holiday even though Thanksgiving isn’t part of the state-mandated curriculum for his 11th-grade class. It “reminds my students that they are not the first new Americans to have struggled to achieve their dreams,” he says, “and that others before them have overcome the challenges of living in a new country.”

Like the Pilgrims, most of the students at Newcomers say their families came here seeking better lives. The Pilgrims “were looking for something they didn’t have in England,” says a girl from Colombia. “When you come here it is the same. You have to face difficulties.”

Students say their parents came here to make a better life for themselves and their children.  A Bangladeshi boy says his family came for the purpose of “pursuiting the happiness.”

In (ESL teacher Sophie) Zannis’s class, we fall into a discussion of the virtues the Pilgrims exemplify and the personal characteristics they needed in order to survive the terrible winter of 1620-21, when half their number died. The words fly across the classroom: “Courage.” “Hard-working.” “Brave.” “Frustrated.” “Strong.” “Don’t give up.”

The students also believe it’s important to eat turkey, though their parents may add pierogies or rice or tortillas. It’s tradition, they say.

Eduwonk links to Education Trust slides of seventh-grade writing assignments at two California middle schools. One asks students to analyze Anne Frank’s character; the other asks students to write about “my best friend” or “a chore I hate.” The expectations gap is huge, he writes.

Raising expectations doesn’t work unless other things happen too, writes commenter John Thompson, a high school teacher in Oklahoma City.

To turn things around, it would take an honest discussion of what it takes to raise student performance when neighborhood secondary students have skills that are five years or so below their neighbors who went to magnet schools. But our district leaders had the the same visceral response as you seem to be having, and mandated immediate and much much higher standards. Instantly, many core teachers were intimidated into teaching five years above the students reading level, and failure rates soared to 95% in some. The dropout rate exploded and the district immediately abandoned the experiment.

Look at what’s being taught, adds Core Knowledge.

You can’t feed kids a thin gruel of content-free, “self-directed” reading and writing for their entire academic career and then expect them to suddenly be able to write a nuanced character study of Anne Frank in the 7th grade.  You can’t ask kids to do “self-directed” writing about their family, their friends and their personal experiences throughout elementary school to the exclusion of nearly all else, then expect them to dazzle you with their insights into literature in middle school.

Education Trust’s new report details an old complaint: The neediest students are the most likely to get teachers who didn’t specialize in the subject they’re trying to teach. It’s especially hard to hire and retain qualified math and science teachers in low-income, high-minority middle schools.

Julie Amero, accused of letting students see pornographic pictures on a classroom computer, has plead guilty to a misdemeanor and surrendered her teaching credential; she’ll also pay a $100 fine. In exchange, felony charges will not be refiled. But a soon-to-be-released report suggests she’s innocent, reports Wired.

Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut, was arrested after students in her class reported that they’d seen pornographic images on her computer screen on Oct. 19, 2004. Amero said the computer wouldn’t stop sending pop-ups and that she didn’t know what to do with the computer.

In January 2007, she was convicted of four felony pornography charges and faced up to 40 years in prison.

Computer security experts persuaded the judge to set aside the conviction. The new report confirms that the school computer was unprotected against malware and was infected. Several witnesses gave inaccurate testimony in Amero’s first trial.