Teens aren’t just wasting time when they “hang out” on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites, concludes a study by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Youth Project.

“It may look like kids are wasting a lot of time online, but they’re actually learning a lot of social, technical and also media literacy skills,” said Mizuko Ito, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine who lead the study.

. . . Kids denied access to new media, because their family can’t afford it or because their parents, school or library restrict their access or time on social networking sites, are likely to be short on skills that members of their generation are expected to possess, the researchers concluded.

Offline youths are “handicapped in their efforts to participate in common culture and sociability,” the study reads.

I’d bet social networking skills can be learned quickly if young people feel the need.

I was somewhat out of the common culture as a kid because I watched so little TV — and no Westerns. I read books. I’m now catching up by watching reruns and DVDs of Gunsmoke and Maverick. (My husband likes old Westerns.) There’s a great Maverick episode, “Gun-Shy,” that parodies Gunsmoke.

Fordham’s A Byte at the Apple looks at education data: Schools are getting better at tracking who’s doing what but there’s plenty of room for improvement. In the future: Students would carry a digital “backpack” of achievement information with them as they move through school.

Pre-K Can Work, writes Shepard Barbash in City Journal — but only it’s focused on disadvantaged children, uses effective teaching techniques and is held accountable for results. Unfortunately, the preschool expansion bills in Congress would fund the same, old programs that have show no lasting results.

Pre-K teachers learn that it’s not “developmentally appropriate practice” to seat children at desks; to give them worksheets; to make them work to master the alphabet, letter sounds, and math; to assess their academic skills (medical, dental, and nutrition assessments are okay); and to group them by skill level for instruction (because all children should receive equal treatment and because children learn as much from one another as they do from adults).

In the ’70s, Project Follow Through, a huge federally funded research project, examined nine preschool models. Only Direct Instruction “consistently accelerated the academic achievement of poor children,” Barbash writes. But DI violated the beliefs of early childhood educators, so the results were ignored.

The dominant preschool curricula “don’t show teachers how to teach oral language and phonological awareness the fast way,” he writes. That’s why pre-K hasn’t improved school performance in Georgia and Oklahoma, which have programs for years.

Homework’s not done? British students blame their computers, a survey finds.

Of the top-five tech homework excuses, computer crashes resulting in lost essays came out on top.

Others were accidental deletion after completing the homework and a failed internet connection preventing the carrying out of research.

Some complain of unresponsive printers. The creative blame  Russian hackers. And then there’s the classic:  The dog peed on my computer.

In Nagging for Success in City Journal, I review David Whitman’s book on paternalistic, transformative schools, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism.

“Nagging is love,” I used to tell my daughter. “I am a much-loved child,” she’d reply. And so it is: if you care about a kid, you tell her what she’s doing right and what she’s doing wrong. You stick with her when she makes mistakes. You honor her successes. You nag. . . . To give disadvantaged students a shot at college and mainstream success, (Whitman) argues, schools must teach “not just how to think but how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional middle-class values.”

My book, Our School, which makes a lovely and thoughtful holiday gift, is about a charter high school that sweats small, medium and large stuff to prepare students to succeed in college.

Measures That Matter by Achieve and Education Trust sets out a “new set of basics” — standards, course requirements, curriculum and teacher support materials, aligned assessments, and an information/accountability system — that will prepare high school graduates for college and careers.

‘Open source’ testing could satisfy those who want local measures of achievement linked to national standards, writes Charles Barone in Education Week. He envisions a national data bank of test items based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Program for International Student Assessment.

Over the course of one or two years, the panel would create a pool of test items that would be piloted and subjected to the usual analyses of psychometric rigor. The goal would be to move beyond multiple-choice items to short-answer, problem-solving, essay, and other formats.

States and districts could pick items from the bank to develop local assessments. But comparability would remain an issue, I think.

Computer-adaptive testing is gaining in popularity, reports Education Week. These tests respond to correct answers by asking harder questions; wrong answers prompt easier questions. Tests are shorter because high achievers don’t waste time with questions that are too easy and low achievers don’t face questions that are too hard. Teachers can pinpoint each student’s achievement level. And teachers get the results instantly, so they can use the information to adapt instruction.

Only Oregon uses computer-adaptive testing as its accountability test, though Utah is considering it.

Students who take three years of high school math often forget what they’ve learned by college and end up in remedial classes. So more high schools are requiring seniors to take a math class — but not necessarily trig, precalculus or calculus, reports Education Week.

The most popular emerging courses include statistics and discrete math . . . as well as classes in quantitative reasoning, math modeling, and math in business and finance.

The academic demands of those courses vary. Many target students who have completed Algebra 2, but who do not want to take precalculus or fear they would find it too much of a strain. Some are being drawn up for elite students who have flown through all the math classes available to them.

Many students are surprised to discover that math can be useful in real life. It’s not just designed by sadistic adults to torture teenagers.

Homeschooling has gone mainstream, concludes Milton Gaither in Education Next.  An estimated 1.1 million to 2.5 million children are educated at home. Others attend “cybercharters,” learning at home using online curricula provided by tax-funded charter organizations.

Home schooling is blending with other education movements to lead the way toward a 21st-century education matrix that is far more dynamic and adaptive than the schooling patterns of the past.

Only 30 percent of homeschooling parents give religious reasons.

. . . reasons range from concerns about special education to bad experiences with teachers or school bullies to time-consuming outside activities to worries over peanut allergies.

Homeschooling parents are great collaborators, organizing courses and activities.

Journalist Peter Beinart found that Wichita’s 1,500 home-schooling families had created “three bands, a choir, a bowling group, a math club, a 4-H Club, boy- and girl-scout troops, a debate team, a yearly musical, two libraries and a cap-and-gown graduation.” “Home-schooled” children were meeting in warehouses or business centers for classes “in algebra, English, science, swimming, accounting, sewing, public speaking, and Tae Kwan Do.”

Ppublic school districts have lost the fight to criminalize homeschooling, Gather writes. Some now offer part-day enrichment classes to regain a fraction of per-student funding.

Also in Education Next: What happens when states adopt alternative certification for new teachers that’s truly an alternative to education school?

Genuine alternative certification opens the door to more minority teachers, and student learning is more rapid in states where the reform has been introduced.

“Scientific evidence that alternative certification harms students” is “somewhere between scant and nonexistent.”