“Many see the academy as serving rich and spoiled people who have always gotten what they want — that’s why they are crying now,” said Laura Pemburton, a district cook with two children in neighboring schools. “They have made it seem as though kids who like sports are lesser beings.”

Of course, parents of students have some cost-cutting plans of their own:

Over at the academy, parents have demanded that the district fire Clark or trim his benefits, including an annual salary of $131,000, a tax-free $80,000 home loan and use of a district sport utility vehicle.

According to Wikipedia, ESA was ranked 19th in the nation in Newsweek’s Challenge index ranking of 27,000 public high schools in 2005.

Finally, no matter how brilliant the draft standards, there is no reason to believe that they will drive meaningful educational improvement. Government schools will still be government schools, and the people employed by them will still have very little incentive to push kids to excellence, and every incentive to game the system to make the standards toothless.

He makes some very interesting points, and most of his ire seems to be aimed at national standards in particular.  But to the extent that he argues against national standards on the basis that all students learn differently, it seems like he might be making an implicit (and possibly inadvertent) argument against fixed standards at any level of education — federal, state, district, or even school standards.  I take it this isn’t what he wants to do… but it is an interesting thought nonetheless.

I mean, really… what if the idea of putting students in large groups to learn together is itself deeply mistaken?  I don’t think it is, but I’ve been wrong about things before.

This was quite a shock.

But I got used to it.  To this day I’m not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing that I got used to it, but I did.  And people will get used to same-sex dorm rooms, too.

Although the number of participants remains small, gender-neutral housing has gained attention as the final step in the integration of student housing.

In the 1970s, many U.S. colleges moved from having only single-sex dormitories to providing coed residence halls, with male and female students typically housed on alternating floors or wings. Then came coed hallways and bathrooms, further shocking traditionalists. Now, some colleges allow undergraduates of opposite sexes to share a room.

Pitzer, which began its program in the fall of 2008, is among about 50 U.S. schools with the housing choice, according to Jeffrey Chang, who co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign in 2006 to encourage gender-mixed rooms. Participating schools include UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, Haverford, Wesleyan and the University of Michigan.

Frankly, I think more choice is probably a good thing.  But more choice means more choice — I rather think that schools should be hesitant to do away with traditional sex-segregated halls.   To the extent that gender-neutral housing might become the new default and could actually be a move in what often seems to be a ceaseless argument for the absolute fungibility of the sexes, I think I would object.  But I’m not sure were anywhere near that point yet.

Sorry for yesterday’s site crash, faithful readers. I think the problem is fixed.

The ESEA blueprint released by the Obama Administration yesterday would represent, as Andy wrote, a dramatic change in the federal role in education – one that would be more targeted, less prescriptive, and use a lighter touch on the vast majority of America’s schools.

Except for the very worst schools in the country–which would be subject to serious turnaround efforts–the rest would be freed from federally-mandated accountability. (The fastest-improving schools would actually get cash rewards and extra flexibility.) It does call for 100 percent of students to graduate from high school “college and career ready” by 2020, but that’s purely an aspirational goal; there are no consequences attached whatsoever. (The transparancy of annual testing and reporting would continue.)

The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal  are focusing on one part to love or hate, the blind men and the elephant, Petrilli writes.

The unions are complaining that the blueprint, in Randi Weingarten’s words, “places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent of the authority.” John Kline, the ranking Republican on the House education committee, warns that the proposal doesn’t square with Obama’s promise of more flexibity for the states.

Petrilli sees it as a “huge victory” for the unions in getting most schools out of the threat of federal intervention. For suburban schools and their often Republican representatives, it’s also a good thing.

It’s a big setback for special ed and ELL advocates, because the failure of their clients would no longer send schools into a buzz saw of sanctions. The civil rights types, who earnestly believe Washington can fix all equity issues from on high, should be apoplectic.

Petrilli is happy about the plan’s reform realism: Common standards, lots more flexibility and ad admission that No Child’s sanctions “were a bust.”

Since I’m still on vacation — having witnessed Ladies’ Steer Undecorating at the wine country rodeo, we’re on our way to the Great Barrier Reef — I haven’t given the plan a close look. But I worry about the kids who weren’t doing well before No Child Left Behind.  They don’t all go to worst-of-the-worst schools.

Here’s a list of ten commonly-held beliefs in academia that don’t square with what the rest of the country thinks.

Immediately we realize that this isn’t about whether these “myths” are wrong — just that they aren’t what the “rest of the country thinks”.  We are thus warned to proceed with caution.  Here’s the list itself — though you should go read the article to find out why some of these are thought to be myths:

1. There is no liberal bias in academia.

2. Everybody should go to college.

3. Academia is more noble than the business community.

4. Diversity makes everything better.

5. All faculty research is necessary and/or important.

6.  Academic freedom means anything goes.

7. Higher Education drives the economy.

8.  Natural aptitude doesn’t matter.

9. Morality is relative.

10. All cultures are equally good.

Numbers 2, 6, 8, and 9 aren’t really things that “academics think” — so to the extent that they aren’t true, they’re just myths, not “Myths of the Ivory Tower.”  Number 2 in particular is something that most professors, I think, seriously disagree with.

Frankly, while some academics may think number 1 is true, I’m not sure it’s anything close to a majority.  I think most people recognize the liberal bias, enjoy it, and see it as something weighing in liberalism’s favor.

I doubt that number 10 is something that anyone thinks, academic or not.

Number 5 is trivially false, in the sense that Newton’s work on Alchemy wasn’t “necessary and/or important”.  So I guess it can be called a “Myth”.  But that’s a pretty facile interpretation of the idea.  To the extent that something resembling  “All faculty research is necessary and/or important” is actually thought by academics, I think it’s true.  All research is important — because it’s part of a larger project.  Obviously one could look back at a theory that has been debunked (say… that Knowledge=justified true belief, or Newton’s aforementioned Alchemy) and say “Well, that wasn’t necessary.”  But we don’t know that until someone debunks it.  Schalin likens academic writing to “an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly”.   He means to be pejorative, but (1) that’s sort of how scientific discovery works, and (2) the monkeys that we as a society choose to fund at our typewriters tend to be very, very smart people.  So we’ve got some decidedly above-average monkeys.

Sometimes articles need to be pointed out because they are good articles that raise important points.  Sometimes an article needs to be pointed out because it is really a substandard, slapdash attempt at scoring cheap rhetorical points.  Unfortunately, I think this is one of the latter.

“Kids these days…”

“Nobody makes them like they used to…”

Sometimes, and probably more often than we think, the grouchy old man is right.  Stephen Zelnick examines one of the problems facing young men these days:

As a boy, I revered George Washington and was not baffled by the fact of his slave-owning or his land dealings along the Potomac, as if that was all to be known about him. I hoped I would tell the truth about despoiled cherry trees; I hoped, like Benjamin Franklin walking down Philadelphia’s Market Street as a young man on his own, that I would see the world before me as an open field of possibilities; I believed I would, like Lincoln, chase after the poor woman who forgot her three pennies because it was the right thing to do. How does a boy become a man without these inspirations?

The social and cultural atmosphere has been so polluted one wonders how young people can form life-projects that demand decency and tenacious effort. Everything seems to be for sale, and no one is ashamed by it. The fix is in on the Left and the Right in Washington. Turpitude in the coal and oil industry, with their locust hosts of lobbyists to protect them from those who would protect the environment, is an old story. The new stories are about agri-business and healthcare and education, and now even the green NGOs that take big bucks to moderate their advocacy.

As bloggers oft proclaim: Read. The. Whole. Thing.

One place I might take issue with him is when he says:

Unlike their female counterparts, young men tend not to complain about unpleasant grades and do not chase every stray GPA point in petty obsession to excel.

This has not been my experience at all. But I am not teaching English, and I have been at this for far, far, far shorter a time than Dr. Zelnick, so I’m inclined to either defer to his greater experience or chalk it up to the difference either in discipline or in region.

H/T  to Jane Shaw at Phi Beta Cons.

But in case you haven’t been following it… the lawsuit has begun!

The lawsuit seeks a court order for the school to hold the prom. It also asks that McMillen be allowed to escort her girlfriend, who is a fellow student, and wear a tuxedo, which the school said also violated policy.

The school’s decision was a shameful example of pure spite.  They didn’t have the courage of their convictions to simply tell the girl she couldn’t go (and there’s no way they would have gotten away with that legally, anyway).  So instead, they cancel the prom.  Cowards.

Look, I tend to think that most proms could use some canceling.   But this was just an educational institution lashing out in a very nasty way at a young girl, and I hope that they get their derriere handed to them by the ACLU.

A little context: Michael Newdow has made a cottage industry over suing various government entitites for using the word “God”.  On Thursday, the 9th Circuit gave him a kick in the teeth over the Pledge of Allegiance.  I obviously have a view (a positive one) about the Court’s opinion, but the case should be of interest to people on both sides of the debate, such as it is.  The key lines, I think, are:

The Supreme Court held that as long as recitation of the Pledge was optional, then the Pledge was constitutional. The same principle applies here.

* * * *

In the context of the Pledge, the phrase “one Nation under God” constitutes a powerful admission by the government of its own limitations.

* * * *

Thus, the Court drew an explicit distinction between patriotic mentions of God on the one hand, and prayer, an “unquestioned religious exercise,” on the other. Therefore, we hold the School District’s Policy providing for
the voluntary recitation of the Pledge does not violate the Lee coercion test.

* * * *

We recognize some school children who are unaware of its history may perceive the phrase “under God” in the Pledge to refer exclusively to a monotheistic God of a particular religion. A reasonable observer, however, aware of the history and origins of the words in the Pledge would view the Pledge as a product of this nation’s history and political philosophy.

* * * *

The dissent’s analysis would grant a heckler’s veto to anyone who made just enough noise in support of an enactment so as to defeat an otherwise valid measure. That is not the law.

The majority of the opinion is Reinhardt dissenting.  (Pun intended.)

UPDATE: In other news… the fight against graduation prayers continues on, with the promise of much success.