Education Notes

Lots of links piling up, so here goes...

On May 16 charter schools lobby Springfield. Give them your support and ask your legislator to raise caps on charter schools in Illinois.

The Independent Women's Forum paper: Help Boys Achieve Their Academic Potential Through School Choice.

Cinny at District 211 has an offering on corruption in the schools---betrayal of children and the public trust.

Sometimes you live long enough for a victory, however pyrrhic, at least for your own kids, but others will benefit in future. This was a major misuse of resources and a huge drain on student teaching time that could be better spent on math, science and reading for example. Al Gore's version of the chicken in every pot, the yellow brick road of the "information" highway to put a laptop on every desk as a "best practice" by know-it-all liberal educators has been proven to be a bust. And worse. And massively expensive. Millions, repeat millions per school district. And for what? (I'm still muttering millions, remember that when schools ask for more money as they always do---they routinely WASTE it on megabuck bells and whistles and often neglect to teach your kids.)

NY TIMES, (the irony). I quote a bit in case you can't get the article:

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Sigh. @#%##!!!!! And this:

Alice McCormick, who heads the math department, said most math teachers preferred graphing calculators, which students can use on the Regents exams, to laptops, which often do not have mathematical symbols or allow students to show their work for credit. “Let’s face it, math is for the most part still a paper-and-pencil activity when you’re learning it,” she said.

Another iteration on merit pay---(Could be done much more simply with the market, but the Trib apparently still believes public education is salvageable in Chicago.)

Daniel Pipes, A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn ( A cautionary tale---we have got to jettison the multiculti moral relativism, the idea that you can't critically assess scholarship or the lack of it. We can't have public schools teaching total falsehoods.)

More concern here about multiculturalism--little girls wearing headscarves, training for the hijab in America. While I think modesty is important and should be respected, do we want to acquiesce as a country to a culture that essentially enslaves women? France bans headscarves in schools. At first I thought this was wrong, (I also thought, France punts on the war on terror but bullies girls?) but then I learned that some girls are forced to wear them by peer pressure when they might not wish to. I guess I think headscarves, maybe, but not covering the face. What do you think?

UPDATE: Higher education under the microscope.