Forget winning the science fair or being an all-state pole vaulter or, well, getting straight A's -- not being straight's now worth a lot too, when it comes to looking good to the college of your choice. Harvard and other universities around the country now are factoring in gayness as an enhancement to a college application...thinking having confronted one's sexual orientation at a young age shows independence - and builds character and leadership potential -

This doesn't mean honor students will have to go gay to go to Harvard. They'll lie. Is Harvard going to check?

One of my daughter's classmates clinched a a perfect 800 on the SAT II composition exam with an essay about the courage it took for him to declare his homosexuality. He wasn't gay. He was ahead of the curve.

A pro-gay policy in admissions will fill the Ivies with deceitful heterosexuals. -- 6/5

Na-na-na-ing for the queen
It's a good thing my daughter is coming home from Oxford next week. She's going native. Here's her Jubilee report:

London was PACKED with tourists, and there were British flags and hats and everything everywhere. I think at least half of it was for the World Cup, but the spirit was still wonderful and infectious. Yesterday, as I was waiting at the bus stop on our way to Hyde Park with my Davis friend Leanne and a few of her friends, we saw a couple of motorcycles pass us on the street, followed by a black car. The man in the car waved to us as he passed. A familiar-looking man. We all turned to each other and said at the same time, "Was that...?" and then we realized that YES, it was PRINCE CHARLES! Prince Charles waved at me!!!!! Mom, I know you're jealous. One of the girls said she saw Harry, too, but I didn't.

I couldn't believe how little security he had, or that the queen had later. When I asked a Brit about it, she said, "Well, who would want to hurt the royal family? We love the royal family."

That really got to me, especially later when we gathered in Hyde Park to hear the Jubilee concert. Did you see on TV that a million people surrounded Buckingham Palace to watch the concert on the screens they had set up? Yeah, I was one of them. It was so amazing. I had originally thought this Jubilee stuff was kind of dumb, but it was so fun to be a part of it all. I bought a British flag and waved it mightily as the entire crowd sang "God Save the Queen." I tried not to sing "My Country Tis Of Thee" along with them.

It seemed like every living British rock star sang, from Eric Clapton to Ozzy Osbourne to Elton John. Brian Wilson sang as an "American Ambassador," and Leanne and her friend Carly and I sang aloud loudly to "Wish they all could be California girls." Queen (minus the dead lead singer) sang "We are the Champions," which was probably the biggest hit of the night, as the England World Cup fans, proud of their team though they only managed to tie Sweden the previous day, screamed along and waved their flags. Then, finally, Paul McCartney came out, and led everyone in "Hey Jude" and "All You Need is Love." I can't tell you how magical it was to be na-na-na-ing with one million people, young and old, from all parts of the world. Every single person knew the words, and I wondered if there will ever again be a musical group to reach as many people as the Beatles have.

Then, after the queen came out to light the final ceremonial flare, and we all gave her three cheers, fireworks lit up the sky. I'm telling you, I finally get the reason for the monarchy. Nothing in America inspires this much devotion. -- 6/5

Birds, bees and parents
Parents want schools to teach just about every aspect of sex ed, reports the Los Angeles Times. Condoms, contraceptives, emotions, values, you name it. Well, sure, writes Jeff Sackmann. Parents typically want schools to do everything. But some jobs belong to Mom and Dad. Or, families being what they are, Mom. Jeff writes a pretty good letter that could be sent home to parents urging them to talk about sex with their children before they have grandchildren. -- 6/5

Old -- that is, elderly -- PC
Stan Freberg's "Elderly Man River" shows fit-for-the-kiddies censorship is nothing new. Thanks to Ken Summers for the link.

Ted Alper says rewriting literature for a test is no big deal, though it looks silly to change "fat" to "heavy." The point is to avoid content that would distract some students based on their background. Kim Swygert, a testing expert, agrees.

Well, if anything that refers to ethnicity is distracting, don't choose a passage by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Once you take the Jewish ethnicity out of Singer, nothing is left. The writing can't possibly be comprehensible. -- 6/5

Vocational blahs
In Fritz Schranck's school district, students are rejecting vocational training, even with the prospect of high-paying jobs.

For some reason, teenagers in this area seem to have little or no interest in learning how to be a plumber, carpenter, electrician, or similarly skilled worker, no matter what the marketplace says about the current high value of these jobs.

The local school superintendent gave me an example. A tool and die company owner tried to develop an internship program with the local vo-tech, combining classroom experience with work in his busy shop. The first year pay was to be $12 per hour, rising to $26 per hour when the students completed the program.

There were no takers. -- 6/5

Homecoming peasants
Tim Taylor, an old friend and former colleague, responds to the vanishing valedictorians post:

If schools are going to eliminate academic rankings, I hope they have the consistency to eliminate athletic rankings, too. No judging some students as better athletes than others and creating special teams for them. No "most valuable players." For that matter, no homecoming king and queen. No school plays with starring roles. No solos in the band or chorus. Why should academic outcomes be the only place without rankings? -- 6/5
 

Fun fruit
In regard to the Royal Marine's comment on ancient Greek philosophy, Ben Sheriff says the complete saying, attributed to both Arabs and Greeks, is: "A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, a melon for ecstasy."

And Steve Quick says quite a few U.S. Marines are educated, openminded and conversant with Greek philosophy. -- 6/5

Hey, Marine!
Many warbloggers are chuckling over this story of British Marines fighting off the sexual advances of Afghan farmers with painted toenails and wandering hands. But how many have noted the erudition of a Marine named James Fletcher.

"We were pretty shocked," Marine Fletcher said. "We discovered from the Afghan soldiers we had with us that a lot of men in this country have the same philosophy as ancient Greeks: 'a woman for babies, a man for pleasure'."

How many U.S. Marines -- or U.S. college students -- could come up with this quote? -- 6/4

No scrubs
Mickey Kaus explains what's wrong with a New York Times story arguing that limiting welfare benefits discourages marriage.

Maybe the process by which welfare reform affects marriage is a long-term, multi-step, even dialectical process. 1) The first step is that single moms no longer have to settle, and no longer want to settle, for no-good men. (Cf. the 1999 song "No Scrubs," by TLC. The newly-working post-1996 single moms would be the "honeys with the money." The no-good men would be the "scrubs.")

You don't usually get "dialectical process" and rap lyrics in the same paragraph

Kaus thinks -- and I agree -- that the real challenge is to get welfare dads into the workforce and family life. -- 6/4

Hooked
Lisa Snell, education director of Reason Foundation, has started an edu-blog called Education Weak. I told her it wouldn't take too much time. Hah! It's like pushing drugs.

She links to a funny column by Dan Bernstein on zero tolerance for initials. -- 6/4

School choice grows in Minnesota
Eleven years ago, when Minnesota passed the nation's first charter school law, one percent of the state's students were enrolled in choice programs. Now that's up to 17 percent, reports a new study. Everyone is pleased with the results -- except for the teachers' union. Charters enroll a significantly higher percentage of low-income, minority, disabled and non-English-speaking children. Overall, charter test scores are lower but rising rapidly. -- 6/4

School sex
Fifteen percent of students are sexually abused by a teacher or school staffer at some point, estimates a professor in the June issue of the American School Board Journal. That number seems high to me, unless it includes leering. The horror example is an elementary school counselor who turned out to be an ex-priest with a history of sexual abuse allegations. But mostly it's men and teen-age girls. -- 6/4

Good work
Harlan Sexton writes that educationists look down their noses at tradesmen.

If schools offered classes that actually trained people to do real jobs and prepared them to keep learning new things, I think that you'd have very little trouble motivating lots of students that currently don't care at all, and you could shovel enough math and science into the curriculum to put them well ahead of most college graduates.

Doug Levene mentions a Wall Street Journal column by Lee Gomes about going online to hire a programmer as a day laborer. His rent-a-coder lives in India and works very, very cheap. Gomes advises students not to plan on any job that can be done online and outsourced to Bangladesh. Levene writes:

This seems like pretty good advice to me. Carpenters and electricians may make out very well in the world to come. Doctors and lawyers and other professionals who need to be physically present with their paying customers may also do well. Code-writers, data-inputters, number-crunchers, etc. - they may see drastically reduced earnings. -- 6/4

Why Stalin hated Hamlet
In light of New York's literature-gutting fiasco, George Byrd sent me a link to a home-schooler's essay on censorship of Shakespeare. I learned that Queen Elizabeth didn't like "Richard II" and Stalin thought Hamlet was not the New Soviet Man.

John Dewey wrote: "Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. Conflict shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. . . . It is the sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity."  

Debbie La Fetra adds. "By removing any potential for conflict, the "educators" removed any real opportunity for thought!" -- 6/4
 
Too many number one students
On the vanishing valedictorian, Scott Anderson writes:

The real danger to valedictorians is their ubiquity, because of grade inflation. Our local high school, Oak Park-River Forest High School in Illinois, had 19 valedictorians in 2001. Can you imagine the pressure on any single teacher who wants to maintain some traditional grade distinctions? -- 6/4

Power from the people to the union
After a defeat in the legislature, the California Teachers' Association may go to the voters with an initiative to force curriculum and textbook decisions into the collective bargaining process and to require that California school spending per pupil equal the national average. Polls say the public likes the idea of teacher involvement, but I suspect it will be less popular when the word "union" comes up. As for raising spending, voters want to spend more on schools but may be wary of putting that in law in a tough budget year. -- 6/3

Innocents killed and saved
Most Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians between Sept. 30, 2000 and May 7, 2002 were children under the age of 15, writes Justin Weitz; women make up 25 percent of the Israeli victims. By contrast, Palestinian sources report that 11.7 percent of Palestinians killed by Israelis were under 15 and 2.8 percent were women (via Damian Penny).

In other words, nine Israeli women were murdered for every Palestinian woman, and five Israeli children for every Palestinian child.

That doesn't count deaths since May 7: A grandmother and 18-month-old grandchild were blown up in a park; three teen-agers were shot playing basketball. But the guy who threw grenades at a kindergarten class didn't kill anyone.

Matt Welch links to the Los Angeles Times series on civilian deaths from U.S. bombing in Afghanistan. First, the Taliban inflated or flat-out lied about the civilian death toll; now indigent Afghans are filing dubious claims in the hopes of compensation.

In his comments section, Welch mentions claims that the U.S. campaign caused 20,000 "indirect" deaths because people fled the fighting. This ignores the indirect benefits to Afghan civilians, who were dying of hunger, disease and oppression during the Taliban regime. In a Feb. 1 New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof talked to U.N. relief agencies about the lives that will be saved.

But now aid is pouring in and lives are being saved on an enormous scale. Unicef, for example, has vaccinated 734,000 children against measles over the last two months, in a country where virtually no one had been vaccinated against the disease in the previous 10 years. Because measles often led to death in Afghanistan, the vaccination campaign will save at least 35,000 children's lives each year. . . .

Heidi J. Larson of Unicef says that if all goes well, child and maternal mortality rates will drop in half in Afghanistan over the next five years. That would mean 112,000 fewer children and 7,500 fewer pregnant women dying each year. . . .

Working from United Nations figures, if Afghanistan eventually improves just to the wretched levels of neighboring Pakistan, that would mean 115,000 fewer deaths a year of children under the age of 5, along with 9,600 fewer women dying in pregnancy each year.-- 6/3

Everyone's special
Valedictorians are an endangered breed as high schools eliminate class rankings and honors for the very top students. Ranking students by grade point average is elitist, competitive and stressful for top students, say detractors.

The stress and competition won't go away until Harvard, Yale and Stanford admit all applicants. As for elitism, well, what's so awful about honoring students for academic achievement? -- 6/3

The Generously Sized Alternatively Valued Wolf Goes Vegan
Scott Norvell hits New York's bowdlerized literature, and then gives more examples of rewriting classics to fit current sensitivities. I thought the "Four Little Pigs" rapprochement with the Wolf was a parody. But it's not. -- 6/3

The Grapes of Annoyance
To meet "sensitivity review guidelines," New York's education department rewrites literary passages on its high school English exams. This New York Times story (via Bob Ballard) would be funny if it weren't so sad.

In a feat of literary sleuth work, (Jeanne) Heifetz, the mother of a high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority of the passages — drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others — had been sanitized of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer questions based on these doctored versions . . .

In an excerpt from the work of Mr. Singer, for instance, all mention of Judaism is eliminated, even though it is so much the essence of his writing. His reference to "Most Jewish women" becomes "Most women" on the Regents, and "even the Polish schools were closed" becomes "even the schools were closed." Out entirely goes the line "Jews are Jews and Gentiles are Gentiles." In a passage from Annie Dillard's memoir, "An American Childhood," racial references are edited out of a description of her childhood trips to a library in the black section of town where she is almost the only white visitor, even though the point of the passage is to emphasize race and the insights she learned about blacks.

. . . In the Chekhov story "The Upheaval," the exam takes out the portion in which a wealthy woman looking for a missing brooch strip-searches all of the house's staff members. Students are then asked to use the story to write an essay on the meaning of human dignity.

In "Barrio Boy," a "skinny boy'' becomes "thin," while a "fat" boy becomes "heavy.'' -- 6/2

Unz wins
Pressured by Latino legislators, California's school board considered new rules allowing teachers -- not parents -- to request waivers to place students in bilingual classrooms. Ron Unz protested the assault on the voter-approved law, Proposition 227. He's won the day. The board's new regulations look a lot like the rules created by 227. -- 6/2

Miss Kathy protests
Furriners keep callin' W a "cowboy." What's so dadburn wrong with cowboys, asks Kathleen Parker.

But the real cowboy, the genuine driver of cattle across lonely, death-around-every-corner prairies and torrential rivers was the American heroic prototype -- strong, brave, trustworthy, loyal, wise, resourceful, self-reliant and dutiful. Sort of like a Boy Scout, except not as clean.

The cowboy spirit, which is alive and well in America and anathema to the axis countries and others who hate us, is characterized by freedom; that cliché that was born of good reason, rugged individualism. The cowboy cherishes freedom above all else, as do most Americans. -- 6/2

Blogsmart
Cathy Seipp gets weblogs. -- 6/2

How does the song go?
Eric Olsen has gone nuts on the Uncle John's Band issue. I did learn that the crow is a trickster, which works with Debby's belief that the crow is the smartest bird. (Not a high bar, but nonetheless.)

We sing in a baby boomers' acappella group, not a chorus. -- 6/2

Learning and working
There are high-paying union jobs in Hollywood, writes Kate Coe. No public school trains students to qualify. Private cooking schools are making a fortune; public schools don't train students for high-end chef jobs.

Bob Cavalli writes:

I am certain that plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and other skilled tradesmen make better livings than do I, a lowly editor for obscure trade publications (and are far less bored). And most of them own their own businesses. Schools focus on one thing...college prep, even for students who show talent for trades, or who just don't have the intellectual wherewithal to cut in college. They do a large number of their students a disservice.

By contrast, David McIntyre argues that everyone should take college prep rather than vocational courses.

It doesn't make sense to limit someone's opportunities at such a young age . . . It's easier for a college grad to become a plumber than for someone with a vocational education to become a professional . . . Vocational ed signals acceptance of a class-stratified society without social mobility.

Actually, a real vocational track wouldn't be a dummies' track. Skilled jobs require solid reading, writing and math skills. In Silicon Valley, most would-be carpenters, plumbers and electricians can't qualify for the union apprenticeship program because they can't read well enough or do the math. They can go to community college, but most get stuck in remedial classes there and drop out. Undemanding classes prepare students for nothing. -- 6/1

All children can learn but probably won't
A parent decodes edu-speak, including phrases like "All children can learn" (some aren't), "We have to improve our communications skills" (oops!) and "shared decision-making" (We'll share the decision once we've made it).

As an aside, Daniel Wolff's district spends $14,000 per student; teachers average $70,000 a year. And they've got a failing middle school and the belief that the problem is insufficient funding. -- 6/1

You get what you pay for
In "Better Pay for Better Teaching," Bryan Hassel suggests changing the way teachers are compensated. In particular, we need to pay more to teachers who take on more difficult assignments or bring in-demand skills to the classroom, and link pay to performance. Just like in the real world. -- 6/1

It's not the test
Don't blame standardized tests for failing schools, editorializes the Los Angeles Times, responding to the LA school board's vote for "alternative assessments."

It is also unfair to lower expectations for poor, minority children by suggesting they can't get high scores. First-graders in Los Angeles public schools scored above the national average last year. Thousands of children beat stereotypes at schools like Bright Elementary, Martin Luther King Elementary and Barrett Elementary, where standardized test scores are high and rising.

The educrats' response to testing follows a pattern, blogs Jeff Sackmann. The Dance of Denial ends with lower expectations and lower performance. -- 6/1

Hot text
Protein Wisdom gets extratextual with "Ten Apples Up on Top," which turns out to be a Barthean exemplar of textual "pleasure" in the post-grapheme space with a privileged ideological arc. And tail fins.

Meanwhile, on the "Uncle John's Band'' question, Jackson Houser argues that one shouldn't worry anymore because the hardest days are now over.

The danger of Easy Street is complacency, of course, so there is no need to worry about the struggles of the first days: one just needs to persevere.

Yes, but what about that danger at my door?

George Byrd cites a plausible explanation for why Quinn the Eskimo is named Quinn.

Some Dylan-ologists believe that a possible source for the title is Nicholas Ray's 1960 film 'The Savage Innocents' in which Anthony Quinn plays an Eskimo.

This isn't just a blog about education. It's educational. -- 6/1