John Ellis:

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year’s. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of “the struggle,” and of “oppression,” and—of course—of racism. “We are all students of color now” said Berkeley’s Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented “structural racism.” (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley’s Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations “the best of our tradition of effective civil action.” Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the old “shut it down” cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted “Who’s got the power? We’ve got the power.” In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Unemployment in California is still rising. It just went up from 12.3 to 12.5%, nearly three points above an already bad national average. This horrendous figure is the source of California’s budget problem. The huge loss of tax revenue is compounded by greatly increased unemployment outlays. If we look at the few other states that have unemployment figures well above the national average, there are obvious explanations. Michigan is at 14.6 because employment in its major industry (automobiles) has collapsed. Nevada, at 13.0, is dependent on discretionary cash at a time when there isn’t any. But California is too big to be dominated by one industry, and its plight can only be explained by the state’s having grossly mismanaged its affairs.

In 2007 Raymond Keating formulated a Small Business Survival Index, which is a composite of various aspects of the climate for business in a particular state: business and personal taxes, regulations, mandates, and so on. In that index California ranked 49 among the 50 states. Rhode Island ranked just above California, and its unemployment rate is 12.7. At the bottom of the Index is D.C., and its unemployment rate is 12.1.

In the component parts of the SBSI index, California ranks worst of 51 (including D.C.) on top personal tax rates, worst on top capital gains tax rates, 42 on corporate taxes, 43 on health insurance mandates, 46 on electric utility costs, 47 on workman’s compensation costs, rock bottom again on state gas taxes, 45 on state and local government five year spending trends, and 47 on state and local per capita government spending. It also ranks 49 among the states on the US Economic freedom index, and it has the highest state sales tax rate too: where some states have an income tax but no sales tax, and others have a sales tax but no income tax, California has both, AND it has the highest rates in both.

In short, California is a disaster for business. The state has piled up so many taxes, regulations and mandates that businesses are leaving the state. Just this week I learned that a spare part order for my Lennox fireplace is delayed because Lennox is moving this division of its business to Tennessee. Wealthy individuals are also fleeing the state to avoid the country’s highest tax bracket. When both wealth and wealth creation leave the state, tax revenues leave with them.

Diane Ravich:

I have been a historian of American education since 1975, when I received my doctorate from Columbia. I have written histories, and I’ve also written extensively about the need to improve students’ knowledge of history, literature, geography, science, civics and foreign languages. So in 1991, when Lamar Alexander and David Kearns invited me to become assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush, I jumped at the chance with the hope that I might promote voluntary state and national standards in these subjects.

By the time I left government service in January 1993, I was an advocate not only for standards but for school choice. I had come to believe that standards and choice could co-exist as they do in the private sector. With my friends Chester Finn Jr. and Joseph Viteritti, I wrote and edited books and articles making the case for charter schools and accountability.

I became a founding board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a founding member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, both of which are fervent proponents of choice and accountability. The Koret group includes some of the nation’s best-known conservative scholars of choice, including John Chubb, Terry Moe, Caroline Hoxby and Paul Peterson.

As No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) accountability regime took over the nation’s schools under President George W. Bush and more and more charter schools were launched, I supported these initiatives. But over time, I became disillusioned with the strategies that once seemed so promising. I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for.

NCLB received overwhelming bipartisan support when it was signed into law by President Bush in 2002. The law requires that schools test all students every year in grades three through eight, and report their scores separately by race, ethnicity, low-income status, disability status and limited-English proficiency. NCLB mandated that 100% of students would reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014, as measured by tests given in each state.

Although this target was generally recognized as utopian, schools faced draconian penalties—eventually including closure or privatization—if every group in the school did not make adequate yearly progress. By 2008, 35% of the nation’s public schools were labeled “failing schools,” and that number seems sure to grow each year as the deadline nears.

Since the law permitted every state to define “proficiency” as it chose, many states announced impressive gains. But the states’ claims of startling improvement were contradicted by the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Eighth grade students improved not at all on the federal test of reading even though they had been tested annually by their states in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Meanwhile the states responded to NCLB by dumbing down their standards so that they could claim to be making progress. Some states declared that between 80%-90% of their students were proficient, but on the federal test only a third or less were. Because the law demanded progress only in reading and math, schools were incentivized to show gains only on those subjects. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in test-preparation materials. Meanwhile, there was no incentive to teach the arts, science, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages or physical education.

In short, accountability turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else. Colleges continued to complain about the poor preparation of entering students, who not only had meager knowledge of the world but still required remediation in basic skills. This was not my vision of good education.

Read on.

LA Weekly

Several years ago, a 74-year-old Dominguez Elementary School fourth-grade teacher was having trouble controlling her students as her abilities deteriorated amid signs of “burnout.” Shirley Loftis was told by Los Angeles Unified School District administrators to retire or be fired, and she did retire, but hardly under the school district’s terms.

The principal at Dominguez, Irene Hinojosa, recalls how she spent three years documenting Loftis’ poor teaching skills and inability to control 10-year-olds. “From the minute I observed her, she basically didn’t seem to have the knowledge of the standards and how to deliver them,” Hinojosa tells L.A. Weekly. “I had her do lessons on the same standard over and over again, and children did not get it. On simple math concepts [such as determining perimeters and area] — over and over, she didn’t know how to deliver.”

Each September, a new crop of children quickly caught on to the fact that Loftis had lost control. Full-on classroom fights flared up. One child beat another with a backpack, and others threw objects — even a chair, Hinojosa says. Teachers at Dominguez Elementary began reporting incidents to Hinojosa, who moved Loftis’ class from a bungalow to a room across from her office. That way, the principal reasoned, she could intervene in the chaos a bit faster.

When parents in the Carson neighborhoods around Dominguez Park got wind of the troubles, some sought to transfer their children. A handful succeeded, but Hinojosa says every child “righteously deserved to be moved out. … The kids totally disrespected [Loftis] by the end. It was a lost year for them.”

But Loftis won a ruling in her favor by the state Commission on Professional Competence, a powerful arbitration panel of two educators and an administrative-law judge who can prevent California schools from firing teachers. The panel agreed in 2002 that the district had “grounds for dismissal” of Loftis. But, panel members essentially argued, Loftis had taught at the school for 23 years, and administrators had shown bias in pursuing her while not taking enough steps to do something about her burnout. District officials embarked on a long Superior Court appeals process, but the judge agreed with the arbitration panel that Loftis could perform another LAUSD job — like training teachers.

After five years, district lawyers decided to stop their costly fight and agreed to settle, paying Loftis’ attorneys’ fees of $195,000 on top of $300,000 that Loftis earned during the dispute to work away from children — in a job in the administration.

“We chased that case forever,” says LAUSD Associate General Counsel Kathleen Collins, a young and effervescent lawyer who is something of an anomaly inside LAUSD’s toe-the-line executive offices downtown. “It was my first case, and I felt like, ‘This can’t be the way things work.’”

Loftis, now 83, could not be reached for comment, and a United Teachers Los Angeles representatives declined to comment. But her associates described her as an articulate, highly energetic woman who seems far younger than her years. Of the epic battle she lost to Loftis, Collins says, “You can only have passion for so long” before the obstacles force you to give up.

Oh, the soaring optimism of the Great Society…

“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An earlier iteration of the study, published in 2005, had found a few modest improvements in the language skills of participating students while they were enrolled in the program. But by the end of the first grade, even those few effects have disappeared, according to the follow-up released this month. Out of 44 separate cognitive tests given to former Head Start students at the end of the first grade, only two showed even marginally significant effects. The other 42 showed no statistically significant effect at all.

But even that overstates the case for Head Start. That’s because, on each of the 44 separate tests, there is a 1 in 10 chance of a false positive: a test result that appears to show a positive impact but is really just a random fluke. With so many test results, we’d expect to see at least a few false positives. Statisticians have ways to control for this problem, and when the authors themselves applied such a control, they found that the two apparently “significant” effects vanished.

What’s more, this applies to all the non-cognitive tests administered to students as well. After controlling for the likelihood of false positives, the study’s authors found no “socio-emotional” benefits and no “parenting practice” benefits either. No benefits to Head Start of any kind at the end of first grade. None.

Why is this important? Because $166 billion has been squandered on this program over the past half century, and the Obama administration is wasting even more, even faster. The president already increased annual spending on Head Start by more than a third last year, from $6.8 billion to $9.2 billion. He has made clear he does not intend to stop there.

As the Dem Cong moves to create another government monopoly (healthcare), people in Los Angeles are working to break up the government monopoly of public education.

LAT:

Over the last decade, a quiet revolution took root in the nation’s second-largest school district.

Fueled by money and emboldened by clout from some of the city’s most powerful figures, charter schools began a period of explosive growth that has challenged the status quo in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Today, Los Angeles is home to more than 160 charter schools, far more than any other U.S. city. Charter enrollment is up nearly 19% this year from last, while enrollment in traditional L.A. public schools is down. And a once-hostile school board has become increasingly charter-friendly, despite resistance from the teachers union. In September, the board agreed to let charters bid on potentially hundreds of existing campuses and on all 50 of its planned new schools.

Charter schools now are challenging L.A. Unified from without and within. Not only are charter school operators such as Green Dot Public Schools and ICEF Public Schools opening new schools that compete head-to-head with L.A. Unified, but the district’s own schools are showing increasing interest in jumping ship by converting to charter status.

It’s a long meaty article. Curiously, the idea of letting market forces improve schools was put into play in Sweden 15 years ago.

…the Swedish model that gets so much international attention today would not exist without the acceptance of profit-making organisations. It is a simple matter of incentives. Why should an enterprising teacher set up on their own, and make a career out of innovating in education, when that could mean financial ruin? The solution to these problems is profit. Not a vast profit; some schools make no profit at all. But they behave like businesses, treating parents as customers — and this is what counts.

Take, for example, Carlsson school in Stockholm: an excellent institution, but one run as a not-for-profit charitable trust. Because it lacks proper incentives to expand, it deals with surplus demand by asking parents to form a queue. And it is a very long queue. Parents who are considering Carlsson for their child must send in an application when their child is born. Many miss the cut. And thanks to the school’s strict first-come-first-served policy, along with the academic calendar, many of those children who do make it are benefiting from the time of year in which they were born. It is best to have a birthday between January and April if you want to get into Carlsson.

Why? Because it’s not about education (or healthcare for that matter), it’s about control.

The Dems are always demanding a “conversation” about race. Given that most of the students affected by this are black, why not start here?

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

The decision to end the program, a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill and announced right before the holidays, destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families. Parents and children have rallied countless times over the past year in support of reauthorization and in favor of strengthening the OSP.

Yet, despite the clearly positive results and the proven success of this program, Sen. Dick Durbin, Rep. Jose Serrano, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Secretary Arne Duncan worked together to kill the OSP. Funding the program only for existing children shrinks the program each year, compromises the federal evaluation of the program, denies entry to the siblings of existing participants, and punishes those children waiting in line by sentencing them to failing and often unsafe schools.

What is incredibly disappointing to low-income families in Washington, D.C. has been the silence of President Barack Obama. The President, who benefited from K-12 scholarships himself, worked on behalf of low-income families in Chicago, and exercises school choice as a parent, has stood silently on the sidelines while his Secretary of Education belittled the importance of helping such a small number of children in the nation’s capital.

Now, the fate of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and the low-income children it serves and could serve depends on the willingness of Congressional supporters to insist that the FY 2010 budget allows additional children to participate in the OSP. We call on President Obama and Senator Durbin to stand up and do the right thing. Stand with the children of low-income families in Washington, D.C. who deserve access to a quality education right now—not five years from now—but right now. These children deserve that opportunity.”

An LA County — government run — killed so many patients it had to be shut down, even after five years of attempted reforms.

The LA schools, a failure by any measure, just figured out something basic.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines ordered administrators Thursday to weed out ineffective new teachers before they become permanent, acknowledging that the nation’s second-largest school system has largely failed to adequately evaluate teacher performance.

“This district can be rightly criticized for the promotion of ineffective teachers over the years. That is about to change,” Cortines said. “We do not owe poor performers a job.”

Well, duh. Did it take a new educational theory to learn that basic truth?

Taking aim at weak probationary teachers now could spare the district from firing others who are more effective but have slightly less experience next summer when there will probably be another round of layoffs. Teachers must be let go by seniority, according to state law, which has forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to ignore performance in its dismissals, officials said.

Hmm. Do you think the teachers union got that law passed?

The announcement came a week after The Times presented L.A. Unified with the results of an investigation that found the district often doesn’t meaningfully assess new teachers before they are granted tenure. The story is scheduled to appear in Sunday’s paper.

What a concept: weed out bad teachers before you offer them lifetime employment.

Little Zachary learns a hard lesson: the people in charge are often idiots.

…Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

“It just seems unfair,” Zachary said, pausing as he practiced writing lower-case letters with his mother, who is home-schooling him while the family tries to overturn his punishment.

Spurred in part by the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, many school districts around the country adopted zero-tolerance policies on the possession of weapons on school grounds. More recently, there has been growing debate over whether the policies have gone too far.

Gee, ya think?

Reihan Salam in Forbes:

…In a paper published earlier this year, Blinder and his Princeton colleague Alan Krueger estimated that 25% of U.S. jobs are potentially offshorable. My sense is that this number is actually an underestimate. In Blinder’s view, college teaching is a paradigmatic example of a profession in which long-distance provision leads to a degradation in quality. And yet we’ve seen a number of long-distance educational services prove highly competitive in recent years–so competitive that incumbent providers are doing everything they can to create barriers to entry.

The September issue of The Washington Monthly features Kevin Carey’s wonderful article on StraighterLine, a firm that offers students as many college courses as they want for $99 a month, far below the thousands of dollars charged by rival services. Like more expensive services, the education offered by StraighterLine is tailored to the individual student; you can move as quickly or slowly through the material as you’d like. Tutors based in India and the Philippines provide more of a personal touch than any overburdened graduate student.

Blinder, who served on Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors and as a vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has rightly identified offshoring as a compelling reason to transform our educational system. He has challenged the shibboleth that increasing access to college is sufficient to meeting the economic needs of our workforce, emphasizing instead the need to prepare students for work in personal services that are far less likely to be offshored. To that end, he wants schools to emphasize so-called “soft skills,” like the ability to work well in teams, as well as creativity and problem-solving ability. He wants less standardization and more spontaneity, and I strongly concur.

But is this possible in our industrial school system? I doubt it. My fear is that we’ll instead encourage students to pursue college degrees and then post-graduate degrees as a way of fattening up the education-industrial complex. Just as mass incarceration masks unemployment in the United States, mass higher-education increasingly masks unemployment in Germany and South Korea: Students take years to complete useless degrees, and once they’re out, they find themselves loaded up with debt. This will work wonders for administrators but not for students. If we really want to encourage change, we need to look to educational entrepreneurs. (more…)

The quasi-socialist Swedes understand free markets better than American Democrats.

Anders Hultin writes in the UK Spectator.

…Isn’t it strange how little faith government places in the people whose lives it seeks to organise? Once we put our ‘symbolic’ policy into practice, and handed power from government to communities, the effect was extraordinary. A thousand flowers bloomed. Or, more accurately, the number of independent schools grew from 80 to 1,100 — educating 10 per cent of all pupils at the compulsory education age and 20 per cent of those in upper secondary. The drive and energy came from outside government: we in the education department just paid the bills. This, perhaps, explains the success: it was a grassroots-led revolution. Where communities were unhappy with their school, they did not need to petition parliament or local government. They could find a school provider, and set up a new one.

But an audit of the new schools reveals a striking statistic — and this is where David Cameron and his education spokesman, Michael Gove, should take note. Of our new breed of successful ‘free schools’, 75 per cent are profit-seeking. Why? Well, what happens is that the schools tend to expand as fast as demand requires — if they are oversubscribed, they will open a new school rather than ask parents to add their name to a waiting list. But in order to expand, they need to have made money. Without the profit element, the Swedish example shows that the number of new independent schools would be very small and most of them would have a religious purpose.

In fact, the Swedish model that gets so much international attention today would not exist without the acceptance of profit-making organisations. It is a simple matter of incentives. Why should an enterprising teacher set up on their own, and make a career out of innovating in education, when that could mean financial ruin? The solution to these problems is profit. Not a vast profit; some schools make no profit at all. But they behave like businesses, treating parents as customers — and this is what counts.

Take, for example, Carlsson school in Stockholm: an excellent institution, but one run as a not-for-profit charitable trust. Because it lacks proper incentives to expand, it deals with surplus demand by asking parents to form a queue. And it is a very long queue. Parents who are considering Carlsson for their child must send in an application when their child is born. Many miss the cut. And thanks to the school’s strict first-come-first-served policy, along with the academic calendar, many of those children who do make it are benefiting from the time of year in which they were born. It is best to have a birthday between January and April if you want to get into Carlsson.

Here’s a cautionary tale for anyone contemplating putting the government in charge of healthcare, namely, the New York City public schools.

Steven Brill writes in the New Yorker writes about the difficulty firing a bad or incompetent teacher. Many sit in limbo collecting full pay.

..These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all.  Like all teachers, they have the summer off.

The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

So NYC spends millions on salaries and administrative costs because they can’t effectively fire anyone.

One morning in July, I attended a session of the arbitration hearing for Lucienne Mohammed, a veteran fifth-grade teacher. Mohammed, unlike most teachers sent to the Rubber Room, agreed to allow the record of her case to be public. (Her lawyer declined to make her available for an interview, however.) She had been assigned to P.S. 65, in Brooklyn’s East New York section, and was removed from the school in June of 2008, on charges of incompetence.

Mohammed’s case was the first to reach arbitration since the introduction of an initiative called Peer Intervention Program (P.I.P.) Plus, which was created to address the problem of tenured teachers who are suspected of incompetence, not those accused of a crime or other misconduct. P.I.P. Plus was included in the contract negotiated by Klein and Weingarten in 2007. The deal seemed good for both sides: a teacher accused of incompetence would first be assigned a “peer”—a retired teacher or principal—from a neutral consulting company agreed upon by the union and the city.

The peer would observe the teacher for up to a year and provide counselling. If the observer determined that the teacher was indeed incompetent and was unlikely to improve, the observer would write a detailed report saying so. The report could then be used as evidence in a removal hearing conducted by an arbitrator agreed upon by the union and the city. “We as a union need to make sure we don’t defend the indefensible,” Weingarten told me. Klein and Weingarten both say that a key goal of P.I.P. Plus was to streamline incompetency arbitration hearings. It has not worked out that way.

The evidence of Mohammed’s incompetence—found in more than five thousand pages of transcripts from her hearing—seems as unambiguous as the city’s lawyer promised in his opening statement: “These children were abused in stealth. . . . It was chronic . . . a failure to complete report cards. . . . Respondent failed to correct student work, failed to follow the mandated curriculum . . . failed to manage her class.” The independent observer’s final report supported this assessment, ticking off ten bullet points describing Mohammed’s unsatisfactory performance. (Mohammed’s lawyer argues that she began to be rated unsatisfactory only after she became active with the union.)

This was the thirtieth day of a hearing that started last December. Under the union contract, hearings on each case are held five days a month during the school year and two days a month during the summer. Mohammed’s case is likely to take between forty and forty-five hearing days—eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States. (The Department of Education’s spotty records suggest that incompetency hearings before the introduction of P.I.P. Plus generally took twenty to thirty days; the addition of the peer observer’s testimony and report seems to have slowed things down.) Jay Siegel, the arbitrator in Mohammed’s case, who has thirty days to write a decision, estimates that he will exceed his deadline, because of what he says is the amount of evidence under consideration. This means that Mohammed’s case is not likely to be decided before December, a year after it began. That is about fifty per cent more time, from start to finish, than the O.J. trial took.

In 1967, LBJ came to speak at my high school.

It was a surprise (to us) visit, a political event he was using to promote some educational component of his Great Society program. We know how well that turned out.

How was the presidential event? I can’t say. I ditched school that day with a band of my senior classmates. When informed later that the prez had come, we didn’t believe it.

School kids will have a heads up on September 8th, as Obama plans a webcast speech to all public school students.

The President will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning. He will also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens.

Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah — that’ll be the likely takeaway by many students. Others will wonder why, since this is a webcast, why Obama didn’t just email them a link.

by J.C. Phillips

Q: Out of 29 participating nations, where did America rank on international student assessment?

A: 24th

Every education reform effort since the National Defense of Education Act signed in 1958 has begun with soaring rhetoric, big promises, and massive budgets and delivered not much in the way of results.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education; George H.W. Bush promised to “map a new approach to education”; Bill Clinton signed his “Goals 2000”; and George W. Bush had his “me too” moment with “No Child Left Behind.” Yet in spite of all these efforts and billions upon billions of dollars only 23% of American students were proficient in reading by graduation in 2005. In fact, according to the most recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading scores have remained flat while real federal spending per pupil has more than tripled since 1985. The average freshman graduation rate has also remained flat according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

These statistics give the lie to the myth that increases in educational spending will result in improved academic performance. Moreover, they suggest that it is high time that we recognize the distinction between public schools and public education. Public schools are schools run through the political process while public education is a commitment to spend public dollars wherever children receive the best education, whether that be in the basement of a church or the dining room of your neighbor’s home. 

The point is expertly driven home in the new documentary, “Flunked” produced by Steven Maggi of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. The stars of this 49 minute long peek at education in America are the educators and schools that are achieving results by thinking outside of the box and pissing off the organized, entrenched interests in the process. 

Highlighted in the film are Howard Lappin, former principal of the Foshay Learning Center in Watts, California. When Lappin arrived at Foshay, he noticed that the kids in 7th and 8th grade were basically at a 3rd and 4th grade remedial math level. He insisted that they be made to do grade appropriate work much to the chagrin of the parents and school unions who all complained that algebra was too difficult for them. 

And there is Karen Jones, principal of the Sisulu Children’s Academy in Harlem. Jones has taken this school filled with Title I or at risk children and turned it into one of the top performing schools in all of Manhattan.

However, the star of this film is the outspoken Dr. Ben Chavis, principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA. Chavis, a Native American raised as a sharecropper, holds no punches when it comes to his ideas on educating minority children in low income areas: “they need structure and discipline and no excuses!” When Chavis arrived at the Indian charter school in 2001, it was the worst school in the district. Chavis describes it as defined by multi-cultural nonsense – “a bunch of Indians sitting around in a circle weaving baskets.”

Chavis immediately began to challenge all of the orthodoxy. Gone went the middle school rotation of classes. With the exception of gym class, students now spend the entire day with one teacher. Gone went the computers. Says Chavis with a chuckle, “They can’t read. They don’t need a computer.” Forget small classes. Chavis has an average class size of 28. Chavis began to emphasize the basics. The first three hours of each day is devoted to math and English. When Chavis noticed that the North Carolina math curriculum was superior to that proscribed in California, he dumped the California books and began teaching the North Carolina curriculum. Chavis’ unorthodox methods have turned the Indian school into the best middle school in Oakland. 

The approach of Chavis may not work for every student. “Flunked” makes clear that there is no single solution to the problems of our education system or one school delivering the goods. The one size fits all approach to education does not work. What does work, however, is dynamic leadership, high standards and high expectations for students, flexible curriculum and personnel practices and parental participation. 

Public education must empower parents to spend public dollars on education that works. Without options, we can devote all of our GNP towards education and it will only be throwing good money after bad.

What happens to educators when they aren’t strangled by labor unions and Democrat politicians?

Like all California public schools, Our Community School in North Hills has felt the sting of state budget cuts.

But after laying off three teacher assistants and canceling a popular dance program at the charter school, Principal Chris Ferris decided to approach her staff with a question:

Do you want to keep free health-care benefits or keep more teachers?

For many educators, the fact that charter schools like Our Community can even ask these tough questions puts them in a stronger position to weather the financial storm.

Free from rigid union contracts, able to make spending decisions at the school-site level and continuing to see enrollment growth, charter schools can run their campuses like small businesses. At a time when the Los Angeles Unified School District faces layoffs of some 8,500 people and is dismantling popular programs to cut costs, some charter schools are actually hiring teachers.

“Charter schools have an opportunity in this situation to act with far more agility than traditional schools,” said Jed Wallace, CEO of the California Charter School Association.

Imagine that: local, nimble control yields better results.

FRESH evidence of charter schools’ success should put President Obama on the spot: Will he put his muscle where his mouth is?

This month, Obama issued a direct challenge to the more than two dozen states like New York that have arbitrary, teachers-union-imposed “caps” on the number of charter schools they allow to operate. But if he’s serious, he’s going to have to put force behind his words.

Charter schools have a track record as labs of innovation and high-achievement but the unions hate them, because . . . well, because charters’ teachers are rarely unionized.

A new, wide-ranging report from the RAND Corp. last week serves to underscore what we know about charters: They help kids, improving their performance on average and providing some shining success stories all without taking away from traditional public schools.

The RAND study looked at charters in Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, San Diego and the states of Florida, Ohio and Texas. Its most striking finding: Charter-school kids graduate high school and attend college between 7 and 15 percent more often than their traditional public-school counterparts.

That higher graduation and college-attendance rate comes on top of modest test-score bumps that charters have long been shown to produce.

What’s more, charters do all this not by “skimming” the brightest students from traditional public schools, as their critics like to contend but by taking in students who are below average and doing a better job educating them.

With charters doing such a good job, what reason could there be for capping their growth? Other than the obvious: Democratic (and, yes, plenty of Republican) legislators doing the unions’ bidding.

City Journal:

Today marks the tenth anniversary of New York’s Charter Schools Act, which authorized the creation of 100 charter schools in the state. Over the past decade, charter schools—public schools that may operate independently of local school districts—have gone from a quaint think-tank idea to a mass movement with broad parental support and bipartisan backing.

Back in 1998, the charter school law was primarily viewed as the hobbyhorse of Republican governor George Pataki, with Democratic support limited to the Reverend Floyd Flake, a former congressman, and to a few Democratic assemblymen. The New York City Schools Chancellor openly opposed the law, as did the New York State School Boards Association and two teachers’ unions, the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and its most important local, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Today, the law is supported by Democratic governor David Paterson, Senate Democratic Leader Malcolm Smith, much of the membership of the Legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, and New York City’s mayor and schools chancellor. NYSUT remains opposed, but the UFT has staked out a more nuanced position, going so far as to open two charter schools itself. A new generation of younger Democrats, members of the group Democrats for Education Reform, are providing financial and political backing to charters in New York. And the schools are popular with parents, too: according to the New York Charter Schools Association, more than 30,000 students are on waiting lists to attend charters.

Though charter schools still face significant resistance, few political observers would have predicted such a sweeping change in the political landscape. Clearly, the perspective of ten years offers much to be happy about and much progress to build on. But failures and missteps along the way also suggest a need for state chartering entities and charter advocates to pause for a moment of reflection. How did we get here, and where are we headed?

Paul Graham writes about tests, credentials and meritocracy:

…Judging people by their academic credentials was in its time an advance. The practice seems to have begun in China, where starting in 587 candidates for the imperial civil service had to take an exam on classical literature. [1] It was also a test of wealth, because the knowledge it tested was so specialized that passing required years of expensive training. But though wealth was a necessary condition for passing, it was not a sufficient one. By the standards of the rest of the world in 587, the Chinese system was very enlightened. Europeans didn’t introduce formal civil service exams till the nineteenth century, and even then they seem to have been influenced by the Chinese example.

Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery. It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. But by no means a perfect solution. When you judge people that way, you tend to get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as in present day South Korea.

What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal. The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next.

It’s hard to beat this phenomenon, because the schools adjust to suit whatever the tests measure. When the tests are narrow and predictable, you get cram schools on the classic model, like those that prepared candidates for Sandhurst (the British West Point) or the classes American students take now to improve their SAT scores. But as the tests get broader, the schools do too. Preparing a candidate for the Chinese imperial civil service exams took years, as prep school does today. But the raison d’etre of all these institutions has been the same: to beat the system. [2]
_____

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children’s success directly. It’s a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly—for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children’s qualities.

Parents will tend to do this when they can. Parents will die for their kids, so it’s not surprising to find they’ll also push their scruples to the limits for them. Especially if other parents are doing it.

Charles Euchner in The American:

Late last year, a student at the American University of Paris sent a request to a company called Writerboard. “I have another paper to write,” he wrote in an email. “It’s another art history paper. It should be around 3–5 pages. It is the same course than [sic] the last two. It should therefore be written with the same approach.” He added: “I have attached the professor’s guideline as well as the other two essays you have written for me.”

The papers Justin (not his real name) attached use dramatically different styles. The first, speaking of a Paul Cézanne critic, states: “While his artistic critical eye seems accurate if not always reliable, the pagan frisson of his Freudian approach is perhaps overly compelling for him.” (The term “pagan frisson” later provoked gallows laughter among art history faculty at the university.) The second paper used a simpler style: “The buildings are cast in various shades of dour gray, structures that rise over 50 feet above the street.”

For his new assignment, Justin asked Writerboard to produce an analysis of a single work of art from two different critical perspectives. Not long after Justin placed his order for a new paper, Professor Anna Russakoff obtained emails that documented her student’s cheating.

Preparing to confront the student, Russakoff asked her department chair and dean for advice. Before Russakoff could confront him, Justin sought help for yet another assignment, this time an analysis of art at the Louvre. After being informed of Justin’s new request for an outside writer—his fourth documented case of at least attempting to cheat—Russakoff lamented in an email: “And wouldn’t you think that if you came to Paris to study art history you might actually WANT to go to the Louvre to look at art…????”

In the following weeks, Russakoff got mixed signals from the university’s administrators. Her department chair agreed that the evidence of cheating was strong, but the dean would not go so far.

When Russakoff confronted the student, he denied any cheating. When he could not define words in the paper such as “eschew” and “obtuse,” he explained that his sister helped him edit the paper. At the suggestion of the dean, the student supplied what he claimed were printouts of emails with his sister. Russakoff is sure Justin produced the materials after the fact, since she possesses his time-stamped emails that show he hired Writerboard to write four papers.

After reading the university’s official policies for dealing with cheating cases—which put the onus on the professor to see any case through—Russakoff decided to give Justin an F for the Cézanne paper and a C-minus for the course. The C-minus meant that Justin would not have to repeat the class, which is required for art history majors. And so Russakoff does not have to teach him again. “It’s probably cowardly,” she says, “but it would have been a lot to deal with.… I’m not even a full-time faculty.”

Justin’s case underscores a growing problem at educational institutions around the world. Technology has created new threats to academic learning and honor. And while Justin was caught in the act, countless students outwit their teachers.

Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, the leading researcher on student cheating, says that the portion of American students who admit to cheating off the Internet—either habitually or occasionally—increased from 10 percent to 40 percent from 1999 to 2004. Students can contract out for papers, download papers from databases, or just cut and paste passages from the Web. In 2007 alone, cheating scandals at Duke, the Air Force Academy, Indiana University, and Ohio University produced national headlines because of the large numbers of students involved.

IBD:

Arne Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools since 2001, has garnered much praise for his efforts to improve them. But his efforts have largely amounted to pouring new wine into old bottles with little to show for them.

Duncan holds a degree in sociology, not education. He supports higher teacher pay and more training but has done little to loosen the teachers’ unions’ grip on education. Like the UAW, these unions have been a drag on innovation while imposing huge costs.

He has supported closing failing schools but not the right of parents to take kids elsewhere. According to a 2005 Chicago Sun-Times article, Duncan, Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Chicago Teachers Union all oppose vouchers, saying they “haven’t been proved to be effective and would tax public resources.”

Duncan’s record has been unimpressive. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), Chicago Public Schools have remained below the national average during Duncan’s term.

Under Duncan, Chicago schools’ average reading scores rose just one point on average from 2002 to 2007, to 250 out of 500. The national average in 2007 was 263, and 75% of Chicago students scored less.

In math, scores rose from 254 in 2003 to 260 in 2007. But the national average that year was 280. Again, 75% of Chicago students scored below the national average. In writing, the story was the same, with about half falling below the national average.

If anyone lives in a bubble, it’s academics. Campus politics are brutal, but with tenure, life is pretty insulated from the real world where commoners dirty their hands making a living. Plus trying to pay their way as they get gouged for textbooks and tuition.

Many colleges have such massive endowments they need never charge tuition at all, but charge they do. Think Harvard. Can it last?

The idea of “bubble” has been on everyone’s mind since the escalating housing and economic crisis first erupted in July 2007. Throughout these turbulent times, one institution appeared to be coasting along above the fray: Higher Education. Higher ed has been growing for decades, becoming a staple in the national political economy. The supply and demand situation has been remarkably favorable to it: believing that higher education is a necessary, if not sufficient, ticket to personal success and social progress, the public has tolerated increasingly higher costs and tuition—forces that citizens have rebelled against in other consumer domains.

After all, didn’t ambitious citizens have to pay their dues to higher ed in order to have a meaningful chance at success? With seemingly no viable alternative or exit strategy, consumers have stretched their pocketbooks to the breaking point and taken out loans to purchase a chance at the American Dream. (Today over 35% of students rely on student loans, and the number is growing.) Not surprisingly, the last twenty years have seen tuition costs rise at over three times the rate of inflation. The overall costs for many private schools add up to $50,000 per year, while public universities cost up to $20,000 for state residents, and over $30,000 for those who hail from out of state. Meanwhile, wages for most Americans have been left in the dust.

Something had to give. The fate of the housing market comes to mind. Believing that home prices would rise virtually forever, consumers and investors were willing to stretch themselves and their debt to the limit in order to obtain housing stock. We all know what happened when that assumption ran into the brick wall of reality. Is higher education immune to such a shock?

Not according to some commentators who have burst onto the scene in recent months. In an article on Forbes.com a few months ago, a leading financial analyst observed, “We are at a trend line that cannot be sustained. Tuition must go down, or there will be limited demand for high-priced private schools.” The recent economic debacle enhances the credibility of this prediction. As we speak, high-priced Antioch College is closing its expensive (and excessively politically correct) doors after 157 years of existence. According to many sources, Antioch is the beginning of a national trend.

..and gets punished by the thought police. Alexander McPherson: 

I am a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine, and I have consistently refused, on principle, to participate in the sexual harassment training that the state and my employers seem to think is so important.

For a while, it didn’t seem to matter much that I had refused. I (and fellow scofflaws) were periodically notified that we were not in compliance, and we were advised to get with the program like everybody else. Then the university began warning me that my supervisory responsibilities would be taken away if I did not promptly comply.

Last month, the university finally followed through, sending me a letter announcing that my laboratory and the students I oversaw were to be immediately turned over to other university officials and faculty. I continued to refuse to take sexual harassment training, and do so now.

I am not normally confrontational, so I sought to find a means to resolve the conflict. I proposed the following: I would take the training if the university would provide me with a brief, written statement absolving me of any suspicion, guilt or complicity regarding sexual harassment. I wanted any possible stigma removed. “Fulfilling this requirement,” said the statement I asked them to approve, “in no way implies, suggests or indicates that the university currently has any reason to believe that Professor McPherson has ever sexually harassed any student or any person under his supervision during his 30-year career with the University of California.

The university, however, declined to provide me with any such statement, which poses the question: Why not? It is a completely innocuous, unobjectionable statement that they should have been willing to write for any faculty member whose record is as free of stain as is my own. The immediate reply of the administration was that if I didn’t comply with the law, I would be placed on unpaid leave.

So why am I am being so inflexible on this issue? Why not simply take the training and be done with it? There are several reasons.

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

Read it all.

Winners of the 2009 AAAS/Science Dance Contest (gee, did I miss New Years?). Many more here.

Even those who think the Bill Ayers/Obama connection is irrelevant to the campaign must wonder why the USA turns its enemies into college professors where they can influence young minds.

It’s not just Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Ron Karenga, the black separatist who invented Kwanzaa as a black alternative to Christmas was a felon — convicted of torture — who did his time and four years later was running the black studies department at California State University, Long Beach.

The makers of Indoctrinate U, a documentary which reveals the hard left bias on college campuses, had a segment on Bill Ayers et al. that didn’t fit into their film. With the recent focus on Ayers, they’ve made the outtake available on their website.

You can view the video here.

The documentary channel will be airing the full film next week. All times are Eastern:

Monday, October 27th : 09:00 PM – 10:30 PM

Tuesday, October 28th: Midnight – 01:30 AM
(Starts after midnight Monday)

Saturday, November 1st: 05:00 PM – 06:30 PM

Sunday, November 2nd: 02:00 AM – 03:30 AM

Tuesday, November 4th: 03:00 AM – 04:30 AM

Kevin Kosar: 

“Troublemaker” may be the nicest epithet ever applied to Chester E. Finn Jr. Though genial and in possession of legions of friends and admirers, Finn, the head of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, has many critics. Leftist academics have nothing but spite for him. Henry A. Giroux, a professor of communications, has called Finn “slimy,” and a fair number of other members of the education establishment, a.k.a. “the blob,” deride Finn as part of a conservative, neoconservative, or capitalist (take your pick) cabal that is hell-bent on privatizing public schools. 

In part, this enmity is due to Finn’s brutal candor, which I witnessed firsthand at an education conference in 2001. Early in the program, a sharp reporter of some renown lobbed a half-baked question at Finn. With a few words, “Checker” (as everyone calls him) blew the question from the sky like a clay pigeon. I thought, “Doesn’t he know who she is? He’s going to get hammered in her next article.” Of course, he knew who the reporter was; he just did not care.  

Mostly, though, Checker has earned enemies because he is a tireless advocate of school reform—and has been one for four decades now. His relentless questioning of popular shibboleths (“Fewer children in a classroom makes for higher achievement! Charter schools take money from public schools!”) has made him a pariah among many academics and activists.

Checker’s passion for improving student learning comes through clearly in Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (Princeton, $26.95). His family story is classically American. The Finns arrived from Russia in 1891 and settled in Dayton, Ohio. Checker’s great-grandfather started a “bag and burlap” company. One of his sons, Samuel, Checker’s grandfather, completed high school and sold soap door-to-door while studying law. By age 30, Samuel Finn had passed the bar and started a law firm. The Finn family was ascending. As Checker puts it, “Just three decades after my Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother peddled produce from a wagon, my father matriculated at Yale.”

If a corporation built homes over a toxic site, they’d be pilloried.

But when the Los Angeles Unified School District knowingly built a high school on a site seeping methane from 100 year old oil fields, he criticism was muted.

As it stands, that high school has yet to open and will cost $400 million when it does. For one single high school.

You’d think that would teach ‘em. But no…

Dangerous levels of lead have been found under a parking lot that the Los Angeles Unified School District plans to turn into playing fields for Virgil Middle School, reigniting the ire of project opponents, it was reported today.The district plans to move the school’s current playing fields to build an elementary school on the site.

Past reports have found contaminants on the land and groundwater under the future fields, which now contain commercial property and Virgil’s teacher parking lot, the Los Angeles Times reported. Cleanup costs are expected to reach $10 million.

On Friday, teachers received a notice from the state Division of Toxic Substances Control informing them that lead levels exceeding safety standards had been found in the ground under the gravel lot, according to The Times.

The lot was paved over the weekend to contain the lead, which could be harmful if inhaled.

According to the Division of Toxic Substances Control, lead levels at the site were found to be more than 100 times the recommended limit of 255 milligrams per kilogram in samples taken a month ago, The Times reported.

“We’ve been walking on that for years,” math teacher Maria Magana, who has been among the most vocal opponents of the project, told The Times. “This is exactly what the teachers mean when they say they don’t trust the district to do the $10 million cleanup correctly.”

The Economist:

THERE is a fascinating and important ongoing debate concerning recent growth in American income inequality. Just a few weeks ago, the Economist highlighted recent work by Paul Krugman suggesting that trade was playing an increasing role in widening income gaps. In response, Josh Bivens, whose work was featured in that piece, wrote that trade could possibly be blamed for a third of the rise in inequality.

I thought it was important to point out that the problem wasn’t wage gaps, but the failure of American workers to respond to them. Slowing educational attainment has meant more unskilled American workers and fewer skilled workers, a supply situation which has pushed wages apart.

I found it interesting then when Mark Thoma featured a comment from Paul Krugman today, downplaying the role of education in inequality by saying it could only be blamed for a third of the rise in inequality. As Mr Thoma notes, this is probably a conservative estimate. In the pecking order of inequality causes, education is clearly a bigger factor than trade. This become all the more important when one considers that improving educational attainment is good for economic growth, while curtailing trade is bad.

At any rate, Mr Thoma makes his observation while mentioning some new research on American education from VoxEU. That research says that educational attainment is very closely related to parental education level. No surprise, then, that most of the increase in attainment between 1979 and 1997 was due to demographic factors–a more educated parental cohort, in other words. Once that factor is held constant, response to diverging wages has been quite disappointing.

The authors of the study–Joseph G. Altonji, Prashant Bharadwaj, Fabian Lange–offer potential explanations for the lack of adjustment, but they conclude that none of the best candidates are without criticism. The question, they say, remains open.

We posted at length about Bill Ayers, bomb-thrower-cum-educator and associate of Obama. Ayers answered Sol Stern’s criticism here.

Stern repeats several times that I want to “indoctrinate students” and turn classrooms into “laboratories of revolutionary change.” Not true, not even close. He claims that I want to “promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms,” and that my work is based on the idea that “the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony.” Not true, not true. He offers no accompanying quote or citation, which is a little odd since he states that it’s a “major theme.”

The one true assertion he makes about my actual work—and he repeats it several times—is that I am in favor of teaching for social justice. He never explains why that’s a bad thing—Stern favors teaching for social injustice?—but simply calls it the “social-justice teaching agenda.”

Sol Stern, replied to Ayers here.

In my City Journal articles I have cited numerous examples of New York City schools devoting their curriculums to social justice themes and have described specific units taught to children (including in elementary schools) that clearly fall under the rubric of political indoctrination.

For example, the radical education group NYCoRE created a “Katrina curriculum” that has been piloted by one of the group’s leaders in the fourth grade of a Manhattan elementary school. The curriculum leaves nothing to chance, providing teachers with classroom prompts designed to illustrate the evils of American capitalism and imperialism. One section, called “Two Gulf Wars,” suggests posing such questions to the kids as: “Was the government unable to respond quickly to the crisis on the Gulf Coast because the money and personnel were all being used in Iraq?”

So it seems to me that the question isn’t precisely how widespread social justice teaching is right now (although more studies would be welcome) but rather what public school leaders – state education commissioners, teachers union leaders and district superintendents – might do to make sure that intrusion of left wing or right wing political ideology into the classroom doesn’t spread any further. We need a professional code of ethics for teachers, a Hippocratic Oath if you will, that makes clear that our public school classrooms are not laboratories for social and political change, with the kids serving as guinea pigs. Perhaps Stanley Fish put it best: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or antinationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk show host.”

Mark Steyn:

Is American public education a form of child abuse? The Washington Post’s Brigid Schulte reported this month on a student named Randy Castro, who attends school in Woodbridge, Va. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police.

Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he’s been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He’s guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days – and maybe beyond.

Maybe it’ll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer’s computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he’ll be able to keep it hushed up until he’s 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.

But that’s what he is now: Randy Castro, sex offender. The title of the incident report spells out his crime: “Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive.” The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the first-grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.

Randy Castro was not apprehended until he was 6, so who knows how long his reign of sexual terror lasted? Sixteen months ago, a school official in Texas accused a 4-year-old of sexual harassment after the boy was observed pressing his face into the breasts of a teacher’s aide when he hugged her before boarding the school bus. Fortunately, the school took decisive action and suspended the sick freak.

By the way, is that the first recorded use in the history of the English language of the phrase “accused a 4-year-old of sexual harassment”? Well, it won’t be the last: In the state of Maryland last year, 16 kindergartners were suspended for sexual harassment, as were three preschoolers.

Keep reading. As you do, ask yourself (rhetorically) who runs our public schools today.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it’s perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible.

The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

HT: Maggie’s Farm

Los Angeles school officials transferred an assistant principal to a Watts middle school just months after he had been removed from a previous school where he was investigated for allegedly having sex with an underage student and pulling a gun on her stepfather.

Last week, the assistant principal, Steve Thomas Rooney, 39, allegedly molested a student at the new campus, Markham Middle School. He was arrested and charged with five counts of forcible lewd acts on a child, stemming from allegations that he sexually assaulted the 13-year-old girl March 1 and at least one other occasion.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials declined to comment Wednesday about how Rooney had been reassigned to Markham last fall, saying they are conducting an internal investigation and citing a policy barring them from speaking publicly about cases under those circumstances.

What a convenient policy.