Pretty badly -- but not badly enough to keep Obama from appointing the head of the Chicago's public schools to the top spot at the Department of Education. And it is even worse than I have mentioned in earlier posts -- the district has received five straight failing grades under NCLB with Arne Duncan at the helm.

The Chicago Public Schools, whose superintendent, Arne Duncan, has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to be the next education secretary, failed to meet the Illinois state standards set under the No Child Left Behind Act for the last five years.

From 2004 to 2008, the Chicago district (District 299) failed to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) in key areas, according to the district’s progress report on the Illinois State Board of Education Web site.

Now I am a critic of NCLB, and think it needs serious revision to do a better job of measuring student learning. But a district in which only 60% meet the minimum standard in reading and only 20% of special needs students meet the minimum standard is clearly not up to snuff.

If he can't lead effectively at the district level, why should we believe that Arne Duncan can be an educational leader at the national level? The US Senate must reject Duncan's nomination.

Posted by: Greg at 03:59 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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For crying out loud! Did someone really make a decision to do something this absurd?

Students at St. Stephen Elementary School found out last week that Santa Claus can have the same skin color as them.

That's because two Santa Clauses — one white, one black — were invited to the rural Berkeley County school at separate times last Friday to take pictures with students of the same skin color.

Principal Willa Norton's decision to invite two Santas has drawn criticism from a few parents and from two civil rights organizations, which said the school shouldn't have divided the students by race without asking parents first.

Marguerite Lyons, who found out about the two Santas while picking up her son outside the school Thursday, said dividing the children by race smacked of prejudice. All the children should have seen one Santa, she said.

"I don't care if (Santa) was Chinese or Puerto Rican," said Lyons, who is black. "Everyone's the same."

For the record, I agree with Lyons, who seems to have adopted the philosophy of racial equality much more fully than the principal or the civil rights organizations, which were willing to concede the propriety of such racial separatism “if the parents wanted it.” There should have been only one Santa, with no racial division – and had she brought a black Santa into her school that is ¾ black, I can’t imagine having anyone object (or caring if anyone did). After all, I was not troubled when, during my two years on Guam as a kid, we had a Santa who looked just like the Pacific Islanders who made up the bulk of the non-military population there.

Now mind you, Norton was trying to do a good thing here, and I won’t attack her goal. But the execution is really problematic – and even she and her district indicate there will be a different procedure in place next year. So Merry Christmas to them all.

Posted by: Greg at 01:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And this time it is a liberal being censored!

Big Bear High School student Mariah Jimenez should be allowed to wear the "Prop. 8 Equals Hate" T-shirt she was banned from wearing on campus, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The 16-year-old sophomore, who is her class president, wore the tie-dyed T-shirt to school on Nov. 3, the day before voters approved the constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage in California.

Mariah's sixth-period teacher, Sue Reynolds, ordered her to remove the shirt during a meeting of the Associated Student Body.

When Mariah protested, Reynolds sent her to the principal's office.

"She said I shouldn't be wearing such divisive shirts, and my shirt draws a line down the school," said

Now IÂ’ve taken a pretty hard line on student speech in the past, relying on the seminal case in Tinker v. Des Moines, in which the Supreme Court ruled that students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate. However, since Jimenez lives in the Ninth Circuit, IÂ’m going to have to take a different position, because the Ninth Circuit decided to overrule that precedent from a higher court and the higher court (the US Supreme Court) punted when offered the opportunity to reassert its authority and acknowledge that student speech on important political and social issues is protected by the First Amendment.

The irony, of course, is that the decision in which the Ninth Circuit stripped students of their First Amendment rights was a speech that allowed schools to suppress the speech of students critical of homosexuality. But since the Ninth Circuit undermined the notion that students have a First Amendment right to speak on such issues, it is hard to accept the argument that this is a violation of MariahÂ’s rights in any way. After all, the Ninth Circuit has more or less indicated that it will defer to school administrators in such instances, and they did indicate that they were seeking to avoid violence and disruption, just as the school had in the case in which the Ninth Circuit implicitly dispensed with the relevant Supreme Court precedent.

Ferraud sent Mariah's mother a letter dated Dec. 3 indicating the school's decision was more about Mariah's safety than about restricting free speech. She said district officials "were concerned about the potential disruption resulting from the fact that the shirt seemed to imply that those students who supported Proposition 8 were expressing `hate."'

And since many of those students were basing their position on Prop 8 on their religious views, and since at least some of those students would have been members of minority religions (Mormons and Muslims, among others), these students had every right to be left alone and not subjected to so-called hate speech, just as the judges ruled gay students had a similar right when the student in Harper v. Poway was banned from expressing “hateful” sentiments by wearing a shirt that read “Homosexuality is Shameful”. These members of minority faiths might have their poor psyches injured by such hateful words, just like the hypothetically-harmed homosexual kids in the earlier case. And while the fact that young Mariah made it through to sixth period with no disruption of the school day might seem compelling in arguing that the shirt caused no harm, Tyler Harper had made it through a substantial portion of the day without incident before his speech was suppressed by school authorities. If such facts are irrelevant in a case involving speech on one side of the gay issue, it should be equally irrelevant on the other as a matter of applying the law and Constitution equally.

Outside the Ninth Circuit, though, I would argue that Mariah should have every right to wear her shirt unmolested – and, indeed protected if necessary – by school authorities. If we are to teach our young people to be fully-informed and active citizens in a free society, both Mariah Jimenez and Tyler Harper OUGHT to be able to walk through the hallways of a school expressing diverse views of homosexuality and gay rights with the full support of teachers and administrators. In a world where Tinker v. Des Moines were a precedent which school authorities sought to uphold rather than undermine, actions like those of Jimenez and Harper would be seen as evidence that the schools had succeed rather than problems for administrators to deal with. Of course, in such a world we would view schools as a place which encouraged critical thinking and respectful self-expression rather than institutions in which teaching to the state minimum standards implicitly requires that No Child Gets Ahead.

By the way, let me state for the record that I do not fully agree (or disagree) with either studentÂ’s message. On the other hand, IÂ’d be proud to claim either as my student or my child, because each has engaged in an act of true patriotism by exercising their legitimate First Amendment rights and attempting to defend them appropriately when challenged by government authority. Each deserves better than they were given by their respective schools.

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Is anyone else troubled by the fact that Barack Obma has appointed a new Secretary of Education whose own school district under-performs the nation on standardized tests AND is provides such a lousy education that the president-elect and his wife refused to send their children to the district's schools.

In 2007, only 17 percent of eighth graders tested at or above grade level in reading in Chicago Public Schools – the school system administered by Arne Duncan since 2001.

President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday tapped Duncan to become secretary of education in the upcoming administration.

Duncan, hailed by Obama as a reformer, said he would like to take the lessons he learned in Chicago with him when he moves to Washington. “I'm also eager to apply some of the lessons we have learned here in Chicago to help school districts all across our country," Duncan said after Obama formally named him to the job in Chicago.

By every measure, Duncan is a FAILURE as a superintendent, with his reforms having been ineffective. Can our children afford to have the lessons he learned in Chicago applied nationwide, which would presumably lower student performance? We'd be going from "No Child Moves Ahead" to "No Child Learns To Read". I therefore urge the US Senate to reject Arne Duncan's nomination to be Secretary of Education.

Posted by: Greg at 03:32 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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We are constantly told by advocates of affirmative action that the under-representation of racial, ethnic, or gender groups in a program is evidence of a problem that must be remedied. As such, IÂ’d like to encourage colleges and universities to implement affirmative action programs to guarantee that the proportion of individuals in these study abroad programs.

In recent years, as study abroad has ballooned across the nation, fueled by growth in short-term programs and increasing diversity in participating students’ majors and destinations, a 2-to-1 female-to-male ratio has stayed remarkably stagnant. In 2006-7, the most recent year for which data are available, 65.1 percent of Americans studying abroad were women, and 34.9 percent men. A decade earlier — when the total number of study abroad students was less than half its current total — the breakdown was 64.9 percent female, 35.1 percent male, according to Institute of International Education Open Doors statistics.

I’d bet that if there would be task forces, special programs and howling by the professional victim’s groups (like AAUW) over what would appear to be a violation of Title IX if these figures were reversed. Yet somehow this disparity has been permitted to fester over the years, with women being denied the benefits of an appropriately diverse educational experience when they study abroad. Shouldn’t something be done – using the very arguments used to eliminate men’s athletic programs and establish special scholarships for women and minorities? Or does this situation serve as confirmation that the claimed goals of equality and equity are actually nothing more than excuses to engage in indefensible discrimination?

Of course it does, as illustrated by this anecdote.

The persistent gender gap is regularly described as an object of interest in the field — if not an object of intense concern compared to, for instance, the similarly stagnant and low numbers of racial minorities studying abroad. (“I’ve made myself a little unpopular occasionally when I’ve been in sessions on under-represented groups in study abroad and I bring up the issue of men in study abroad,” (William) Hoffa said).

Yeah, that’s right – only under-representation of victim classes is a problem. Daring to suggest otherwise makes one “unpopular” due to the sin of political incorrectness.

H/T NROÂ’s Phi Beta Cons

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