Number 2 Pencil

Happy Halloween!

No real bloggage today; I'm leaving early to participate in our company's food drive, and then I need to get the rest of the party food for the gathering I'm having tonight. So, I'll leave you with a few spooky links, and wish you all a lot of fun and candy tonight!

What your Halloween costume says about you - Use this information to psychoanalyze that weird coworker of yours who came to the office dressed as a dominatrix nun.

Top Ten Scary Geek Movies, parts one, two and three. My favorite? "28 Releases Later."

The 100 Scariest Movie Scenes of All Time, from the fabulous RetroCrush site.

A how-to on how to remove eggs and toilet paper from your house, just in case you live near a bunch of juvenile delinquents.

Download that creepy-ass theme from Halloween here and play it really loud on your computer, the better to scare your cubicle-mates. The Divimax 25th Anniversary Edition of that 1978 classic is available for as low as $18.49 on Amazon.

Read about horror movies gone horribly wrong; Jabootu's got the reviews of such putrid horror movie failures as From Hell It Came(1957)The Creeping Terror(1964), Rock & Roll Nightmare, and, one of the worst movies of all time, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).

That's all for now. I'll be back on Monday!

Update:Okay, I said I wasn't going to blog, but I have to link to this humorous story about a NC State fan who admits to a terrible secret in his past - rooting for UVA:

Imagine the horror: sports fans wearing striped ties, spectators swaying hand-in-hand in song, and constant and repeated references to Thomas Jefferson in every uttered phrase. Make no mistake, this horror is as real as the grave of Sally Hemmings. I should know, I lived it. This is my story.

UVa is a land of zombies with excellent standardized test scores.

Hee hee hee. When else am I going to get the chance to link to an article that uses "zombies" and "excellent standardized test scores" in the same sentence?

Toy guns are much safer in the hands of adults

Remember a few days ago, when I was bitching about the moronic case of the nine-year-old arrested for waving a toy gun in public? His mom was charged, too, when all she was trying to do, allegedly, was beg the police to let her "delinquent" son off with a warning.

Devoted Reader Nick pointed out a little inconsistency in the approach our police take towards citizens with toy guns. Kids, who probably have no idea what they did wrong, get arrested. Adults who wander into a congressional office building with toy guns as part of their costumes, however, get let off the hook:

The House of Representatives shut down Thursday following a reported security breach at a nearby congressional office building, but police later determined that a plastic revolver and Halloween costume were to blame and lawmakers went back in session.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said "two staff members bringing in Halloween costumes" were responsible. "I don't think they had any ill intent," he said, adding he expected no charges to be filed.

Bear in mind, the staff had been chatting with the two aides for a while before the gun showed up on the x-ray machine. Good thing it wasn't a real gun, eh?

Now, perhaps U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer, he of good judgement, could wander over and explain to Lorain Officer Joe Novosielski (the guy who arrested the nine-year-old) the concept of toy guns, and the fact that people who own them rarely show "ill intent."

A nine-year-old with a toy gun gets charged with "juvenile delinquency by reason of inducing panic," while two absent-minded aides, whose actions resulted in the House of Representatives being shut down, face no charges.

Is anyone else out there starting to feel like our society is deliberately trying to make life miserable for kids, while letting adults off the hook?

Update: Fellow blogger Daryl C provides yet more data to support this theory - "Principal Accused of Pointing Toy Gun":

A middle school principal who a parent says pointed a toy gun at a seventh-grader was reassigned to a desk job Thursday while school district officials investigate the complaint.

"I was really disturbed, for him to use his authority to intimidate children like that," she said.

I really don't blame her. Principal Samore appears to be using the "tough love" defense here, but given that the kid was sent to the principal's office on completely false charges of having a gun, why did the principal decide to use a gun - even a toy one - to scare him? No gun was found on the kid.

So, to recap: Nine-year-old waving toy gun around - gets arrested. Congressional aides bring toy guns into office building - no punishment. Principal deliberately uses toy gun to frighten wits out of a boy falsely accused of having a gun - gets reassignment to a desk job. He hasn't been fired, nor arrested - just told to sit somewhere else for a while.

You can read parental comments about the school here. At least one parent claims that kids must carry clear backpacks and cannot even use lockers, because "gangs and fights are out of control." And the principal's solution is to use a toy gun to frighten a kid who hadn't done anything wrong?

The "enormous barrier" of mailing a $6 check

When I read stories such as this one (which is real), I understand why there are some people out there who believe that it is asking too much of kids to learn to read and write and do math on a basic level, or that it's asking too much of schools to teach every child the most basic of educational skills:

Roughly 40,000 poor people have been dropped from the Oregon Health Plan this year because of their failure to make monthly premium payments, some as low as $6 a month.

Those dropped can return after six months.

Good thing those poor have advocates to make excuses on their behalf, isn't it? After all, it seems to now be unacceptable to ask that people make even the most minimal efforts on their own behalf. But now that I think about it, maybe Ellen has a point. If schools don't teach kids how to write, how can we expect those kids, who will grow up to be unproductive members of society, to know how to write a check or address an envelope? "Expectations just can't be lowered enough" seems to be their motto in Oregon.

Sheesh. I've heard complaints about the US becoming a "nanny state," but this is ridiculous.

(Via RightWingNews).

"Hogwarts Headaches"

So much for all those efforts to increase literacy rates and love of reading amongst young children. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine blames Harry Potter books for causing headaches, neck, and wrist pain:

Dr. Howard Bennett, a pediatrician writing in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, said he had three otherwise healthy children between 8 and 10 years old complain of headaches for two to three days last summer. One child also complained of neck and wrist pain.

After some questioning, Bennett found that all three had been reading the 870-page "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" book for six to eight hours a day. Two of the children read while lying on their stomachs, and the third propped the book on her legs and rested her head on a pillow...

I have the feeling some parents would love to have the problem of kids who read too long without taking breaks.

Chicken puppets and scary drawings

*Sigh* Can I just combine the stories about PETA antics and zero-tolerance idiocies into one post? It would be easier. Thanks.

First up, those wacky anti-science PETA activists disrupt a middle school to protest eating chicken. Needless to say, PETA handed out literature and spoke to kids without getting school or parental permission first; you never know when those guardians might try something tricky like teaching kids the science that supports medical research.

Although the ingestion of fried chicken could be discouraged on the grounds of bad nutrition and digestive discomfort, PETA's constant refrain that children have a "natural empathy" for animals, and their use of that as an excuse for propanda distribution, is enough to give anyone indigestion as well.

Next, Devoted Reader Mark T sends along this story of a patriotic 14-year-old who has been suspended for drawing military figures engaged in combat.

A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy — whose dad and stepdad are in the military — was suspended for five days because he drew a "patriotic" stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.

"He's been punished for the drawing," said Tinton Falls school superintendent Leonard Kelpsh. "We felt it was highly inappropriate, and we took it very seriously."

Inappropriate why? Was it threatening to anyone in the school? Was it meant to scare other students? Or is it simply unacceptable to hold pro-war, anti-Taliban thoughts in New Jersey schools?

Scott Switzer, of Colts Neck, was sent home last week from Tinton Falls Middle School (search) after a teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal...

Scott said school officials may have been edgy because of an earlier incident in which other students had drawn a "very Columbine-ish" picture.

Key phrase here is "other students." If I read this correctly, Scott is being punished in part because of what other students did. If he didn't draw the "Columbine-ish" pictures, why should any of that tension spill over on him?

Officials said they were concerned because his drawing contained a reference to another student who they feared might have been a potential target. But a local psychologist who examined the teenager said the sketch was benign.

"I don't attribute pathological significance to it," said Dr. Gloria Tillman, a psychologist who treated the boy for ADD. "I have to wonder what is expected of our children today when 1) our country is at war and 2) both his father and stepfather are out fighting the war."

I'm not so concerned about what is expected of our children as I am about what is expected of our school officials, especially in terms of judgement and common sense and viewing things in context. If the school really felt that another child was threatened, then they may have had a point in isolating Scott and talking to him. But if the picture doesn't really have any threatening messages to anyone in particular, and if the boy's own psychologist doesn't see a problem, what right does the school have to label the boy as "not normal?" Since when is it "not normal" for young boys to be fascinated by weaponry, war, and battles - especially boys whose family members are in the military?

Extending the use of the SAT

What's a testing opponent's worst nightmare? The use of the SAT by employers after a potential employee has graduated from college. The Volokh Conspiracy notes that the Wall Street Journal has reported on this new trend; some employers are allegedly requiring the submission of SAT scores along with a college transcript for entry-level positions.

I don't have a subscription to the online version so I can't reach the original article, but here's what The Volokh Conspiracy - and one reader - had to say:

SATs For Life? My colleague Lloyd Cohen passes along these thoughts:
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A most interesting article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Apparently, there is an increasing trend among employers to ask applicants for their SATs long after graduation from college. I find this heartening. The SAT is fundamentally an IQ test. While not the only measure of likely productivity on the job, intelligence is probably the most powerful and robust predictor. In the past college of attendance, major, and grades, while always subject to unreliability, were more powerful indices of both intelligence and other productive inputs than they are now. As these other predictors have become more debased it is good to see that the market is responding.
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Precisely because of its value as an IQ test there are those who wish to transform the SAT into something else, and wish to narrow its employment. One wonders how--if they succeeed--the market will respond.

Of course, the SAT does have some limitations as an IQ test, not least that taking a preparation class can boost results, and that language skills for the Verbal section will be affected by the quality of English spoken in one's home. But in the push to raise high school graduation rates and college attendance rates, graduating from high school or even attending college is no guarantee that a job applicant has basic literacy and math skills, much less advanced ones. It's not surprising that employers are looking for substitute signals.

Not surprising, but that doesn't mean that the SAT is necessarily the best test for the job. It is related to intelligence, and it does predict first-year college grades. However, that doesn't mean that it is necessarily predictive of success on the job once one has a college degree, given that most of those with college degrees will have a more limited range of SAT scores (limiting the range of a variable necessarily limits the correlation of that variable with other variables). Any company wanting to use SAT score as any sort of selection variable would do well to collect data showing that SAT scores were in fact correlated with productivity, or performance reviews, or some such measure of job "success" in that environment.

What's more, if employers plan to use the test for hiring or promotion purposes, they're going to come under fire from the same people who use the score gap as a means to bash objective college standards. Colleges already feel the pressure to lower standards for minorities, allegedly because the test is "biased." Companies who use the SAT will most likely see the same score gaps (it would be interesting to know if they didn't), and they'll suffer the same pressure to not use the test because of those gaps. I wonder if they have any idea of the abuse they'll suffer if they turn down someone with a decent college GPA who had a low SAT score and was admitted to college under affirmative action.

Did anyone see the original article, or have a subscription to the online version?

Update: Apparently it's not in the online version. One helpful reader who did read the article mentioned a standard of 1350 as the SAT score for at least one company. I'd be very surprised if companies were using scores this high as absolute cutoffs. As this chart shows, a 1350 is at the 93rd percentile. Any company using that cutoff is almost certainly ruling out some qualified applicants.

What's more, take a look at this chart. It doesn't give composite percentile ranks, but we can easily come up with an example that illustrates the problem. Let's say the most likely combination of Verbal and Math that produces a 1350 score is 700 Verbal, and 650 Math. Let's compare the percentiles by score and race:

5% of White examinees score above a 700 in Verbal, while only 1% or so of black or Hispanic examinees do so.

19% of white male examinees score above a 650 in Math, and 11% of white females do. However, only 2% of blacks and 4% of Hispanics do this.

See the problem? The score gap exists throughout the SAT score scale, but at the high end of the scale, the number of black and Hispanics examinees drop off dramatically. Any company that requires a 1350 SAT score for hiring purposes is in effect doing what the College Board tells colleges not to do, which is the use of a strict cutoff score so high that it will eliminate a large proportion of minorities. Companies that use this high a cutoff won't have to waste much money on "diversity training", because they won't have that diverse an employee population.

Companies are, of course, perfectly free to make the decision to use the SAT, but I hope they're prepared for the lawsuits to come.

The Head Start exam, and its detractors

The Head Start standardized tests have arrived:

The new federal emphasis on accountability in education reached Nate Kidder recently in the form of his first standardized achievement test. Nate is 4 years old.

He sat on the edge of his chair in the cafeteria at the West Early Childhood Center, where he is a Head Start child, and chewed his lip. Patricia Stevens, the center's principal, gave him the 15-minute exam, asking questions on simple vocabulary, letter recognition and math. At one point, she showed Nate a page with four pictures and asked him to point to the one that matched the word "vase."

I've heard from readers who suggest that fifteen minutes is a long time for a four-year-old to concentrate on anything, but the personlized interaction and the type of test items here do not seem inappropriate for the purpose of the test.

...More than half a million 4-year-olds in Head Start programs around the country are taking the same test, which has been mandated by the Bush administration...

Federal officials say the test will improve the quality of Head Start, the 38-year-old program intended to prepare poor children for kindergarten. But many of the country's leading education experts, and Head Start providers and teachers, say the test could harm the children as well as Head Start...

Wonder which one of these potential harmful situations has these experts more concerned? As described above, it is very hard for me to see how the testing situation could be harmful. The NYT goes out of its way to point out that Nate was "nervous" and that the test was "not fun," but my guess is that most four-year-olds are in the process of learning to deal with situation that challenge them, and are used to "not-fun" situations (i.e., picking up toys, being punished for pulling the cat's tail, etc).

The suggestion that kids might be guessing on the exams is also floated here as an implied criticism of the exam, although (a) guessing behavior is present on every test from this Head Start assessment right up through the medical boards, and (b) if kids consistently guess right, then at some level they do know the answers. If most kids are responding randomly, that will show up in the item statistics, and the test developers will realize that the test is not appropriate.

Experts also say the test fails to take into account the complex lives and needs of children living in poverty.

"When you get an answer from a child living in poverty, it's not a very good indicator of their capacity," said Dr. Edward Zigler, a psychologist, a founder of Head Start, and the director of the Center on Children and Social Policy at Yale University. "They have a variety of motivational factors that get in the way. If you grew up in poverty, you become wary and suspicious of adults you don't know, and testing situations."

If I read this correctly, this psychologist is essentially saying that if a child is from a poor home, there's no real way to test if they can recognize letters of the alphabet, and it's a given that they're afraid of testing, period. That sounds like poppycock to me. Instead of assuming that these children will mistrust strangers, and presumably lie to them, why not use this opportunitey to teach kids that testing can be safe and relatively stress-free? The test administrators don't berate kids for getting the wrong answers, so why are we being told to assume that the kids will be freaked out by it?

Wade Horn, the federal official in charge of Head Start, said that extensive field testing had been done to make certain not only that the test is reliable, but also that children find it "fun, interesting and enjoyable."

The test was clearly not Nate Kidder's idea of fun. When Mrs. Stevens showed him four pictures of people with different facial expressions, and asked him to point to the one that matched the word "horrified," he bit his lip and looked at her for reassurance.

And...four-year-olds never do that any other time? When Mommy goes to introduce Nate to someone new, does he sometimes bite his lip and shy away, or look at her for reassurance? Does that mean Mommy should never put Nate in those situations, simply because they're not fun? Is "fun" the only rationale that should be used when deciding how to educate a child?

Obviously, I'm not advocating torturing four-year-olds, but the NYT is really reaching here in their efforts to demonize this test. You can't tell me that for every Nate in Head Start, there's not also a Natalie who eagerly awaits the chance to show off how well she can identify the letters of the alphabet. Why didn't the NYT interview that child?

One can argue, as one of the test administrators did, that the test questions were not appropriate, or one can argue that the drawings used were poor, or that the illustrations need context. Those are all valid criticisms of any test. But I think it's silly to claim that all kids will be as unsure about answering as Nate was, and while I understand the concern of teachers who feel that kids like Nate will have their confidence undercut by these exams, I see no reason to assume up front that that will be the case.

Oddly, one teacher claims that "building confidence" is one of the main components of Head Start, and complains that the tests don't measure this. Does this mean they'd rather the test administrators give feedback during the exam? This might make the test less stressful for some, but more for others. Why the assumption that a neutral testing environment must be a confidence-destroyer?

Opponents of the test agree with federal officials that Head Start needs to be improved...[but]...they worry that Head Start teachers will start teaching to the test — and overemphasizing literacy and math skills.

For children from deprived homes, who will presumably go to less-than-stellar public schools, is it possible to overemphasize literacy and math skills at this point? Since when did we decide that it was harmful to teach these skills to young kids? When did we start assuming that the type of kids who attend Head Start cannot benefit from learning these skills?

Many of the children at the West Center here have parents working at minimum-wage jobs at Wal-Mart, Burger King or other businesses. Some parents are barely out of their teens.

Even more reason that Head Start should be offering enhanced educational opportunities to the children of these parents. And if the parents are very stressed out about these tests, who may be partially to blame for that? Perhaps the teachers and Head Start officials themselves, who describe these tests in such an unremittingly negative fashion. And perhaps the NYT as well, which manages to mention a chatty, non-nervous little test-taker near the end of the article, along with another jibe at the test administrator:

At the Head Start center, John Ross Espino, a chatty 4-year-old, was a lot more interested in talking to Mrs. Stevens than in answering her test questions. When she asked him to point to the picture that corresponded to the word "diving," he told her, "I have swimming lessons today."

Normally, Mrs. Stevens said, she would have been delighted to talk with John Ross about his swimming lessons. But in keeping with the test instructions, she proceeded to the next question.

Yeah, that's just....torture. You mean these people are trying to get four-year-olds to stay on task for fifteen minutes? Imagine that. Is this the worst the NYT can come up with? If so, they're going to do have to do a lot more to convince me that these tests are actually harmful to kids.

These tests may indeed not be valid for this group, but if that's the case, the test scores and the item statistics will show that. This sort of presumptive hatchet job tells me that the NYT has already decided the tests are invalid; the better to ignore the results when they're finally released, I suppose.

Update: Don't miss Joanne Jacobs take on this subject. I particularly like it when she yells at the fatuous psychologist who insisted that poor kids can't be tested:

Fatuous comments:
"When you get an answer from a child living in poverty, it's not a very good indicator of their capacity," said Dr. Edward Zigler, a psychologist, a founder of Head Start, and the director of the Center on Children and Social Policy at Yale University. "They have a variety of motivational factors that get in the way. If you grew up in poverty, you become wary and suspicious of adults you don't know, and testing situations."

Joanne's reply:
IT IS NOT A TEST OF THE CHILDREN'S CAPACITY! It's a test of the effectiveness of Head Start. The test is given by the teacher, an adult the child does know. And I don't believe four-year-olds are wary of testing situations. It's a game to them. Maybe a boring game, but a game.

All caps counts as yelling, right? And Joanne emphasizes, as I should have but didn't, that the NYT tack of attacking the test's meaningfulness for assessing individual children is moot. The purpose of the test is assess how well Head Start helps children; the debate is really made of up those who want to know if Head Start is teaching kids useful academic skills along with social skills vs. those who are comfortable with the US having spent $60 billion since 1965 on a glorified day-care system.

My guess is that those who are so heavily criticizing the test in advance would like to keep the money rolling in for the glorified day-care environment. Otherwise, why such animosity towards an exam that doesn't report scores for individual students?

Update: I should have known that Scott Ott would have uncovered the secret to equalize our nation's youth:

The Senate version of the Head Start reform bill would rename and 're-mission' the Great Society program. Instead of trying to prepare poor children for school in hopes of enhancing achievement, 'Slow Start' will enroll children from middle-class and wealthy families and attempt to "confuse and de-motivate them" so that they won't excel their peers from low-income families.

"Most well-off people have just lucked into their money," said the Senator. "They feel guilty about how their clever little prodigies always bust the grading curve. They would love to do something to level the playing field, and they're willing to stoop to conquer inequality."

Ha!

"Controversial" changes in Illinois

The Mundelein High School (IL) board is revamping their curriculum in order to boost falling ACT and Prairie State Achievement Exam scores. The plan is labeled "controversial," but at first glance it's hard to see why it deserves that term:

The plan is designed to meet the educational standards set by the ACT so students are prepared when they take the test. Mundelein students will take as-of-yet-unspecified English, math, science and social science classes that better prepare them for the exam as well as the Prairie State Achievement Exam, a statewide standardized test...

Teachers will help the board and administration develop the specific classes. Students also will have to take more math and science classes than are currently required to graduate, according to the plan...

Ok, I'm still not seeing anything here that sounds "controversial" to me. Even the previous incarnation of the plan, which was opposed by parents, doesn't sound that extreme to me. One part that was dropped would have required some students to take remedial reading classes. Why would parents have opposed that, given that the only students who would have been placed in remedial reading classes would have been those who needed it?

Scientists vs. PETA in schools

Remember the potential PETA-linked charter school in Sacramento, with its "humane" curriculum? Well, now the scientists are fighting back:

A new science-based educational curriculum has been launched to help elementary and middle school students appreciate the role of science in their lives and to counter the animal rights-based curriculum known as humane education.

The new science-based curriculum comes at a time when "humane education," which advocates say includes compassion for animals, awareness of environmental problems like so-called global warming and overpopulation, as well as non-violence, is expanding into the U.S. public school system.

Here I was thinking that these isolated charter schools were the main problem, but no; this article notes that the "humane education curriculum" in mandated in seventeen states.

Benford is eager to challenge the animal rights aspects of humane education.

"They don't understand that if someone goes in and destroys a laboratory where maybe 20 years of research has been underway to cure, let's say, smallpox or anthrax or cancer, somebody may die for that," Benford added.

PETA, of course, believes the scientists are doing nothing other than "brainwashing" the impressionable young students. Apparently, PETA considers a science curriculum to be a sign of "desperation" and in violation of the "natural empathy" that children have for animals. PETA is also apparently afraid that, when given all the facts about scientific research and animal testing, children will not choose the politically-correct side.

And don't miss this article, in which Cheryl Spencer-Scher, the director of the National Humane Education Society, fails to show any difference between the mission of her organization and acts of radicalism:

Spencer-Scher dismissed the criticism that the humane education curriculum preaches a radical animal "rights" philosophy.

"We don't promote the radicalism, we don't really promote the protests or the throwing of red paint on the [fur] coats, although some of us in our private lives may do those things," Spencer-Scher said.

Emphasis mine. So this curriculum will be fair and balanced and will not teach kids to burn down new suburbs or bomb medical research labs - but members of this organization may very well be doing those things in their spare time. Spencer-Scher asks parents to "to really look over the curriculum and get a grasp of it before condemning it." I'd suggest they "really look over" the members of the groups who are organizing these types of schools, and this sort of curricula, as well.

Police arrest nine-year-old for "inducing panic"

I suppose schools can't be expected to use judgement in place of zero-tolerance policies when the police are treating nine-year-olds as dangerous criminals, even after they discover that no real guns were involved:

A 9-year-old boy was arrested at gunpoint and handcuffed Saturday because he was waving a toy gun over his head while seated on a bench outside a store, according to a Lorain police report.

Saunders, 28, was also charged with obstruction of justice and resisting arrest when she pleaded with police not to arrest her son and to give him a warning, according to a police report.

Okay. The gun was painted black; not a good idea for a toy to be using outside on a busy street. I don't blame the officers for assuming at first that it was real - that's how officers stay alive. But to not let the kid go with a warning when they realized it was a toy? And to arrest the mother for trying to protect her child? We're talking about a nine-year-old here. He probably doesn't understand what he did wrong, and I'm pretty sure the law requires that his mother be there while he's being questioned.

The officer obviously felt his hands were tied and that he had to charge anyone who "induced panic" - but let's take this to its logical extreme. Suppose a five-year-old boy had grabbed a real gun from somewhere and gone outside with it. Obviously, the neighbors would have freaked; one of them might have called the police. The first task for the police would have been to get the gun safely away from the child - but would they have arrested the five-year-old as well? Wouldn't common sense suggest that the right thing to do would be to lecture the child and try to impress upon him the dangerous situation that they created? Does the officer really have no latitude in deciding who to arrest? At what point did we decide that nine-year-olds with toy guns deserve arrest in order to be taught that society might misinterpret their innocent actions?

The ones who have been needlessly left behind

The Thernstroms go on the offense with an op-ed in the Boston Globe that identifies the "educational catastrophe" facing black and Hispanic students today as the "central civil rights issue of our time." Those who favor "the old solutions" - more emphasis on racial integration, requiring masters degrees in education, smaller classrooms - probably won't like what the Thernstroms have to say.

First, the horror stories:

The student body of Cedarbrook Middle School in a Philadelphia suburb is one-third black, two-thirds white. The town has a very low poverty rate, good schools, and a long-established black middle class. But in an eighth-grade advanced algebra class that a reporter visited in June 2001, there was not a single black student. The class in which the teacher was explaining that the 2 in number 21 stands for 20, though, was 100 percent black. A few black students were taking accelerated English, but no whites were sitting in the English class that was learning to identify verbs.

Students in eighth grade had to be taught what the "2" in 20 stood for, and had to be taught how to identify verbs. In eighth grade.

Here in Massachusetts, where the high school class of 2005 has begun the MCAS testing process, the gap is crystal clear. On the first try, 82 percent of white 10th-graders passed, and the figure for Asians was almost as high (77 percent). But the success rate for Hispanics was 42 percent and for blacks 47 percent...

On the nation's most reliable tests, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), the typical black or Hispanic student at age 17 is scoring less well than at least 80 percent of his or her white classmates. On average, these non-Asian minority students are four years behind whites and Asians. They are, in effect, finishing high school with a junior-high education.

Emphasis mine. Those who claim that the score gap must be proof of test bias simply do not want to admit that black and Hispanic students simply might be that far behind, and I don't blame them for not wanting to believe that. I don't like being labeled racist or uncompassionate for insisting that the problem is not with the tests, but I understand why some of those who oppose testing reach for those disparaging labels and the deceptively easy answers. It is a tragedy, and far from being the result of racial inequality, the disparate education that the test scores reflect has become one of the sources, if not the main source, of those inequalities.

This sort of achievement gap cannot be wished away, nor legislated away. Real changes must be made to close the gap, and many educators and legislators are not ready to make those changes:

...improving test scores will require better teachers. How can we identify such teachers? The scholarly literature shows that neither graduate degrees in education nor years of experience in the classroom have a significant impact on student achievement. The best teachers are those with strong academic skills, as demonstrated by their performance on standardized tests...

Also suggested: Make the teaching jobs more attractive by allowing potential educators to skip education programs, and give better teachers higher pay and more responsibility. Back teachers up in the classroom by allowing them to discipline students and demand respect. Give principals the authority to fire bad teachers and promote good ones.

And drill, drill, drill. The schools that are succeeding in educating black and Hispanic students are ones that "focus relentlessly on the core academic subjects, insisting that their students learn the times tables, basic historical facts, spelling, punctuation, and rules of grammar." In other words, the opposite scenario suggested by most "progressive" educators who have a horror of facts, memorization, and rules.

The idea that students of a certain race, or background, or "culture" cannot benefit from the discipline and high educational standards that educated so many of our immigrants in the past is one of the most pernicious ideas in education today, and I'm grateful that the Thernstroms are speaking out against it.

Trivium Pursuit

Devoted Reader Mike D. sends along a link to a thoughtful article about the "classical trivium" of learning:

One thing that is never studied in modern, progressive schools of education is the classical-medieval organization of studies known as the trivium. Since classical education regards human beings foremost as thinking creatures, at every level of education youth must be invited to think about the great problems of the physical and moral worlds. Nonetheless, the ancients knew that learning must be tailored to the age of the student...

Young people have to begin at the beginning. At the first stage of education students must master the basics, or the "grammar," of every subject. They must learn to read, using the parts of words, or phonemes, in order to master the words themselves. They must know the grammar of their own language, which means correct spelling and proper word usage. They learn the people, places, and events of world history. They gain a basic "number sense" by manipulating numbers in various mathematical arrangements. Students learn to read music, to sing and play basic instruments, and to listen closely to various genres of music. They learn to recognize and to classify various parts of the physical universe. They should particularly learn the different kinds of animals, plants, and the planets of our solar system and various constellations in our galaxy. At this juncture education relies heavily on young people’s memory. By nature children love to memorize things. Simply ask a child to repeat back the details of a story you have just read him and watch his face light up!

I like this description, because it contradicts the current "wisdom" of modern education which suggests that (a) children don't like memorizing anything, and (b) children must be taught to figure out solutions and exhibit "higher-order thinking" before they're given the tools with which to do that.

Those that believe in this current wisdom often oppose standardized testing because those types of exams allegedly don't measure more elaborate thought - but it's (relatively) simple to develop reliable tests that do measure the basic skills, and I believe testing is necessary to ensure that the basic skills are being learned. Educators who downplay or ignore testing, and who try to introduce abstract concepts too early or force younger students to come up with justifications before they teach the basics, are putting the cart before the horse.

Once students have gained a pretty good handle on the grammar of various subjects, they move into the "logic" stage of education. Since this level corresponds to the onset of adolescence, it might also be called the "argumentative" stage. Though students continue to study the facts of the various disciplines, they now have the intellectual capacity to call those facts into question or to wrestle with them...

Again, having the capacity to question facts requires that the facts be known, and that students have the tools with which to convey their questions. Too many "progressive" educators downplay the memorization of facts, as though one can learn to argue logically without having facts to argue with.

High school should be considered the third part of the trivium, the "rhetorical" stage. Having the facts at their disposal and being able to wrestle with them, students will now be able to express themselves with increasing grace and at considerable length, both in speech and in writing. They will learn to make coherent literary, historical, mathematical, and scientific arguments. They are ready to tackle difficult readings and problems. Too often in this country we wait until college to challenge young people with meaningful intellectual work...

I agree. And writing is one of the more abstract and advanced skills that standardized tests are useful for measuring, although it requires a great deal of work to develop a writing assessment that is both useful and reliable.

Poll question #1

You know, given that I'm a statistician, you'd think I would have sprung poll questions on you before now. Please note that the poll question specifically separates my reporting on testing and education from my opinions; I'm curious as to how many people come here looking for hard facts vs. how many want to know what I think about those facts.

Are you Cerulean or Aquamarine?

The Shark Blog has a new name for the type of "diversity" that college administrators often try to engineer - "Crayon Diversity." As Sharkansky puts it:

Regent Cole went on to talk about the importance of diversity and said the event had strengthened his resolve that the UW should promote a more diverse campus. Regent Ark Chin said such advocacy was a must in light of the atmosphere on campus.

The Board of Regents wins today's Crayon Diversity Award for advocating the principle that diversity is a good thing as long as people don't express diverse opinions.

In other words, as long as we're all different colors, the need for "diversity" is satisfied. Shark also thoughtfully pointed out some demographic factors to the UW Board of Regents:

As I've pointed out previously, the college-age population of the State of Washington is 72.5% white, 6.5% Asian and 3.7% black, while the University of Washington freshman class is 56.5% white, 27.9% Asian and 2.9% black. The only way the university could accurately reflect the diversity of the state's population would be to send 3/4 of the Asian students home and admit a lot more white kids and a handful of new blacks. I hope that's not what the Regents have in mind.

"Reading, Riting, and Rilly, Rilly Hating Math"

Now, THIS is the way to whine about having to learn math in school. And if you haven't ever read Hissyfits, why not? This collection of brilliant, literary geeks, which isn't updated nearly often enough, contains laugh-out-loud rants about obnoxious co-workers, dysfunctional landlords, and of course, the French.

The importance of parents

Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Clarence Page recounts the amusing tale of a talk-show host who was desperate to find someone who disagreed with Abigail Thernstrom and the theory that black parents do not do enough to convey the importance of education to their children:

As much as I love to argue, especially in front of vast national television audiences, I had to bow out when a popular cable TV talk show recently asked me to debate author Abigail Thernstrom on the delicate topic of the academic achievement gap between black and white students.

There was a brief moment of silence on the other end of the line. I felt my shot at the national limelight evaporate and they would not be interested in booking my son. That's show biz.

Mr. Page then goes on to scold such media folk for trying to stir up controversy and argument around this topic, when calm, level-headed discussion is much more necessary:

One of the most disturbing disappointments in the years since the 1960s civil rights revolution is that the black-white academic performance gap (as much as four years by the time they graduate high school) persists, even among children of the new black middle class...

Yet, whites are not the top performing group. As the Thernstroms point out, the gap between white and Asian-American student performance is actually wider than the gap between blacks and whites, with Hispanics performing about as poorly as blacks.

Emphasis mine - I've always opposed AA because I believe it masks the real problem, and I believe that researchers such as the Thernstroms are doing a good job of showing us where the real issue lies.

One important idea that the Thernstroms are publicizing is the innovative "trouble threshold" theory; it is, in essence, that the students who do well are the ones with parents who do not let grades go very low before introducing punishment (I remember getting skinned and fried for anything less than a B). The Thernstroms cite a 1996 study which surveyed students about parental reactions to grades. White kids said they had to stay above a B- to avoid trouble, whereas black kids could earn a C or C- before the parental wrath would descend.

Asian students? Anything less than an A- and they'd be grounded, and that was the same for both immigrant and native-born students. What's more, Asian parents were more likely to believe that "academic performance depended entirely on how hard [the student] worked," and much less likely to believe in innate abilities, good luck, and other such matters that weren't under the control of the student - or the parent.

This isn't the only difference the Thernstroms uncovered - for starters, young white kids were often reared in homes that had, on average, twice the number of books as young black kids - but it's hard to deny the data that show the impact of parental attitude on academic performance.

Wonder if that talk show host is still looking for someone to debate Abigail Thernstrom? That person better come prepared with some serious data, and a suit of armor to boot.

Educating New Hampshire's parents

I found an interesting little article from the Rockingham News Online. The article describes a forum given by school officials to educate parents on standardized tests and other assessments. Definitely an admirable service to provide (I hope they began by explaining how to pronounce New Hampshire's tongue-twisting test acronym, NHEIAP.)

A comment near the end of the article caught my eye:

It is also important not only to focus on the test scores but to challenge the students in new ways.

"These things are often more important that test scores," said Hume-Howard. "There has to be a balance between testing and the classroom."

I just thought the description of these factors seemed oddly out of place. Is it really the business of schools to teach compassion? And are compassion and "learning style" really more important than test scores for college applications these days? I have no problem with schools focusing on work ethic, nor on them helping children fulfill their leadership potential, but the way those qualities are presented here, you'd think they were completely independent of test performance. A child with a solid work ethic is going to perform up to their potential on any assessment, including standardized exams.

What's "up" with scores in San Francisco?

San Francisco school districts are reporting a jump in test scores. Is that due to increased focus on students whose second language is English - or does the change in tests explain the increase?

Ask school superintendents and principals why standardized test scores increased so much this year, and they will credit increased focus on helping students who do not speak English. But a change in the way the scores are calculated may also have something to do with the improvements.

Panorama's scores had been dropping five years ago, Presta said. Administrators found that non-native English speakers were scoring poorly, and the school hired a specially trained teacher to help. They also increased individual student assessment, especially in reading. "We really believe that it's the reading," she said. "The kids weren't reading at the level they should be."

This article describes how the API works:

According to the Academic Performance Index, an annual survey of standardized test scores at elementary, middle and high schools throughout California, 90 percent of schools showed an overall improvement in their scores during the academic year 2002-2003 over the previous year.

In San Francisco, 86 percent of all schools met their growth targets during the school year 2002-2003, according to district officials, who were in a jovial mood at a news conference Friday morning to announce the results.

The same effect is being seen all over California, which is not surprising. Increased district scores in Monterey are described here. The California Department of Education has all the API results here.

Here's the information for parents (requires Adobe Acrobat). This documents points out that the CAT replacements for the Stanford 9 are specifically aligned to California content standards, but the entire STAR system allows California's students to be compared with each other, and with students in other states.

Acrimony over AIMS in Arizona

Not much is chilly in sunny Arizona, but state schools chief Tom Horne felt the chill when he proposed combining Arizona's AIMS with the Stanford 9 exam. He believes Arizona's students are over-tested, and claims that his plan will save money, save time, and be ready by 2005. Apparently, some board members feel AIMS needs to be expanded, not shortened; others feel the public doesn't accept the current AIMS, and that expanding or modifying it will not help.

To MEAP, or not to MEAP?

A couple of weeks back, it looked like Michigan's MEAP was on the way out. The MEAP is expensive, and the score gap is substantial. But now it appears that Michigan's educators aren't quite ready to replace the MEAP, despite its flaws, and spoke to members of the House education committee about the exam:

Educators attending a meeting yesterday to discuss the future of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program acknowledged the state’s standardized test was imperfect, but they weren’t ready to give up on it...Six state representatives from the House education committee listened as more than a dozen educators from throughout southeast Michigan expressed both their pleasure and concerns with the test...

Overwhelmingly, the nearly 50 educators and community members at yesterday’s meeting said yes...

Why the "overwhelming" response? Apparently, because districts have put a lot of time, effort, and money into revamping classroom curricula to match the MEAP. Changing the test means changing the class content as well. However, the educators did suggest some changes:

...they offered suggestions on how to make things better, namely not to make the test count for so much when dolling out the districts’ progress reports. Also, educators expressed concerns about how special education students, transient students, and low-income students factor into their scores.

The power of the blogosphere

I've been asked by quite a few psychometricians why I started N2P. I tell them that I started it because I kept getting so angry when reading anti-testing articles in college magazines, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times. It drove me mad that anti-testing activists (and those who make money off of demonizing tests) often would be quoted, while neither psychometricians, nor testing supporters, would be mentioned.

In essence, I felt the reporting of testing, especially in regards to college admissions, affirmative action, and education reform, was very unbalanced, and I wanted to tip the scales back the other way a bit.

Well, Brian Anderson of City Journal gets this aspect of the blogosphere. It turns out a that a lot of bloggers started out of anger - anger over 9/11, anger about the liberal bias in the media, and so on. His article, "We're Not Losing The Culture War Anymore" outlines in detail the impact of the blogosphere on the current American media and society.

I always thought blogs were capable of making a difference. It's wonderful to see that stated so clearly by sharp and thorough writers like Mr. Anderson.

Rachel Boim, updated

Rachel Boim has been allowed back into Roswell High School until her hearing on November 13th, at which point the school board will decide whether to uphold the suspension. The indignant articles have already begun, and I hope that the outcry has some impact on those who insist that Rachel must be a threat to her teachers:

"Schools with zero tolerance stirs critics":

Fulton County officials said the journal was confiscated because Boim passed it around in class, causing a disruption. And though facing public outcry, Fulton officials stand by their process. But the zero tolerance policy they used likely will face heavy scrutiny.

"Zero tolerance means zero brain," said Brian A. Glaser, an education professor at the University of Georgia and co-director of its juvenile counseling and assessment program. "The hope of zero tolerance was that if you take the human judgment and emotions out, then the rules would be equally applied across various groups."

"Diary entry provokes overreaction":

If only common sense were more common.

It probably [?!] was not appropriate for the teacher to read the personal diary that he had confiscated. It certainly was not appropriate to react by delivering the sternest punishment available to a school, which is expulsion.

...dealing with it through punishment, as if writing a story in a private diary was a thought crime of some sort, is an overreaction. Surely cooler heads in the Fulton County school bureaucracy can see the folly of their original approach.

Finally, we have a guest column by Ms. Boim herself:

When a teacher took up my journal during fifth-period class on Oct. 7, I wasn't concerned that someone would read the story about the dreaming girl. I was more worried that some of my poems would be read...

The following day I was taken out of class by the school resource officer. At first I was really worried that something had happened to one of my parents. When I was told it was about my journal, I thought that it was ridiculous to have an armed guard escort me to the office...

(Yeah, you know how those young, poetry-writing, flowy-haired blonde girls are, statistically, the ones most likely to physically attack a school principal. You can't turn your back on 'em for a second - of COURSE an armed guard was necessary.)

My tribunal was on Oct. 22. It was a closed trial that lasted for three hours. David Bottoms, Georgia's poet laureate, and Megan Sexton, editor of Five Points Magazine, testified on my behalf. We also presented written testimony from the Heritage Professor of Writing at George Mason University, David Bausch, the author of 15 books. The hearing officer found me guilty and sentenced me to expulsion. I don't think it would have made a difference if the pope had testified on my behalf. The decision was made before I even entered the room...

But of course! That's the whole point of "zero tolerance." School administrators should not have to consider evidence, weigh the facts, or make judgments about any situations! I'm surprised there was even a hearing at all. Must be a vestige of those days when school officials actually stopped to think before they expelled students.

This experience will not discourage me from writing. If anything it will motivate me to write more stories. I will just have to be more careful about where I write them and who I show them to.

Unfortunately, she's correct.

PETA Elementary

Sacramento's got a new charter school on the way, and it professes to be a "humane" school built around a mission of "non-violence." Debra Saunders has the info:

If you took all failed, trendy education bureaucrat ideas, packaged them in a school and put radical animal-rights activists in charge of it, you'd end up with something like the Humane Education Learning Community — a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade charter school approved by Sacramento's San Juan Unified School District...

Silberman believes that parents could be drawn to the idea of the school because they'll think "this is a new touchy-feely California idea where all the kids are there to be nice to each other" without understanding the radical animal-rights agenda behind it.

And boy, is there ever a radical agenda behind it all. One of the charter petitioners, Dr. Yale Wishnick, is also a board member of PETA, the group that likens the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust; the same group whose co-founder opposes the use of seeing-eye dogs. Oh, and this is also the same group that has made donations to radical "animal-rights" eco-terrorists such as the Earth Liberation Front. When PETA members espouse "non-violence" towards all, they often don't include people who disagree with them in that category.

Debra chronicles the non-educational education plan in place for the school:

The charter model will "replace discipline based on rewards and punishments with one based on respect, responsibility and reverence"...

Because, as we all know, there's no evidence to suggest that children need disclipline, nor that they respond well to appropriate rewards and punishments.

Here's a clue as to how un-academic the K-6 school is likely to be if it opens next fall: "Mahatma Gandhi (the petition reads) once said, 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its non-human animals are treated.'''(Clue: Gandhi did not use the term "non-human animal.")

Clue: This school is already out to convince its youth that humans who don't revere "non-human animals" don't deserve humane treatment, because it's not above modifying Ghandi quotes to leave out any inference that we should treat human animals with respect and compassion as well.

I needn't modify any PETA quotes to clarify their lack of compassion for human animals: "It would be great if all the fast-food outlets, slaughter-houses, these laboratories and the banks who fund them exploded tomorrow." - Bruce Friedrich, PETA spokesperson.

While the petition promises rigorous academics, it's hard to find advanced math or challenging literature buried under the avalanche of edu-jargon, as in "value of relationships," "a safe learning environment for students to speak about their own authentic feelings and experiences," "class bonding" and "constructivist and multicultural education and thematic, project-based learning."

Wow. I didn't think that much eduspeak could be crammed into one petition.

Where's the math? The kids may not know how to multiply, but math classes will help students "explore economic costs as they relate to environmental degradation, the loss of wildlife and companion animal overpopulation." (No indoctrination there.)

I have to assume that they will not actually teach math at this school, because it doesn't take much math to understand that much of what is pushed as environmental legislation is based on bad science.

Other readers sent links to the original SacBee story about this charter school; my apologies for not being able to post it before now.

More blogs for your enjoyment

Renaissance Man and Devoted Reader Lawrence Krubner's been commenting on N2P a lot lately. I'm honored to be on his list of "blogs I read even when I'm busy," and he also has a "Free the Schools" website. Go check him out.

There's also Joanne, The Happy Homeschooler, who has her own blog and quite a few opinions listed on it. She previously ran the blog More-Jo, and also hosts a site on positive disclipline for parents.

Finally, The Bitch Girls linked to me a while back, but what I want to know is - what do I have to do to get on their list of "Really Hot Chicks?" Joanne Jacobs is already on there, but surely there's room for another edublogger...

Does "comprehensive review" capture the college "essentials?"

University of California President Robert Dynes is in the news today, defending the "comprehensive review" admissions policy that has drawn so much fire as of late:

Dynes defended the UC’s fledgling “comprehensive review” system of admitting students based on a number of factors beyond standardized test scores and high school grades.

”Creativity, imagination, motivation and just plain work ethic have to count for something,” he said.

Really? Why? Are creativity and imagination absolutely essential for success in college? Are they predictive of eventual graduation? Does this mean the less-imaginative students will be less likely to be admitted, despite good grades? Can motivation be reliably measured? How can you tell if a student has a good work ethic? What if they've worked really hard and are really motivated, but still have bad grades? Why would that background be beneficial to the applicant, when one could view it as proof that this student just can't succeed in an academic environment, no matter how hard they work?

Why don't any reporters play Devil's Advocate with these fatuous statements? I mean, it might be true that "creativity and imagination" are absolutely essential for success in college, but I don't see anyone providing any data showing that, and I don't see anyone pointing out that such statements are theories, not facts.

Their cheatin' hearts

Newsday is running a double-barred "AP Exclusive" on New York teachers who help students cheat on standardized exams. The main article is here, a side article that provides some additional detail is here.

How did the AP uncover the cheating? And just how bad is it?

From 1999 through the spring of 2002, state records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law included 21 cases of proven cheating by teachers from Buffalo to Long Island. Teachers usually reported cheating but some said the practice is more common than records show.

Teachers usually report themselves cheating, or they report other teachers? That statement could have been a bit more clear.

Teachers have read off answers during a test, sent students back to correct wrong answers, photocopied secure tests for use in class, inflated scores, and peeked at questions then drilled those topics in class before the test...

"Teachers care a lot, sometimes they care too much and try to provide too much help," said Dennis Tompkins, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, the state's largest teachers' union. "We moved in a complete new direction in the last seven years. The standards are higher."

Does that mean that if I, as a student, let my friend copy off my answer sheet, I shouldn't be punished because I "care too much" about my friend's GPA? I mean, come on. That excuse wouldn't get a student off the hook, and it shouldn't get a teacher off the hook, either.

The public knows that most teachers care a great deal about their students, but any teacher who believes that it is compassionate to help students cheat should be removed from the classroom. It's ludicrous that this is being floated as an excuse/explanation for deceptive behavior that, essentially, covers up the fact that students haven't learned the material, or that teachers haven't done their jobs. Why is it being spun as misplaced compassion, rather than a desperate cover-up for poor teaching skills?

[State Deputy Education Commissioner James] Kadamus said most of the cheating is in elementary and middle schools, not the high schools where so-called high stakes testing can determine whether a student graduates. In the lower grades, standardized tests are used to judge the performance of schools and teachers in "school report cards."

The assumption that cheating teachers are being "compassionate" is therefore even less likely, because it's not the kids who get negative feedback for low scores in the lower grades.

"If students' have academic weaknesses, their teachers need to strive to fix it, not cover it up and refuse to acknowledge it exists," said Andrea Rogers, research associate at the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability. " ... New York should instantly revoke the license of any teacher who is found guilty of committing testing fraud."

Most of the teachers quit, were suspended or fired or were subject to a state disciplinary process that could lead to dismissal.

Good. The state is sending a message that cheating won't be tolerated, no matter what the root cause is.

And then there's the obligatory quote by a researcher who wants readers to assume that high stakes exams cause cheating, and that teachers who "help" their kids on such exams do so only because of "compassion":

"We found cheating increased by 30 to 50 percent because of high-stakes testing," said Brian Jacobs of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and co-author of the teacher-cheating report "Rotten Apples."

"Classrooms where they have lower achieving students on average are more likely to cheat," Jacobs said of the Chicago study. "That could be some indication of a benevolent motivation on the part of the teachers, or on the other hand it could show motivation that they are trying to improve classroom test scores for themselves."

Emphases mine. I haven't read the study, but unless they randomly assigned teachers and students to take different exams, and observed that only the teachers who were asked to give high-stakes exams cheated, then the researchers haven't shown that high-stakes exams are the reason that cheating has increased. My guess is that they've found a correlation between the presence of high-stakes exams and the presence of cheating, and they've mistakenly concluded that the exams cause cheating. It's a fine point, and they're deliberately blurring it here.

Oh, and one other interpretation for the fact that classrooms with low-performing students may show more cheating behavior is that the teachers in those classrooms may be more incompetent, and more desperate to compensate for their poor teaching skills. Thus, in a high-stakes situation, it's poor teaching skills that lead to cheating AND to poor test performance.

That's certainly an alternate explanation that covers all the facts, and to me, it's just as likely as the "benevolent motivation" theory that Mr. Jacobs has suggested.

Just when I think it can't get worse...

So, the "Dumbass of the Week" category is taken. Can I initiate the "Surreal School Overreaction of the Week" award? Because this one definitely deserves that prize (via Best of the Web):

The Fulton County school system on Friday temporarily rescinded the expulsion of a Roswell High School freshman who wrote a fictional tale in her private journal about a student who dreams she kills a teacher.

Ok. Stop. Right. There. A student was expelled because she wrote in a private journal about a fictional character who dreams about killing a teacher? How many steps removed from reality, not to mention any concept of reasonable privacy, did this school have to be to decide that this warranted expulsion in the first place?

Here's the original story:

Rachel Boim, 14, who moved here from suburban Denver, about 20 minutes from Columbine High School, was expelled after a closed, three-hour hearing conducted Wednesday by a Fulton County school system official.

David Boim said his daughter often carries her personal journal and did not have it in class as part of an assignment when it was confiscated Oct. 7. Art teacher Travis Carr took the journal during the class because Rachel was passing it to a classmate, Boim said.

Carr kept the journal overnight, and on Oct. 8 Rachel was taken from her second-period class by school police and her parents were summoned to the school.

If I were Rachel's parents, I'd sue the pants off everyone involved in this. This is absolutely bottom-of-the barrel, negative-IQ, no-judgment-involved thinking. Her father is absolutely right to say that her constitutional rights have been violated, although I'm amazed at the restraint her parents are displaying in this article. I would not have even ceded, as does her mother, that this extremely private literature should have been brought to the parents' attention.

Even if we give the teacher leeway for confiscating the journal, on the grounds that it was a non-class-related item being passed around during class, the teacher had no right to keep it and no right to read it. And then to summon the police in and expel a creative honors student for a private work of fiction? This young woman must feel like she's been raped. I would have, if a teacher took my private journal, read it, and then pressed criminal charges against me for what was in it, resulting in publicity which declared to the entire school, not to mention the world, what was in the journal.

Every time I assume that the zero-tolerance idiocies cannot get worse, they do. Next up, I assume, is that schools will move beyond regulating all thought, speech, and action within the school grounds and start prosecuting students for "crimes" committed off the grounds (in fact, since Rachel wrote the story at home, isn't that exactly what has happened here?). No kid in the public school system will be safe.

I hope Roswell High School understands that it has just made itself a national laughingstock - and that it's also just terrifed any Roswell student who has ever put pen to paper to express a politically-incorrect thought. What's next? Locker searches for angry notes? Private-journal-sniffing dogs?

Update: I missed the appearance of Rachel and her father on Hannity and Colmes tonight; if anyone saw it, let me know. They also did an interview with CNN reporter Soledad O'Brian, who asks some rather thick-headed questions, and I thought the Boims showed amazing restraint:

O'BRIEN: David, obviously you guys have been now embroiled in this controversy with the school. Can you understand the school's perspective, a teacher takes that, reads that says, "Oh, my goodness, this sounds to me like a kid who is planning on shooting up our school?"