The school, which has far more applicants than it has places, gives priority to those children whose mothers are Jewish. M, the student in question, was raised in a practicing Jewish home, but his mother is a convert from Catholicism, and converted in a reform temple. (However, those students whose parents are atheists would still be given priority, were the mother "ethnically" Jewish.) When M.'s father took the school to court, he won; however, the school appealed - hence the Supreme Court ruling.

While this may not seem to be a big issue - how many non-Jews, after all, are going to be eager for a strict parochial education, so how much will the new "religious practice" tests matter? - it could have wide-ranging implications for all faith-based schools. And, says England's orthodox community, for modern Judaism as a whole. Said the President of the United Synagogue, to the Guardian, "Essentially, we must now apply a non-Jewish definition of who is Jewish...These are matters of principle. If we don't fight this, what do we fight? These are germane to everything we believe in."

Jewish School Loses Appeal [Guardian]
Jewish School Loses Places Fight [BBC]

According to the study, no. British researchers looked at 17,000 adults, all born in the same week in 1958. Men who had attended single-sex schools as children were more likely to divorce or separate from a partner by their early 40s than those who went to coed institutions. And men educated in single-sex environments were more likely to suffer depression or "a sense of malaise." Girls, however, did not appear to feel these adverse effects. Mary Bousted of the UK's Association of Teachers and Lecturers responded thus:

All the research shows single-sex schools are good for girls but bad for boys – both in terms of academic performance and socialisation. Girls seem to learn what the nature of the beast is if they have been to single sex schools whereas boys taught on their own seem to find girls more puzzling. Boys learn better when they are with girls and they actually learn to get on better.

As Bousted's "nature of the beast" comment shows, it's easy to inject anecdotal evidence into the single-sex schooling debate, and such evidence can easily turn to gender stereotype. For my part, boys I've known who had close female friends growing up — in school or out — tend to be more feminist and generally more comfortable around women. But it's hard to assign causality here — boys who are naturally well-disposed towards girls probably tend to have more of them as friends. And while I can certainly buy that being socialized with girls from an early age helps boys with relationships later in life, I'm not sure that girls are naturally "puzzling" while boys are easy to figure out. I wonder if the kind of school students attended affected the results — some were educated privately, some publicly, and it's not clear if researchers controlled for this. I also wonder if girls reap benefits from co-ed schooling that were outside the scope of the study. Lucy Hodges, editor of the Independent's education supplement, thinks they do. She writes,

As someone who was educated in a single-sex boarding school I believe my schooling might have been improved if I had spent it in the company of boys as well as girls. It would certainly have provided some welcome distraction in lessons. Instead of reading Georgette Heyer all the way through Latin and maths, I could have been making eyes at a real-life hero a few yards away and even had some improving discussions with him about my algebra prep. As it was, I didn't really get to know a youth who wasn't in a book until I arrived at university at the tender age of 17-and-a-half.

The relationship-building implications of single-sex schooling for heterosexual girls aren't totally trivial, but it's kind of unfortunate that Hodges chooses to frame them in terms of their dubious educational benefit. She also says that her daughter "would have been better off, certainly at sixth-form, at a school with some boys – and a few more male teachers – to bring a bit of spice and interest to her life." The idea that girls need sexual excitement to perform well in school is kind of depressing — can't academic subjects add "spice and interest" to life?

I'm not convinced that the excitement of the opposite sex helps hetero kids learn math. But it does seem logical that, regardless of sexual orientation, children learn social lessons from opposite sex peers. Potential confounding variables aside, it is possible that boys learn more valuable lessons than girls, or at least different ones. They may learn that girls share their interests and goals, that they can be smart and funny and fast and cool, and — most importantly — that they are people worthy of attention and consideration. Girls probably learn the same things about boys, but they may also learn that some boys don't like it when they speak up, or that some teachers have different expectations of them because of their gender. These lessons may be damaging to girls, and single-sex education may shield them from this damage for a time. But if it's true that sex segregation hampers boys' ability to relate to girls and later to women, that's not good for either gender. Single-sex education has benefits for many people, but it's not a gender-relations panacea — if we want boys and girls to grow up free of prejudice, we may ultimately need to pay more attention to what we're teaching them than to whether we're teaching them together.

Why Single-Sex Schools Are Bad For Your Health (If You're A Boy) [Independent]
Lucy Hodges: The Perils Of Single-Sex Education [Independent]

[Radwaniya, Iraq; November 16. Image via Getty]

An Iraqi soldier stands guard as school girls gather in the playground of their school in Radwaniya west of Baghdad on November 16, 2009. Iraqi soldiers paid a visit to the school handing out school bags, pens and pencils. AFP PHOTO / ALI AL-SAADI (Photo credit should read ALI AL-SAADI/AFP/Getty Images)

We all understand why dress codes exist: lack of distraction, safety, sometimes even to discourage conspicuous economic disparities. To show that school is serious business. Some schools ban gender-bending dress as a means of discouraging harrassment, which however suspect it may seem, at least is rooted in tragedy. (As the Times reminds us, "safety is a critical concern. In February 2008, Lawrence King, an eighth-grader from Oxnard, Calif., who occasionally wore high-heeled boots and makeup, was shot to death in class by another student.")

And then there's what happened at Morehouse last month. As Fox explains,

Recently Morehouse College, an all-male black private university in Atlanta, released its "Appropriate Attire Policy" that banned do-rags, caps, hoods and sunglasses in class and "decorative orthodontic appliances." But it also specified the following — "No wearing of clothing associated with women's garb (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at college-sponsored events."..."The image of a strong black man needs to be upheld," Cameron Thomas-Shah, student government co-chief of staff, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . "And if anyone sees this policy as something that is restrictive then maybe Morehouse is not the place for you."

Dicta like this - and, to an extent, the highly-publicized Ceara Sturgis Tuxedogate - are obviously somewhat arbitrary. As long as the clothing is neither dangerous nor out of bounds (ie, the same length and neckline rules would, one suppo, nor one the ACLU is disinclined to pursue. Should a boy dress like a drag queen for class? Well, neither should a girl - that does qualify as "distracting." An administration might argue that cross-dressing was, by its nature, distracting. I'd say, maybe for the first week. But then you get used to it. High school may be rigid, but young people are also flexible and, as we have read time and again, far more liberal-minded about issues of sexual identity than any prior generation. However insubordinate kids might be, they still ultimately take their cues from an administration - and can tell when something's arbitrary or unfair. Lawrence King, after all, was not shot because of the way he dressed, but because of the ignorance, fear and hatred of his attackers. (And, by the way, we're guessing Chinos wouldn't have guaranteed a blissful school existence.) It may be harder for a school to address this than the clothes - but surely it's also a crucial part of an education.

School Dress Codes Homophobic? [Fox]
Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School? [NY Times]

Related: "That's Just Who I Am. I Don't Dress Like A Girl. I Don't Even Own Any Girl Clothes."

As the Times's Jennifer Steinhauer points out, fake guns and swords have long been forbidden at school, and although she depicts mask bans as part of a new crackdown, my brother and I were forbidden from covering our faces back in the nineties. What is new is an insistence on "positive costumes" rather than the traditional ghosts, vampires, zombies, and ax murderers. A school in Plainfield, Ill. encourages "costumes depicting animals and food (preferably carrots or pumpkins)" — the "carrots or pumpkins" preference implies that even dressing as junk food may be beyond the pale. Plainfield district spokesman Tom Hernandez says, "Several years ago, there was some push back in our community. Some people thought Halloween was a Satanic ritual." Perhaps embarrassed to have put himself in the same camp as Harry Potter haters, he backtracks: "Well, let's not say Satanic - let's say they were not comfortable with what it represents." So now, Halloween in Plainfield will represent ... salad.

Riverside Drive Elementary in LA's San Fernando Valley issued a whole memo about Halloween costumes, stipulating the following:

¶They should not depict gangs or horror characters, or be scary.

¶Masks are allowed only during the parade.

¶Costumes may not demean any race, religion, nationality, handicapped condition or gender.

¶No fake fingernails.

¶No weapons, even fake ones.

¶Shoes must be worn.

All of this really sounds pretty reasonable, except for the "no scary costumes" part. It's a little disturbing that schools now feel the need to protect children from fake blood and zombie makeup. But it's not exactly a surprise. I went to public school in the San Fernando Valley, and while I had a largely good experience, I can attest that there's nothing those schools love more than banning shit. I remember not just the mask ban, but also the yo-yo ban, the pog ban, the D&D ban, and the ban on "white socks pulled up to the knees and worn with cutoffs" (I think this was thought to be gang attire, but I never saw anyone wearing it, and the fact that it had to be recited aloud to us in homeroom every day for four years was nothing short of surreal). In some cases, these bans were meant to keep us physically safe. In others, they were meant to reduce conflict or status-jockeying (this never works, as a banned yo-yo is an even bigger status symbol than a legal one). And in others still, they seemed conceived in concert with overprotective parents as a way of keeping our little lives free of any untoward influence of any kind. The ban on scary costumes seems to fall into the last category.

According to Steinhauer, the LA Unified School District has long discouraged sexy costumes, such as French maids, and I find this somewhat easier to support. I get not wanting to initiate kids into the sexual-industrial complex before they're old enough to do their own face paint. But Halloween is supposed to be scary, and while I understand shielding the young and sensitive from horror movies, I doubt many children are going to be permanently scarred by seeing, say, a fake scar. And I find truly scary costumes a welcome antidote to the recent dominance of the sexy.

A few years ago, my mom told me about her favorite trick-or-treater — a fairy princess with a pink dress and an oozing bullet hole smack in the middle of her forehead. Was it in poor taste? Kind of. Did it glorify violence? I guess. But the whole point of Halloween is to acknowledge that death and gore and fear are part of human existence, and to celebrate them rather than fleeing them. Of course, fleeing and denying death (and aging, and disease, and anything else "gross") is exactly what American culture does every other day of the year, so perhaps the fact that we're now forcing our kids to dress up as carrots should come as no surprise. I can sense a backlash already, though: banning "horror characters" will just force kids to find more creative ways to be terrifying. Steinhauer cites one LA kid who's going as a box of Wheaties, which is so wholesome it's actually kind of scary.

Drop The Halloween Mask! You Might Scare Somebody [NYT]

The middle school bracelet panic has been going on for some time now (I swear this story comes out ever year, with no definitive proof that kids are actually playing this game), and though administrators tell the New York Times that "it's turned out that a lot of the kids, especially the girls, wear them as fashion statements, and some were adamant they didn't have any connotation," they insist that some students were heard discussing the bracelets and the "snap" game that accompanies them, and so the school banned them as a means to keep the fad—and, presumably, the activities that accompany it—out of the school.

But taking bracelets away from students, even from those who are using them for some kind of weird sex game, does nothing to actually address the real fears administrators have. Instead of banning the bracelets, perhaps an open conversation about sexuality—the kind we apparently are not allowed to have in public schools—would serve them better.

I graduated high school in 1999; after Columbine happened, administrators banned all trenchcoats, and started keeping a close eye on any student who had the slightest trace of goth in their wardrobe. It was frustrating and humiliating for many of my classmates, who actually had to say things like, "It's just a cool coat, I don't want to blow up the school," in order to defend themselves.

The panic that strikes adults when stories of lurid or violent behavior break out amongst teens and tweens often causes them to do the easiest thing possible: remove all evidence of such things from the hallways. But no one benefits from hiding the problem, and kids aren't going to stop having sex or being psychopaths like Eric Harris simply because you take their stylistic choices away. The bracelets may be gone, but the issues still remain. The administrators may not be able to see it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

School Bans Bracelet Used In Sex Game [NYTimes]

Often enough the walkers are quite small: elementary-school aged, I'd say, maybe 9 or 10, walking alone down what everyone in my town assumes are fairly safe streets. Maybe it's due to the stories I've heard about kidnappings over the years, the ones that always start the same way: small town, nothing like that ever happens here, walking alone on his way to school, etc, but the sight of a child walking unsupervised makes me worry, and apparently I'm not alone.

In today's New York Times, Jan Hoffman explores the debate between parents who feel their children should be escorted back and forth to school and parents who feel their kids need to experience independence and freedom, even in the face of paranoia stoked by the evening news and the disapproval of fellow parents.

When I was in school, there were two types of students: the bus pass kids and the walkers. When the bell rang, the walkers were free to skip out the door and head directly home, while it was a half-hour ordeal to make sure the bus pass kids got on the right bus, knew their bus stop, and were accounted for. The walkers had the freedom; it was bus kids like me who were fretted over. But as Hoffman notes, walking to school has become a rarity these days, as busing and car pooling have become, in the eyes of many parents, anyway, a "safer" alternative. "In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school," Hoffman writes, "by 2001, only 13 percent still did."

The way you view the world changes as you get older: when I was a kid, I thought nothing of standing at the bus stop unattended for 30 minutes, waiting for the stupid bus to finally arrive. I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where kids left the house at 10am and weren't seen again until a chorus of "Dinnerrrrr!" from various mothers and fathers rang through the streets at 5. We were allowed to be independent, to have adventures, to explore, just as our parents had twenty or thirty years earlier. But the thought of my 6-year-old niece going anywhere by herself, even outside in the front yard to play without supervision, makes me incredibly nervous.

So how do we reconcile our own fears with our children's need to assert their own independence? Lenore Skenazy, who famously wrote about her decision to let her son ride the subway alone, tells Hoffman that "we don't do [children] a service by going to the worst-case scenario in your mind and acting accordingly," and perhaps that's true, but there has to be a way to ensure that your kids are safe without feeling like the world is out to get them at every turn.

For the record, my mother, who used to let my sisters and I run around the neighborhood for hours, now walks my niece to school herself, and I don't blame her. Of course, she's still quite young, and when she's older, she'll be able to go alone, but for now, I think we all feel safer knowing she has someone holding her hand.

So what say you commenters? Do you (or would you) let your children walk to school? And have you found a way to balance your fears with your child's need to be independent? Feel free to recount your experiences in the comments.

Why Can't She Walk To School? [New York Times]

Everything I type keeps coming out "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FOR THE FUCK OF SHIT FUCK I'M MOVING TO FUCKING CANADA!"

So please enjoy your morning dose of Rage while I get myself together:

Slightly better.

Now on to the actual story. Obama had planned to give a speech to schoolchildren, encouraging them to work hard and stay in school, similar to one George H. W. Bush did in 1991. Conservatives caught wind of this and decided to create a new rage-filled campaign about socialism and indoctrination. The Politico reports:

School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama's back-to-school address Tuesday – forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation's classrooms.

The White House says Obama's address is a sort of pep talk for the nation's schoolchildren. But conservative commentators have criticized Obama for trying to "indoctrinate" students to his liberal beliefs, and some parents call it an improper mix of politics and education.

Now, the speech is optional for schools. The speech will be broadcast during school hours and made available online to students who want to watch it. And I can understand the objection to having political figures in schools. But, as usual, an actual conservative response and the bullshit being peddled are completely different.

As an example, take fucknut Jim Greer, the Florida GOP Chairman, who compared Obama to the Pied Fucking Piper and referred to the speech as "liberal propaganda." Two minutes in to a segment on Hardball last night, Greer tried to explain his willful misinterpretation:

Time For School is a 12-year documentary project about seven children from different countries who are struggling to get a basic education. The first two installments, Time For School and Back To School (both of which are available online) aired in 2004 and 2006 introduced the children as they started school and then checked up on them two years later. The new film, Time For School 3, revisits the students, who are now teenagers, in two episodes airing last night and on September 9.

73 million children around the world don't attend school, and of these, two thirds of those children are female. Though more Afghan children are enrolled in school than ever before, one third of the country's children are still not in school and, again, most are girls. Shugufa is an exception because her father, who is an assistant doctor, believes in educating his daughters. When Shugufa was very young the family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan for four and a half years to escape Taliban rule. Though the Taliban is no longer technically in control, the group's attacks against women's education have grown worse in the past few years; last year, violent attacks closed down more than 600 schools in the country and Shugufa's school has been forced to tighten security.

Still, Shugufa dreams of becoming an engineer, a journalist, or a doctor. In the clip below, it's clear that Shugufa has a much different attitude toward education than many American children. "School sets you on the right path. Who doesn't love school?" she says.

Below, Shugufa's religion teacher tells her that Islam defends women's rights, which is certainly not the Taliban's interpretation. Her teacher is strict about the girls keeping their heads properly covered, but Shugufa says, "We feel comfortable wearing our scarves and we're grateful to Allah for making us Muslims."



Aside from the threat of Taliban attacks, what may ultimately put an end to Shugufa's education is the fact that girls are expected to do housework. There are 13 people in Shugufa's family and she and her sisters have to work for several hours in the morning before school, and do more chores when they return. The boys around them? The get to play. "I'm up to my neck in household chores and I have to finish all of them," says Shugufa, " My problem is that I don't have enough time to study."

Shugufa has already received more education than many Afghan girls — by age 16 three out of four have already dropped out of school. As American children are lamenting the end of summer vacation and returning to school now, one of the most striking themes in Time For School is actually how much we take education for granted.

The Time For School series is set to continue visiting the seven children through 2015, which is the date they should graduate and also the U.N.'s target date for achieving universal education. According to the U.N.'s website, the goal is to "ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling." While there are millions of children around the world desperate to learn like Shugufa, sadly after watching her story it's hard to imagine that many will be able to overcome the tremendous hurdles to their education by then.

Full Episode: Time For School [PBS]
Full Episode: Back To School [PBS]
Preview: Time For School 3 [PBS]
Universal Education [End Poverty 2015]

[Paris, September 3. Image via Getty]

Children read a list in the courtyard of their school on the first day of the school year on September 3, 2009 in Paris. AFP PHOTO/JACQUES DEMARTHON (Photo credit should read JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/Getty Images)

[Havana, September 1. Image via Getty]

A Cuban girl on the first day of class of the 2009-2010 course, on September 1, 2009, in Havana. AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Women's speech has long been judged differently from men's — women are typically expected to be warmer, friendlier, and more polite. As an undergraduate and grad student, I was keenly aware of these expectations, and how they played out in the classroom. I felt that my female classmates spoke less directly than their male peers, were more likely to begin their comments with "this is just my opinion," or "I could be wrong, but..." This always bothered me, as I felt that women were shortchanging themselves, essentially asking that their words be taken a little less seriously. I prided myself on not hedging my statements — as a political choice but also the classroom is one of the few social arenas where I feel comfortable being really assertive — and I did take a certain amount of mild hazing from my male peers for what I interpreted as my directness. But maybe I was wrong.

In a recent study, Nicholas Palomares, assistant professor of communication at UC Davis, ask students to write e-mails about a variety of topics, some gender-neutral and some stereotypically male or female. Palomares measured the "tentativeness" of the e-mails by counting phrases like "sort of," "I may be wrong," and "don't you think?" He found no difference in tentativeness when students were writing about gender-neutral topics, like restaurant. But women became more tentative when writing about stereotypically masculine things (like changing a tire), and men did so when they discussed "feminine" things. The effect was especially pronounced when students e-mailed members of the opposite sex. The study's press release gives this rather cute example, from a man: "… maybe girls prefer the quality of products at Sephora over other major department stores? I don't know."

So was I imagining the tentativeness in my female peers? It's possible. Perhaps I was so used to what Palomares calls the "stereotype that men are direct while women are tentative" that I heard hesitation where there was none, or that I ignored hedging statements coming from men. And when I thought of myself as being admirably forthright, I may have just been arrogant — something I've seen plenty of male students get criticized for as well.

Then again, it would be interesting to learn how classroom settings compare to the e-mail situation Palomares set up. Are academic topics gender-neutral, or are they gendered, like cars or makeup? Are women more likely to be tentative about math or science, which are still seen as stereotypically masculine? While girls who go to all-female schools are reportedly more confident in their public speaking abilities, and many say that single-gender education improves girls' assertiveness, I'd like to see a rigorous study of how boys, girls, men, and women speak in mixed-gender classrooms. In-person, group interactions are far different from e-mail, and these types of interactions may impose stricter gender norms on both sexes.

Interestingly, I've found myself being incredibly tentative while writing this post. Should I even write it at all? Should I mention my own experiences? Is being tentative even a bad thing? Maybe this is the priming effect psych researchers talk about, or maybe I'm a lot less direct than I've always thought. Or maybe I need to stop using the word maybe before this whole thing dissolves into a meta-analytical soup. Look: women should get to state their knowledge and opinions directly without getting judged for it. One way to advocate for this freedom is to speak up, without apologies or hedges — and to support women who do the same. We shouldn't assume that women are more tentative than men, but we should make sure that schools and boardrooms and the halls of Congress are places where everyone can say what they mean. Also, yeah, Sephora is better.

Women Are Sort Of More Tentative Than Men, Aren't They? [EurekAlert]

In a well-researched and disturbing article, Steven Brill portrays the city's Rubber Rooms as Kafkaesque bureaucratic purgatories, where teachers are sent because of misconduct (like molestation) or incompetence and must wait out the long process of arbitration. Brill describes one as "a windowless room in a shabby office building" in Manhattan, where the occupants sleep, play board games, or argue over folding chairs. They wait there until an arbitrator hears and resolves their cases — an average of three years. In a 2007 Times article, Samuel A. Freedman made the rooms sound even more hellish. He described one thus:

The room in question was about 1,100 square feet and on blueprints submitted to the Fire Department was designed to hold 26 people. On this day, it contained upward of 75. It had no windows, no land phone, no Internet access, no wall decorations, not even a clock. Any personal belongings left overnight were removed by custodians.

A disabled teacher with a service dog was initially allowed to sit outside this room — she was later forced to move inside, and several teachers who are allergic to dogs were forced to move out. According to Brill, several teachers confined to rubber rooms compared themselves to detainees at Guantánamo. The conditions obviously aren't as severe, but the rubber rooms are a little like prison, with an important difference — teachers who are sent there still get paid, and accrued benefits and seniority. Brill notes that one senior teacher, Brandi Scheiner, will earn $300,000 for three years in a rubber room, plus an additional $6,000 a year for the rest of her life in pension benefits — all without once entering a classroom. And that's not counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars it can cost the city to settle a teacher misconduct or incompetent case via arbitration.

Brill paints the rubber rooms as a poor solution to a difficult problem — incompetent teachers are almost impossible to actually fire. The United Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in New York, was founded in 1960 in response to a variety of injustices including "meagre salaries, tyrannical principals, witch hunts for Communists, and gender discrimination against a mostly female workforce (at one point, there was a rule requiring any woman who got pregnant to take a two-year unpaid leave)." Now, however, the UFT, like many teachers' unions across the country, has grown into an incredibly powerful body that mandates lifetime teacher tenure and compensation based on seniority rather than performance. The result: even teachers like Patricia Adams (Brill has changed her name), who was found passed out drunk in her classroom, cannot be outright fired — Adams spent two years in a rubber room and in arbitration hearings before finally being reassigned to an office job, where she passed out again and was finally fired.

Less extreme cases of incompetence are obviously even harder to deal with. Teachers' unions across the country resist the use of test scores to measure teacher performance, but the ratings system currently in place are inadequate. Brill writes that in districts that rate teachers as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, 99% receive a satisfactory rating. And even when there are more choices, 94% still get one of the top two ratings.

So why are teachers, unlike almost any other workers, exempt from any sort of performance accountability? It's tempting to chalk it up to unions unthinkingly protecting their own, but that's far from the whole story. Teacher Brandi Scheiner offers a telling perspective. Before reform efforts by Mayor Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein, she says, "everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own. There was no need to push anyone out." Another teacher Brill talked to in a rubber room said, "we can tell if we're doing our jobs. We love these children."

But the two aren't synonymous. Many people Brill talked to got into teaching because of a love of children, and it is a profession that tends to draw people with high ideals. But loving children doesn't mean you can teach them math, and commitment to an ideal isn't the same as putting it into practice. Some teachers might say that teaching is different from all other professions, because teachers are motivated by passion rather than pursuit of the bottom line. But passion by no means guarantees the kind of honest, clear-eyed self-evaluation Scheiner talks about. If teachers truly love children, they should welcome such evaluation, even when it comes, as it sometimes must, from the outside. This doesn't necessarily mean rigidly tying teacher retention to test scores, but it does mean making sure that people who want to teach children actually can. And when they can't, districts should be able to fire them — not send them to to makeshift prisons for expensive, pointless years.

The Rubber Room [New Yorker]
Where Teachers Sit, Awaiting Their Fates [NYT]

[Washington, D.C., May 29. Image via Getty]

WASHINGTON - MAY 29: U.S. first lady Michelle Obama (R) put her hand on the shoulder of 5th grade student Tammy Nguyen (L) after Nguyen finished her presentation during the first lady's visit Bancroft Elementary School May 29, 2009 in Washington, DC. The first lady placed a visit to the students who have participated in the White House Kitchen Garden events throughout the spring. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

As someone with a looming high-school reunion, it was with chagrin that I read the following summary of an ISER "Popularity" study in the new issue of New York magazine:

The study uncovered "a popularity premium" that seems to quasi-scientifically confirm what Kurt Vonnegut once observed: "Life is nothing but high school … you get into real life and that turns out to be high school again-class officers, cheerleaders, and all." There was a 2 percent bump in how much money the former student made for each additional friendship nomination he or she received. And friends were worth 40 percent of additional years of education, earnings-wise; so instead of doing that master's, you should have made two and a half more friends.

As the write-up points out, this rather gives the lie to the alleged renaissance of the last few years (and, as someone I know who went to high school with neo-nerd poster-boy Marc Jacobs scoffed, 'Oh, he was always cool.' And real nerds are not cool, and people dressing up like outcasts of 30 years ago does not change anything for kids in high school now.) But then, people toss around the term "nerd" pretty loosely, and kids can be social outcasts for all kinds of reasons, be it legitimate behavioral or social problems, or simply an unconventional self-presentation in a deeply conventional community. And by the same token, "popular" can be those genuinely friendly, well-rounded people, or else a select few who most people resent but who are for some arbitrary reason elevated to special prominence in the tiny universe of one's school. I'd guess it's the former who succeed, the latter who live off high school dreams.

Besides, Facebook has changed everything. Not only has the late bloomer lost the ta-da! factor a reunion once meant, but somehow, in cyberspace, in the great universal rush to have more connections, a bigger profile, a larger network, a lot of these old animosities have disappeared. If life's high school? Well, we're all "friends" now.

No Revenge Of The Nerds? [New York]

[Peshawar, Pakistan; May 4. Image via Getty]

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN - MAY 04: Young Pakistani girls attend a UNICEF school in the Kacha Garhi IDP camp on May 4, 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan. UNICEF and UNHR have been working closely together to give assistance to thousands of people displaced by fighting between the Taliban and the Pakistan Army. (Photo by Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Bristol University researcher Steven Proud tracked boys in 16,000 English schools between 2002 and 2004. He found that boys got the best grades in English when "as few girls as possible" in their classes, and the more female classmates they had, the worse they did. On the flip side, both genders did better when there were more girls in science and math classes.

According to the Guardian, Proud explains his findings thus:

boys may do worse in English when there is a high proportion of girls in their class because they realise that the girls are better than them. It could also be that teachers use teaching styles more appropriate to girls when there are more girls than boys in the class. Both genders perform better in maths and science at primary school when there are more girls in the class because boys tend to disrupt the class more [...]

Though the Guardian's headline — "Girls make boys worse at English, says new study" — makes it sound a little like girls are slamming those readers shut in boys' faces, Proud's analysis actually makes boys look bad. Not only are they shrinking violets who can't stand girls outperforming them, but they also get in the way when girls try to learn math. Is it possible, though, that there are other gender stereotypes at work here? The idea that girls are better at English than boys is so entrenched that Proud mentions it pretty uncritically — perhaps boys feel that it's feminine to be verbally adept. And perhaps this effect is more pronounced when there are girls in the class for comparison. However, Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, added that the grade differences in the study were very small, and that "you can't say that it means boys or girls should be separated." Could it be that the variation within each gender is still much larger than the differences between, be it in English, math, or life? Nah, that's unpossible.

Girls Make Boys Worse At English, Says New Study [Guardian]