As a father of daughters, I've had the usual fatherly reaction to some of my daughters' outfits. So, when I saw this headline, "Ohio Cheerleaders Told Uniforms Are Too Short for Class", I figured this Fox News piece was a typical argument between a school and cheerleaders over a uniform.

Monroe Schools Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli told WLWT TV that cheerleaders were instructed to wear long shorts and T-shirts underneath their uniforms at a pep rally Friday.

"The skirts that the cheerleaders wear are very short, and they're very tight and they're slit so they can do the gymnastics that are required of a cheerleader," Lolli told WLWT.com.

Lolli said the skirts are allowed only during assemblies and games.

"You want to have students wear appropriate clothing during the educational period of the day, and then after school, wear the appropriate clothing for the event," she said.

The uniforms have not been an issue in previous years because the district's dress code was not specific on required length for shorts and skirts. The policy was clarified earlier this year, requiring that the bottom of shorts and skirts be no more than 3 inches above the knee.

That sounds reasonable to me. The last thing that schools need are cheerleaders running around in outfits that distract their fellow male students. While I question whether they should be allowed at games as well, I applaud the school's efforts to create a positive learning environment.

I looked down through the article and noticed that it mentioned parents. I thought, "Oh good. The parents are supporting the school." Ummm.... no.

Parent Becky Daniel said the school's dress code should not apply to cheerleader's uniforms.

"My daughter is a senior, this is her last year," Daniel told the station. "We paid for uniforms and they should be able to wear them on game day."

What is Becky thinking? He major concern seems to be that her daughter gets to wear this uniform to class. Why isn't she concerned about whether the uniform is too short or whether it distracts from classroom instruction?

This is an example of where parents' priorities are completely messed up. I can't help but wonder if Becky is what my kids used to call a "cool mom." My son Alex had a middle school experience with a "cool mom" who ended up being arrested for signing kids out of school and giving them pot. Fortunately, my son wasn't one of them, but it did change his attitude towards "cool moms".

I think too often, parents try too hard to be friends to their kids and not hard enough to be parents. Our kids already have lots of friends, but they only have one set of parents. We owe it to them to be a parent. We need to make the hard decisions that no one else will make for us. These parents should be supporting this school's efforts to create an environment where their children can learn instead of worrying about what they paid for a cheerleader uniform.

In a nice change from the articles bemoaning the State Board of Education's decision to test all 8th graders in Algebra I, this San Francisco Chronicle story actually recognizes that Algebra exists in the real world.

Laptop computer. The computer is just an implementation in electrical circuits of a special form of algebra (called Boolean algebra) invented in the 19th century. Ordinary algebra is used to design and manufacture computers, and is at the heart of how to program them.

Cell phone. A cell phone is a particular kind of computer. An important feature of cell phones is that your phone receives all the signals sent to every cell phone in the region, but only responds to signals sent to your phone. This is achieved by using signal coding systems built on algebra.

Parking cop. Today's parking enforcement officers may carry equipment connecting them directly to a central vehicle database that registers your parking fine before you get back to the car and see the ticket on the windshield. Without algebra, such a system could not exist.

Hybrid car. Modern cars often come equipped with GPS, a highly sophisticated system that is designed using enormous amounts of mathematics that builds on algebra.

Delivery truck. Large retail chains use mathematical methods to determine the routing and scheduling of their delivery trucks; algebra is fundamental to those methods.

Stoplight. These days, stoplights are centrally controlled by computers, so there is even algebra involved in turning the light from red to green.

IPod. This is a math device in your hand. The iPod stores music using sophisticated mathematics built on algebra. And the iPod shuffle mechanism uses regular school algebra to order your songs randomly.

In real life Experts in science, computers, sports - even marijuana - use algebra in everyday work

• Brett Wingeier, San Francisco, 34
  Biomedical engineer working on brain implants for epilepsy
  Uses algebra and geometry to calculate the size of the hole to put in a skull to accommodate an electrode.
• Patrick Paulitz, Orangevale, 43
  Computer programmer
  Converts blocks to megabytes, calculates percent increase or decrease in disk space usage.
• Chris Conrad, El Cerrito, 55
  Court-qualified cannabis expert
  Calculates area, mass, bulk, weights, yields and dosages and compares against police findings.
• Marcia Benjamin, San Leandro, 51
  Swim coach
  Calculates a swimmer's lap pace to swim, for example, a 200-meter freestyle race in 2:28.
• Jim Hahn, San Jose, 47
  Corporate trainer, quilter
  Resizes quilt patterns.

Last Saturday, my son Alex and his fiance' Amanda got married at Seaside Beach, north of Fort Bragg. We're glad to add Amanda and her children to our family. You can see pictures of the wedding here.

I thought this Tennessean article was very interesting. Frequently, we look for a silver bullet in public education. We want a single curricular program, textbook, or professional development program that will boost student achievement without the need to make any other changes. This district raised proficiency scores in math by 11 points doing something simple:

Martin attributed the progress to a fundamental change in how teachers delivered classroom instruction last year.

"Instead of having the prescribed 'this is what we're going to do today and tomorrow,' we look at where our students are and pull them up," she said.

"Before, instruction didn't take into account where the students were at any given time. … We just didn't have a systematic way of being student centered, of addressing students more individually."

Math teachers underwent professional training to learn the new approach, which incorporated frequent testing to track student progress. Teachers also relied on classroom discussions and presentations to see if their students grasped the material.

For example, if students solved quadratic equations, they were sometimes asked to explain their thinking process behind deriving the answer. That way, teachers could check if their pupils understood the concept and could apply it correctly.

At another school, they had even better results:

At Stratford High School in East Nashville, the proficiency levels in math skyrocketed, said Cynthia Hicks-McCall, school's math specialist. Last year, 91 percent of students tested at least proficient on the Gateway math test, compared with 55 percent the year before, she said.

"We all taught the same information from day to day and then tested all our math kids every three weeks on the same benchmarks," Hicks-McCall said.

"When we found shortcomings, we went back and taught it again. We pulled kids for tutoring. I just break it down to little pieces of math and show (students) what they mean so they can remember. I'm also big on homework to keep them on their toes."

Hicks-McCall said she came up with this teaching approach of breaking down concepts into smaller chunks after teaching students with special needs. She said they responded well, so she rolled out the technique to the entire school.

So these schools found that if they modify their instruction to meet student's individual needs and remediate when they didn't get the concepts, they had higher percentages of students reaching grade-level. There's nothing Earth-shattering here. This is just good teaching practice. More schools need to be doing it, more often.

According to Lisa Snell in this post, the Americans think the post office is doing a better job than public schools.

An August 2008 poll conducted by Education Next and Harvard University finds that Americans think less of their schools than of their police departments and post offices. When asked to grade the post office, 70 percent of respondents gave an "A" or "B." In contrast, only 20 percent of Americans said public schools deserve an "A" or a "B." Twenty-six percent of the country actually gave their public schools a grade of "D" or "F." And African-Americans are even more down on public schools, 31 percent gave public schools a "D" or an "F."

Lisa goes on to discuss the 2008 STAR test results and a California Charter School Association paper which found that African American students do better in charter schools. While that discussion is interesting, I was really more interested in the post office vs. public education survey.

I think the comparison of the post office and public education is an interesting one. The changes at the post office since the major reforms of 1971 that established it as separate entity have allowed it to compete with a variety of competitors and outside influences including UPS, FedEx, email, etc. Now, 37 years later, it is getting a A or B grade from the majority of our citizens, while public education, where reforms have been mostly lip service, is fundamentally the same as it was 37 years ago.

Maybe it is time for a 1971 Post Office-style reorganization of public education. Without this dramatic level of action, real reforms are going to be limited to individual schools where brave administrators and teachers are willing to make the extra effort needed to get students to grade-level, regardless of their ethnicity, income level, parental education level or school funding levels. Until that happens, students aren't going to get the education they need to be successful in college or in the world of work.

My wife Grace and I are part of a very small book club (right now it is 2 couples, but we're hoping to grow) and we met this weekend to discuss the two books we read. The books were Them by Jon Ronson and Orson Scott Card's Empire.

Both books deal with political polarization. Them has fun with extremists and Empire describes a fictional modern day civil war in the United States. What was interesting to me is that our discussion quickly shifted from the books themselves to the extreme political polarization in our country. We've come a long way from the days when the vice-president was going to be the loser of the presidential election from the other party who would put aside differences to do what was best for the country.

It concerns me that we've reached a point in our country where there is no room for political dialogue between people of opposing views. In our world, each side is so convinced of their "rightness" that anyone who disagrees with them must be "evil" because there is no way that anyone could honestly hold that position. To a liberal, you can't be a conservative without being a tool of big business. To a conservative, you can't be a liberal without being a communist.

While we almost universally believe ourselves to be "moderates", for some reason we believe that everyone who doesn't agree with our position is an extremist. Of course as with most things in the life, the reality is somewhere closer to the center. There are extreme conservatives who are tools of big business and there are extreme liberals who are communists. The majority of people of each political affiliation fall somewhere closer to middle, neither tool or communist.

My sister Michelle and I disagree on almost every political issue, yet we still can have a polite conversation, eat at the same table and even enjoy each other's company. I don't think she's evil, just wrong. OK, I suspect she actually does think I'm evil but that's based on the fact that she's my little sister, not because of my political views and besides she overlooks it. We can talk about political issues without it becoming personal.

My fear is that Orson Scott Card is right. When your enemies, real or political, are evil, then you're justified in any action, after all, they're evil. That's the view taken by Islamic extremists. If we as Americans take that view about our fellow citizens, where will this end? I think we need to get back to our political roots, when people of intellect could have differing political opinions and yet work toward common goals as Americans.

Tuesday, State Superintendent Jack O'Connell "responded" to the State Board of Education's recent decision to require that all 8th graders be tested in Algebra I with a $3.1B plan to address this requirement. From the San Jose Mecury News:

California's schools will need an additional $3.1 billion annually - $2,100 more for every middle school student - to implement the governor's new eighth-grade algebra testing requirement, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said Tuesday.

That would be more than a 6 percent increase to the state's $50 billion in education spending. The money would be used primarily to extend the school day or the academic year and lower class sizes for middle school students, according to a plan O'Connell and state education leaders presented in Sacramento.

Without the funding, O'Connell said, California can expect an overwhelming failure rate in the algebra tests.

"The governor absolutely must deliver the resources needed to make this mandate succeed," the superintendent said in a morning teleconference.

O'Connell's plan and its eye-popping price tag appear to be his volley back at the state Board of Education, which voted last month to implement Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to require all eighth-graders to be tested in Algebra I within three years.

I have to admit I have some doubts about the bulk of the expenditures in the plan:

Increase instructional time for middle grades so all sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students receive sufficient mathematics, pre-algebra, and algebra instruction and support. Cost: $1.5 billion in General Fund for local support.

While lengthening the instructional day might be a good thing in some cases, it isn't necessarily so. More time with an effective teacher will have a positive impact, but more time with an ineffective teacher isn't going to get students where they need to be. I think some of this $1.5B would have been better spent on merit pay pilots or research-based, well-implemented professional development.

Expand the Morgan-Hart Class Size Reduction Program to include pre-algebra and Algebra I in seventh and eighth grades. Cost: $492 million in General Fund for local support, $369 million in General Fund for school facilities and $305,000 in General Fund for state operations.

So, here we have nearly another billion dollars for class-sized reduction (CSR). CSR is already the largest categorical program after special education. While it makes logical sense that having smaller class sizes would help achievement, in practice it hasn't demonstrated the expected results. What happened was that in order to implement CSR, districts had to add a bunch of classrooms and hire new teachers. The result has been increased school construction costs and a lowering of hiring standards for teachers in poor schools. As with increased classroom time, CSR only works if those students are in smaller classrooms with a good teacher. Smaller class sizes with poor teachers doesn't bring much improvement.

Provide funding for districts to establish and operate "Boost Classes" in elementary, middle, and junior high schools, for no more than 15 students per class identified by a student success team as needing specialized curriculum, instruction, and counseling to address the new algebra requirement. Cost: $175 million in General Fund local support and $185,000 in General Fund for state operations.

This is just more CSR with a new name. It is basically a remedial program and again, it is only likely to be effective if taught by a good teacher.

Expand school counseling services in grades four through eight to identify and provide services for students not adequately prepared to take Algebra I in eighth grade. Cost: $40 million in General Fund for local support and $185,000 in General Fund for state operations.

I'm a little unclear on how expanding counseling services for grades 4-8 will improve academic achievement in Algebra I. I suppose some students could benefit from this extra attention and in the scheme of a $3.1B program, $40M probably isn't too much to ask.

On the positive side, I do agree that increasing funding for existing programs such as MESA and AVIID is probably a good approach. Unfortunately, this is a tiny portion of the funding.

Between the increased class time and CSR, Jack's program devotes $2.536B of the $3.1B plan to activities that will directly benefit his overlords at the California Teacher Association (CTA) in increased dues. Perhaps he should have called it the CTA Success Initiative.

I think in the end, as a colleague told me, this whole discussion of Algebra I for 8th graders is really just a red herring. The real issue is getting all students to grade level, every year. If we do that through their elementary years and the beginning of their middle school years, by the time they get to 8th grade, they'll be ready for Algebra I. This $3.1B proposal is just a band aid attempting to fix a problem that took years to create (K-7) at the back end, rather than focusing on the front end of elementary math instruction.

Thanks to Henry at Why Home School for mentioning my petition to make California State Board of Education meetings available online. The number of signers of the petition is climbing, but not very quickly. If you're a California registered voter and you haven't already signed it, be sure to visit http://petitiononline.com/sbeonnet and sign it today.

Thanks to John Fensterwald from the San Jose Mercury News who mentioned my petition to make State Board of Education meetings available online on his blog Educated Guess. I really appreciate John mentioning the petition. Hopefully, that will being a little more attention to the issue.

If you haven't already signed the petition, be sure to check it out at http://petitiononline.com/sbeonnet.

When I saw this Sacramento Bee piece, it really caught me by surprise. As background, Governor Schwarzenegger announced the other day that he was going to reduce the pay of state workers to the Federal minimum wage until a state budget is finally signed. Now, State Controller John Chiang is claiming that it would take at least six months to implement this change in the state's payroll system and another nine or ten months to pay employees back.

If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to issue minimum-wage checks to 200,000 state workers in less than a month, he may want to rehire any semi-retired computer programmers he terminated last week.

The massive pay cut would exhaust the state's antiquated payroll system, which is built on a Vietnam-era computer language so outdated that many college students don't even bother to learn it anymore.

Democratic state Controller John Chiang said Monday it would take at least six months to reconfigure the state's payroll system to issue blanket checks at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour, though Schwarzenegger insists such a change should occur this month.

Experts say Chiang isn't joking when he describes the state's payroll system as a computing relic on par with vacuum tubes and floppy disks.

"It's an example of a number of computer systems in which the state made a large investment decades ago and has been keeping it going the last few years with duct tape," said Michael Cohen, director of state administration with the Legislative Analyst's Office.

This just doesn't ring true to me. Apparently, I'm not the only person who thinks this claim is suspect:

Fred Klass, chief operating officer for Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance, testifying Monday in a Senate hearing, challenged Chiang's description of his logistical hurdles.

"We have not been provided with the evidence that would show us that this is an impossibility, nor does it answer the question of why aren't we working on this for next time," Klass said.

"To some degree, it's not the point," he added. "The point is the law needs to be adhered to, and the governor is saying we need to follow the law. And if the controller is saying it's inconvenient, I think the controller needs to explain why inconvenience is a reason to ignore the law."

The state payroll system is based on the COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, programming language – a code first introduced in 1959 and popularized in the 1960s and 1970s.

"COBOL programmers are hard to come by these days," said Fred Forrer, the Sacramento-based CEO of MGT of America, a public-sector consulting firm. "It's certainly not a language that is taught. Oftentimes, you have to rely on retired annuitants to come back and help maintain the system until you're able to find a replacement."

Retired state employees who have returned to work part-time for the state were among thousands of workers laid off last week.

Forrer said the system has tens of thousands of lines of code, so it is time-consuming to find and replace salaries for each job classification on an individual basis.

Having done a little COBOL programming in school.... Yes, I'm THAT old... this just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You don't need to go through "lines of code" to change hourly wage rates.

COBOL applications like payroll are basically databases. In your database, you have a table (or file) with all the employees and another with all the wage and salary information. If they need to implement this change, they simply write a short COBOL program to go through the correct tables and change the hourly rate to $6.55 for the applicable employees. They can write another short program to keep track of how much they'll need to reimburse those employees when the budget is signed and even put that extra money in their next check and change the hourly rate back to normal.

Maybe I'm missing something, but none of this is rocket science. We're talking about functions that should take a week, not six months. I also find it hard to believe that all the COBOL programmers have just been laid off. If that were true, then the State Controller's office IT management should be fired. In any organization, one of your most basic functions is payroll. You don't run a payroll system for 200,000+ employees and not have staff on hand that know how to maintain it.

While I have great faith in the incompetence of my state government, I find John Chiang's claim that this software change can't be made in less than six months is just crap. It is an excuse. I don't believe that even our state government is this inept.