In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.

School crime, he says, has been historically underreported, victims do not receive proper rights, and the increasing violence against teachers and employees is not taken seriously.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education plans to issue a rebuttal this week.

Last year, more than 5,000 students committed criminal offenses, Stollsteimer reported; not one was expelled. Only 29 percent was transferred to alternative schools.

Stollsteimer characterized the district as having “an organizational culture that has become tolerant of violent behavior and dismissive of the rights of its victims.”

. . . School officials say that though they have not formally expelled students in recent years, they have removed troublemakers by transferring those students caught with weapons to alternative schools.

Instead of zero tolerance, Philly seems to have total tolerance for violence. Or perhaps, considering the transfers, 71 percent tolerance for violence.

Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative ­A-­plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. . . . The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are pretty good, certainly better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate ­courses.

Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of ­low-­income children. . . . Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital. We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our ­back.

China and India still send their best students to U.S. universities, Mathews writes. And, the U.S. produces more engineers with a bachelor’s degree per capita than China or India.

In the late 1980s, when Japan still seemed on its way to becoming the world’s economic superpower, U.S. newspapers published glowing stories about the lofty test scores achieved by Japanese students and suggested that failures of American public education had helped bring on bad times in the United States. By 1998, despite the lack of any significant change in math and reading scores, the U.S. economy was back on top. The Japanese still had good schools, but the bottom had dropped out of their economy (which still hasn’t fully recovered). No ­story.

Flypaper commends Mathews for restoring sanity to the discussion.

. . . many non-Reading First schools were implementing the same programs and professional development opportunities as the Reading First schools. This impact evaluation is not a true experiment which could have certainly been done given the tremendous financial resources allocated for the evaluation. As Tim Shanahan has pointed out, the comparisons made were not Reading First with non-Reading First schools, but Reading First with less-Reading First schools.

Lyon also points out that Reading First schools are spending less than an hour a day on reading instruction, much less than the program calls for, and are devoting more time to comprehension than to phonics.

D-Ed Reckoning has more thoughts.

Concern is spreading among parents and mental-health professionals that the exploding popularity of computer and video games has a deeper dark side than simple couch-potatohood. . . . Studies show that 92 percent of children under age 18 play regularly.

According to the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University, about 8.5 percent of 8-to-18-year-old gamers can be considered pathologically addicted, and nearly one quarter of young people — more males than females — admit they’ve felt addicted.

Little wonder: In February, a team at Stanford University School of Medicine showed that areas of the brain responsible for generating feelings of addiction and reward are activated during game play.

The founder of On-Line Gamers Anonymous says the games are “turning their brains to mush.”

Haven’t we been hearing these warnings for the last 20 years? Of course, some would say gamers’ brains have turned to mush.

Parents can start the mush process while their babies are still eating mush, notes Robert Pondiscio on Core Knowledge Blog.

The (affirmative action) office ruled that my “repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers.”

. . . the $106,000-a-year affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of “racial harassment” never spoke to me or examined the book. My own union - the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - sent an obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read. He told me, “You could be fired,” that reading the book was “like bringing pornography to work.”

. . . After months of stonewalling, the university withdrew the charge, thanks to pressure from the press, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.

If any book can be banned, all books can be banned, Sampson points out.

The problem with the AP program is that we don’t have time to really learn U.S. history because we’re preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement—with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein. There is no time to write a paper.

Without the pressure of the AP course, Stanley-Becker is doing independent research, he writes, “reading the words of George Kennan, Lillian Hellman, Harry Truman and Paul Robeson for a paper I’m writing on the Cold War.” How many AP drop-outs have the opportunity and motivation to do that, as opposed to taking an easier, textbook-zipping U.S. history class?

When I took U.S. history in eighth grade, there was, of course, less U.S. history. But we still ran out of time at the Depression. World War II was a day, not a week. The Cold War shared a day with the review for the final. I took AP history in high school and remember it very fondly. We had time to discuss ideas — though we ran out of time at the Depression, just like in eighth grade. All we knew about World War II was who won. Us!

AP (and IB) courses “dazzle” when compared to the usual alternatives, writes Liam Julian on Flypaper. But they don’t satisfy students who want to think deeply about what they’re studying. Eric Osberg counters that his AP U.S. history class featured discussions and essays — because they’d taken a survey class the year before.

I wonder if there’s more fact cramming now because AP students start with less basic knowledge. Or maybe there are more questions on 20th-century history.

More than half of teachers believe it’s too difficult to weed out ineffective teachers who have tenure, and nearly half say they personally know such a teacher, according to a survey released Tuesday evening by the Education Sector, a nonpartisan think tank.

. . . Most teachers think the evaluation process for new teachers should be strengthened, so that weak teachers don’t become entrenched.

About 70 percent of teachers in the Education Sector survey said receiving tenure was just a formality that has little to do with teacher quality.

Only a quarter said their own most recent evaluation was “useful and effective.”

Compared to 2003, more teachers — especially those with less than five years’ experience — says unions are essential, the report finds. Teachers want their union to “take an active role in improving teacher evaluation, supporting and mentoring teachers, guiding ineffective teachers out of the profession, and negotiating new/differentiated roles/responsibilities for teachers.”

Support for linking pay to test scores has dropped since 2003; only half of teachers want their effectiveness judged based on their students’ progress.