Something New for Schools to Fail At
Oct 31, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 07 • By HEATHER MAC DONALD


L.A.’s misbegotten teen dating curriculum.
If you wonder why American students rank poorly among industrialized nations on academic skills, here’s part of the explanation, from a seventh-grade classroom in the Los Angeles Unified School District:

On a recent morning, [reports the Los Angeles Times,] Trina Greene, manager of Peace Over Violence’s Start Strong program, faced a class at Berendo Middle School in Pico-Union and dived into matters of love and control.

She took students through an exercise in which they had to decide whether to leave a relationship. Under one scenario, a girl pinched a boy for looking at another girl. The students said they would end the relationship. But when she bought him a gold chain for his birthday, a number of them wavered, saying they might stay.

Only 35 percent of Hispanic seventh-graders at this overwhelmingly Hispanic middle school were deemed proficient in California’s English Language Arts test in 2010-11, and only 43 percent were deemed proficient in Math. Yet Berendo’s students are spending precious class time role-playing dating scenarios rather than studying the grammar of dependent clauses or poring over algebra work sheets. (The purchase of a gold chain in this dating scenario is interesting, since we can safely assume that the Start Strong program has been rigorously vetted for “cultural appropriateness.â€