I have a book review up on the homepage today about Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal’s Triumph in the Inner City, by Dr. Ben Chavis. Chavis has achieved stunning educational sucess. In 2000, he took over the American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS) in Oakland, an inner-city charter school composed almost exclusively of low-income minority students. By the time he stepped down in 2007, he had turned it into the fifth-highest-rated middle school in the state — out of 1,300:

What the educational establishment really hates about Chavis is that he has achieved this success by exploding nearly every liberal myth about education. His approach to education is strictly old-school, and based on proven, effective methods. The only thing innovative about what he’s doing is that he’s doing it in the face of decades of “progressive” education. A few core tenets of his educational philosophy are:
-Requiring near-perfect attendance.
-Maximizing the amount of class time and number of school days. (Summer school is required, and teachers are expected to assign a minimum of two hours of homework each day.)
-Heavily weighting the curriculum toward language arts and math. (Chavis’s schools spend twice as much time on those subjects as most other California schools.)
-Liberally handing out disciplinary actions such as detention, and otherwise ensuring that order is maintained.
-Setting and enforcing standards — e.g., every eighth-grader must pass Algebra I. (In many California high schools, it’s possible to graduate with just “General Math.”)
-Making a big public point of not setting lower standards for minority students. (Too many educational institutions indulge in the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” as President Bush memorably put it.)

Further, Chavis positively demolishes the liberal education dogma on race and political correctness:

When Chavis dismisses diversity-heavy education, he doesn’t do so lightly. He is a Lumbee Indian born to an uneducated mother and raised in a sharecroppers’ shack in rural North Carolina. He’s certainly proud of his heritage, but where most modern educators insist that improving self-esteem is necessary to facilitate learning, Chavis insists they have it backwards. “Many Indian elders who live on a Navajo reservation know a lot about their culture. Does that qualify them to get into Harvard or Stanford?” he writes. Chavis once bought into the educational dogma he now wholly rejects; he writes that his eyes were opened when he was pressured by his dissertation committee to make the conclusion of his dissertation more politically correct: “That was a major turning point for me. . . . I started to question the sacred cows of education: parent involvement, volunteer work, more money for schools, culture, self-esteem, bilingual ed and minority holidays.”

The book should be required reading for every parent in America.