Rural districts in some states first turned to a 4-day school week during the 1970s, when the cost of running the buses skyrocketed. This time, the WSJ reported, it's not just gas money. Districts are adopting or considering the shortened week to save on hourly staff payments and utilities. But even the Department of Education in Colorado (a state where a third of the 178 school districts operate on a 4-day-a-week calendar) says the "jury is still out on the question of student performance." But Colorado—and Georgia, another state that supports a 4-day week—are both finalists in the "Race to the Top" competition, which will award cash grants to states with innovative plans for school reform. The obvious question is: How does an untested strategy that many experts argue risks weakening students' classroom achievement constitute "educational reform?"

One possible answer is that the districts with the shortened school weeks aren't participating in the reform efforts. Another is that states and districts are confident that the shortened weeks aren't affecting student or teacher performance. But the most likely answer is that—like so many things in the world of education—the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and since the plans submitted to the competition didn't mention length of school week, it wasn't considered. It should be. With so many districts trying it out, and principals touting its benefits, the 4-day week should be put to the same test as any of the innovative strategies competing for Race to the Top funds. Does it contribute to "substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates and ensuring student preparation for success in college and careers"?

And if it does, why, as one Minnesota blogger asked, don't even the wealthiest school districts want to seize the savings?

Photograph by Comstock/Getty Images.

Tags: school reform

Even as a new and vulnerable mother, I suspected that the Baby Einstein videos were only good if you needed to stick the baby somewhere to take a shower, that they would not actually make my baby 30 or 50 or whatever percent smarter. Still, those videos were dispiriting for me, the first clue that the experience of mothering would be something like being trapped on an island resort with people always trying to sell me things and making me feel virtuous for buying them,or leaving me with a twinge of regret if I didn't.

So it is with some secret pleasure that I have watched the Baby Einstein franchise disintegrate over the years. The latest shot is this new study in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine showing that children under 2 do not actually learn vocabulary words from watching television. I actually take slight issue with this study. They do learn some words. But those tend to be words like “Diego” and “pretty pony.” Which is OK with me, but let’s not pretend they have any relationship to Einstein.

The problem with Baby Einstein is not that children watch television. The problem is that the Baby Einstein founders Walter and Julie Aigner-Clark refuse to admit what Baby Einstein is, thus turning the rest of us into self satisfied idiots or dupes. Baby Einstein’s great contribution to American parenting culture is to convince parents that 5-month-olds can watch TV, too, thus launching an entirely new demographic for advertisers to target. That’s all—now debate.

The founders of Baby Einstein are now suing the University of Washington for the data on two earlier papers that showed that young children who watch television suffer attention problems and delayed language. As far as I’m concerned, the lawsuit has already brought me some measure of satisfaction, by forcing the Clarks to 'fess up. “Welcome to the 21st Century,” Julie recently said. “Most people have television in their houses, and most babies are exposed to it. And most people would agree that a child is better of listening to Beethoven while watching images of a puppet than seeing any reality show I can think of.”

Better than Real Housewives. Put that on the DVD box, and I'll be quiet.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News.

Tags: babies and television, Baby Einstein

Today the BBC is wondering if Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar win for The Hurt Locker will mean more female movie directors overall. The article cites this depressing statistic: "Out of the top 250 grossing films of 2009 in the US, women only directed about 7 percent of them," which is down from 9 percent in 2008. The reason for the absence of women directing major motion pictures seems to be a complex combination of deeply entrenched institutional sexism and women self-selecting away from the profession. The BBC article quotes a film-festival director named Amy Mole, who says of directing, " 'There's little job security, erratic scheduling, it's unstable, there are frequent long location shoots ... So if you want to think about child-rearing, it's not that compatible.' " If you look at the women who have been nominated for Oscars, none of them had children when their movies were made. (Sofia Coppola and Jane Campion both had children shortly after their nominated movies were finished; Lina Wertmuller adopted a daughter long after her nomination; Kathryn Bigelow is childless.)

This reminds me of the article that DoubleX contributor Mimi Swartz wrote for the Daily Beast last year, about how the Obama administration is dominated by women who are empty nesters. Commenting on that piece for the XX Factor, Liza Mundy wrote, "This wasn't supposed to be an administration dominated by female empty nesters. It was supposed to be a family-friendly administration where it was possible to be a working parent and actually parent." Is there a point at which we must admit that some jobs just aren't compatible with having young children?

Photograph of Kathryn Bigelow by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: Kathryn Bigelow, oscars, The Hurt Locker

Eri Yoshida, 18 and the first woman to play professional baseball in Japan, took her impressive knuckleball to the United States this winter, playing in the Arizona Winter League. Her goal: to snag a contract with an independent league on this side of the Pacific for the summer and become the first woman to play pro in the United States. Sure, the league’s a far cry from the majors, but considering that Yoshida is 5’1” and 114 lbs., has never had formal training and is, well, not a guy, it’s still pretty impressive.

As a woman looking to make it in a man’s game, the knuckleball was the perfect pitch for Yoshida to take on. Instead of relying on strength and speed, the knuckleball depends on the pitcher's ability to release the ball so it moves in an unpredictable way. Yoshida actually pitches with a side-arm movement, setting the ball on a path to change direction mid-flight, hopefully tripping up the batter.

Simple biology dictates that a woman at the top her game would not be able to throw a fastball at the same speed as a man at the top of his. It’s not anti-feminist—it’s just a matter of muscle mass. The fastest male marathoners are faster than the top female marathoners. The top tennis players can sure slam the ball across the net, but not at the speed of the top male tennis players. But the knuckleball is different. It’s a skill pitch. A trick. A weapon many of the best players in the pros don’t have in their arsenal. Last week, the Boston Red Sox’s Tim Wakefield—the current king of the knuckleball—watched Yoshida pitch at the Sox’s player development league and told journalists he was impressed. (Yoshida says she taught herself the pitching style by watching tapes of Wakefield.)

So will Yoshida, like her idol Wakefield, suit up for the majors one day? Don’t count on it. As thrilling as it would be to see a woman take the field in the big leagues, the chances are pretty slim.

Photograph of Eri Yoshida by STR/AFP.

Tags: Eri Yoshida, Japanese woman pitcher

I spent $3.58 on that mocha. If I'd only joined Blippy—a social-media app that posts the purchases of its members both on the site itself and to their Facebook and Twitter accounts—yesterday, I could have updated my Facebook with a $65 ski lift ticket, an obscene amount for top-of-the mountain snacks and, unmentioned but casually obvious, the fact that I spent the day at Killington. My first thought is that no one would care, but we all know Facebook, Twitter, and the like aren't about sharing important or even interesting info. They're about maintaining a vague, loose connection with a couple hundred close personal friends. So if you are what you buy, and you tweet what you are, Blippy (which can link to a credit card or to accounts with iTunes, Netflix, and others) was inevitable. Blippy calls it passive sharing (although, depending on the purchase, I could see passive-aggressive sharing: KJ just bought The Lazy Husband!) and suggests that you'd have one credit card as "the social card" and one for, ahem, other stuff. (KJ just bought a 30-day supply of Prozac! And maxipads!) I could actually see a use for this, although rather than posting my purchases to Blippy, I should just arrange to have them e-mailed directly to my mother, which would curtail my discretionary spending substantially. I can also see the fun in it—some of what I buy does indeed say something about who I want to be, and some of it does start conversations with friends. (Could this be the solution to the annoying acquaintance who always wants to know where you got it and what you paid?) I can certainly see the utility to advertisers, and even the possibility of a Blipster discount. So Blippy may take over. But in writing this, I can also see that it hasn't yet taken off—that scroll of purchased items on their site either isn't live, or Ross has purchased the MLB app five times in the past 15 minutes. Maybe there is a limit to what we want to share.

Tags: blippy, Facebook

I have long-standing issues with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, but I have to tip my hat to them for their hard work researching attitudes and beliefs about contraception in young people. They've done a bang-up job showing that high unplanned pregnancy rates in the United States have a lot to do with sexual ignorance, and they've made the case that young people need to learn to speak more freely about sex in order to learn more. (Though the conservative bent of NCPTUP comes through in the report when they imply it's surprising that "only" 13 percent of young people think contraception is morally wrong. That number seems alarmingly high to me.) They've also created an occasion for high comedy in laughing at the way that many modern people view technology as a kind of magic.

Amanda Hess at the Sexist had a blast chronicling the unfortunate lack of understanding exhibited by young people, especially young men, of how contraceptive devices and medications even work, telling a story of a young man who thought the Nuva Ring was a kind of fancy diaphragm and another who thought his girlfriend's birth-control-pill-induced lack of menstruation simply meant that the gods had blessed him with a nonbleeding girlfriend, apparently unaware that his girlfriend was doing the blessing with the help of Big Pharma. Hess was so amused (and rightfully so) that she made a video of men trying to explain how birth control works and failing miserably. If you don't laugh, ladies, you'll cry, so enjoy it as much as you can.

On thing that's startling is that young people don't think the birth control pill works and have sex anyway. Most young people have sex, but over 40 percent of them think that they've got a one in two chance of getting pregnant on the birth control pill that year. (It's one in 100 if they take it correctly, eight in 100 if they do it the haphazard way many do.) It makes you wonder how those taking it imagine that they're skating by without getting pregnant, but the report has the answer, which is that 59 percent of women and 47 percent of men suspect that they're infertile. They may not think the birth control pill works, but they do think it'll give you cancer and ruin your figure. (Not according to science.) It makes you wonder if some of these folks believe they get sunburns because elves paint them with painful red paint when they sleep, and not because they went out in the sun without sunblock. It also makes you wonder why kids who think so little of the pill take it anyway, and I suspect they're just hoping there's an off chance that they're as wrong as they actually are.

This report should be the fatal blow to the argument for abstinence-only, since what they've discovered is that many young people think pregnancy prevention is about praying and luck, and that actual contraception has very little effect on your fertility. But they have sex anyway. The abstinence-only argument has always been that if you scared kids enough about pregnancy, hammered them with scary statistics about contraception failure rates, or concealed the reality of contraception from them completely, they'd be too scared to have sex. Turns out that kids who believe that they've got a 50 percent chance of getting pregnant by the year's end have sex anyway. Even I would have thought fear of pregnancy would have curtailed that a little, but apparently nature's pull is just that strong.

Tags: abstinence-only, sex education, young people these days

—At last night's Oscars ceremonies, The Hurt Locker won big. The war film was loved by the critics and pushed back the crowd-pleasers. [New York Times]

—Happy International Women's Day. This day celebrates all women but especially commemorates those who have fought for equal opportunities. [Boing Boing]

—The U.S. government may see a terror threat in Aafia Siddiqui, but Pakistan is celebrating this MIT graduate as a heroine. With possible Al Qaeda ties, she was convicted in a New York court. Pakistan has made her a symbol of innocence and victimization. [New York Times]

—Would Ronald Reagan vote for Sarah Palin? [Washington Post]

—In the past 100 years, what has changed for pregnant women? For many developing countries, the answer is not too much. [Amnesty International]

Photograph of Kathryn Bigelow by Gabriel Bouys/AFP.

Tags: International Women's Day, MIT, oscars, Pakistan, pregnancy, ROnald Reagan, Sarah Palin, The Hurt Locker