We’re thrilled to introduce the second cohort of Fordham Fellows and the reborn Fordham Fellows blog to the edusphere. As you may recall, even before there was Flypaper there was the Fordham Fellows blog, which had a good run from September to December of 2007. We’ve retooled the Fellows program for this year, and it will stretch all the way through May. Our Fellows—Laura Bornfreund, Catherine Cullen, Ben Hoffman, Nora Kern, and David Powell—are a talented crew, and will be learning the ropes of education policy in their positions at Common Core, Education Sector, Fordham, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the National Council on Teacher Quality, respectively.

Their first assignment was to read the “broader/bolder” and “education equity” manifestos to start wrestling with the big debates in education. And they have some fair insights and good questions, like this one:

What is it about the Broader, Bolder Approach that makes Checker Finn “convinced that many of [the signatories] are trying to change the subject, diverting attention...while letting schools and educators off the hook”? What’s the basis for the assumption that health and family services must always be excuses and never tools?

I can’t speak for Checker, but I suspect it’s his experience and familiarity with the folks behind the “broader/bolder” manifesto that gives him pause. Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute—the group leading this charge—have long argued against accountability in education. They’ve also tried to knock down the success of KIPP and its peers because they demonstrate that schools can in fact close the achievement gap, even when the larger social safety net has holes. (And did I mention that they get money from the teachers unions?) Surely there are some supporters of accountability on the list of signatories—and the manifesto itself takes pains to express vague support for the idea in theory—but the energy is coming from people who are strongly against reform. I suspect that’s why Checker—and others, like Kevin Carey—can’t help but read between the lines.

American extracurriculars win again. A study from Temple University found that obesity in children is linked to a tendency to shy away from athletic teams—and lower test scores, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The Washington Post has been running a series all week on the childhood obesity crisis and our society’s inadequate response to it. Today’s article is about the schools’ role:

When Americans look for a scapegoat to blame for the growing childhood obesity epidemic, they often point to the schoolhouse. School officials said, however, that their efforts to promote good nutrition are thwarted by parents, who send children to school with oversized bags of chips and fight officials when they try to ban cupcakes.

That’s a pretty interesting inversion of in loco parentis. But what’s more troubling to me is the assumption that this problem—like so many others—is our education system’s responsibility to solve. Worried about global warming? Ask the schools to teach something about it. Concerned about teen driving accidents? Ask the schools to beef up driver’s ed. And now, concerned about child obesity? Expect schools to take on the job of slimming kids down.

To be sure, schools shouldn’t be doing harm by serving unhealthy food for lunch and allowing all manner of junk to spew from vending machines. But neither should the anti-obesity mission replace their anti-ignorance mission. Schools have limited time and resources, and they need to be allowed to make room for core academics first.

Video games supposedly made America’s youth lazy and fat; maybe video games can make them active and lean.

Have you noticed kids no longer bike to school?

One of the reasons is that schools no longer encourage biking. Take the case of Bridgewater-Raritan High School in New Jersey. Students there banded together and managed to raise $2,000 to purchase a new bike rack at the school. But school officials denied their request. Katherine Dransfield, one of the students seeking to organize a school bike club, explained that “Essentially, what they told us was that they didn’t want to promote biking as a way to get to school.”

The school officials should be ashamed of themselves. Biking has numerous benefits. It promotes public health and exercise (and our students, many of whom are struggling with obesity, could certainly use it), reduces traffic congestion, and helps the environment by reducing pollution.

In fact, some here at Fordham regularly bike to work during the spring and summer. Mike Petrilli, our esteemed Vice-President for National Policy, is an avid biker. He’s also our resident greenie and political squish, who champions organic food, energy conservation, and combating global warming. I, on the other hand, being a hard-boiled conservative, don’t share Mike’s—how shall I say it—romantic views. I’m all for steaks and gas-guzzling cars. I do, however, commute to work on the train and subway everyday. So, I can’t be that much of a reactionary.

Regardless of our ideological differences, there is one undeniable fact: Mike is considerably slimmer and fitter than I am. A major reason for this is that he exercises regularly—and biking is a key part of his regimen. It is good for you; the more biking, the better. It’s time students were reintroduced to the joys and benefits of riding their bikes. And schools should not stand in their way.

Whether or not you agree with Richard Simmons, it’s promising when anti-obesity initiatives work. That appears to be the case in Philadelphia, where the results from a comprehensive healthy-eating campaign showed that “The number of kids who got fat during the two-year experiment was half the number of kids who got fat in schools that didn’t make those efforts.”

What was the secret? Enter libertarian paternalism:

“We found when you give children healthy choices, they pick them,” said Grace McGinley, school nurse at Francis Hopkinson School, one of the test schools.

Call it a nudge, a push, a shove, whatever—schools are supposed to be in loco parentis, so I say be a nudging nanny and junk the junk food for good.

So says fitness guru cum educational historian Richard Simmons in this Newsweek article: “The idea of NCLB was to make our children academically well rounded. Now they’re just round.”

Yup, it must have been NCLB that made kids fat, because back in 2001 American younsters were lean, mean fighting machines. Ah, the low bigotry of soft expectations.