See Dick go to high school
Education researchers say students do worse if they’re held back than if they’re promoted without knowing grade-level skills. But here’s a depressing stat in a good Hartford Courant story on how schools are trying to help students who aren’t ready to move on.

When the state took over Hartford’s schools six years ago, it identified ending “social promotion” as one of its primary goals. But trustees ultimately backed off, and test scores show that social promotion is alive and well in Hartford. Results from the Stanford Achievement Test show that last fall almost as many ninth-graders were reading at the third-grade level as at the ninth-grade level.

As long as it’s hard to teach reading to some first, second and third graders, and possible to promote illiterates, Hartford will have ninth graders who can’t read.

Challenge
More students are taking college-level courses in high school, and discovering that they can meet the challenge. In Newsweek, Jay Mathews explains his challenge index, which ranks public schools based on what percentage of students take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams. First on the list is an IB-focused school called International Academy in Bloomfield Hills, a Detroit suburb. Given the local population, and the photos of students in Newsweek, my bet is the school serves a lot of Iraqi-Americans, who know what challenge means.

Some elite private schools are moving away from AP courses, saying the test forces teachers to cover too much. Mathews quotes a superintendent named Mike Riley:

“Elitists will always try to find higher ground when it becomes apparent that others can scale their hill,” he says. “While AP’s standards, tests and curriculum have not changed, there are those who once thought the program was the gold standard but now see it as tarnished. What’s the only, and I underscore only, thing that has changed? More kids are included.”

Michael McKeown looked for high-challenge schools with challenging demographics and found Sweetwater Union High School District, on California’s Mexican border, which placed three of its nine high schools on the challenge index: Southwest High (93% minority, 35% subsidized lunch, 32% English Language Learners), Sweetwater High (92% minority, 58.6% subsidized lunch and 28% ELL), and Bonita Vista High (69.5% minority, 11.4 % subsidized lunch, 8.9% ELL).

Vouchers win voters
President Bush’s education agenda is attracting black and Hispanic voters, writes Donald Lambro in the Washington Times.

What’s driving this black and Hispanic shift to Republicans? It is hard to say, but polls show growing support among minorities for school choice vouchers where inner city schools are failing. Many like Mr. Bush’s idea for personal Social Security investment accounts and his faith-based initiative to help the needy, much of which will go to black Baptist and evangelical churches.

Mr. Bush’s 2003 legislative agenda is reaching out aggressively to black voters: There is his $15 billion program to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa; a sizable increase in assistance to historically black colleges; and a special voucher school choice program for the District of Columbia that D.C.’s Democratic Mayor Anthony Williams now supports.

Democrats will keep the teachers’ union, but otherwise labor support is weakening: A third of rank-and-file union members now vote Republican.

Insano in Lintuvia
Over on IMAO, President Bush plans to test Black Project Insano on the island dictatorship of Lintuvia, but only Dick Cheney knows who knows who knows what it is. And nobody knows where he is.

“This is idiotic,” Rumsfeld commented, “Can’t we just bomb countries and shoot people as normal?”

“Do not underestimate the power of Black Project Insano!” Rice shot back, “First we test it on Lintuvia, and then the world will be mine!” She started laughing evilly, but then noticed everyone staring at her. “Uh … I mean the world will be at peace and run by the U.S.”

“I’m going to look for Dick Cheney,” Bush said. He then went to the door of the conference room and shouted out, “Laura! Is Dick in one of the cupboards in the kitchen?”

“Honey, I can’t always be finding Cheney for you,” Laura answered.

Also, Ari Fleischer uses a laser pointer to defenestrate Helen Thomas, and the Fox News reporter refuses to take off her bikini top.

Not a hate crime
At a Palo Alto drug store, an 18-year-old Hindu employee was caught having sex in a restroom with a 15-year-old Muslim girl who also worked there. Muslim groups protested the “hate rape.”

But other store employees said they’d seen the two teen-agers giggling together. The girl hurt her credibility by talking about a nonexistent sister’s rape and suicide. An assistant district attorney now believes the girl lied to cover her embarrassment.

Prosecutors dropped “hate crime” charges against Sanjay Nair, and last month dropped attempted rape charges as well. Nair pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor; a judge said the sex was unforced, but still illegal (because of the girl’s age).

School choice, eh?
Canada is getting its first privately funded vouchers, and teachers’ unions aren’t happy, writes Neil Seeman in NRO. Yet Canada is more advanced than the U.S. on school choice.

Several Canadian provinces offer public funding to qualifying private schools, including religious schools. In fact, over 90 percent of the population enjoys a panoply of publicly funded school choices. In several provinces, these funds take the form of per-pupil funding directly to schools, much like vouchers, although the province of Ontario is currently offering a 20 percent refundable tax credit for parents whose children attend private schools.

. . . In those provinces that fund private schools, there is a statistically weaker correlation between socioeconomic status and educational achievement. When funding follows children to the parents’ choice of school, parental satisfaction and test scores shoot upwards.

Interesting.

Dowd’s hidden correction
After the terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, Maureen Dowd claimed in her May 14 New York Times column that President Bush had said Al Qaeda was no longer a threat.

“Al Qaeda is on the run,” President Bush said last week. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated … they’re not a problem anymore.”

Left out by the three little dots was the meaning. Bush really had said:

“Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.”

Now, in a classically incoherent column, she’s printed the entire Bush quote, without admitting the previous distortion. It’s a sort of hidden correction. This won’t do.

Zev Chafets has turned Dowd in to the Times’ new rat-on-a-reporter hotline. We’ll see what happens.

It’s not easy being illiterate
Civil rights leaders urged Florida students to skip school to protest the graduation exam, and the state reading test used to qualify for promotion to fourth grade.

”I’m hoping the governor will realize that it’s hard enough being black in America today,” said state Sen. Frederica Wilson, who believes the policy disproportionately falls upon minorities. “For children without a diploma, it will be triply hard.”

For children who can’t read, write and calculate, it’s no picnic either.

Gov. Jeb Bush announced students who fail the graduation exam can earn a diploma if they “pass” the SAT or ACT college-entrance exams. No word on what it means to pass these tests. As Kim Swygert writes, students who can’t pass Florida’s exam in six tries aren’t likely to ace the SATs.

Who’s clueless?
Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe complains that students can’t distinguish pseudo-intellectual blather from genuine “ArgueSpeak.” He wants to use popular culture to interest students in learning how to frame an argument.

It’s the professors, not the students, who are clueless, writes Steven Lagerfeld in Opinion Journal. And substituting Spice Girls for Shakespeare won’t help.

Neither will coining clumsy words.

At University of North Carolina-Wilmington, Professor Mike Adams is trying to foster tolerance for different opinions. It all started when he deliberately violated university policy by posting a “Clinton/Gore ’96″ sticker on his office door.

After two years without any complaints, I decided to replace the sticker with one that said “George W. Bush for President.” Within a few weeks I heard reports from two  faculty members and one staff member saying that someone was preparing to file a complaint about the Bush sticker.

. . . I decided it was time to let the faculty in on my little experiment. I did this by sending an e-mail to everyone in the building which began as follows: “You have all been involved in an experiment in tolerance which, unfortunately, some of you have failed . . .”

As you can imagine, the “liberal” Democrat who was conspiring to punish me for the Bush sticker decided to let the matter go.

Now a sticker on his door — “So you’re a feminist . . . Isn’t that cute?” — has offended a student. She got her daddy to complain to the board of trustees.

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Mike Peckham, designer for the new de-blogspotted Penny, created this.