Those kids better larn their lessons, writes Dave Barry. Because their parents are suffering from brain leakage.

Why do our children perform so poorly on standardized tests? Does the fault lie with our teachers? With our school administrators? With our political leaders? Can we, as concerned parents, sue somebody about this and obtain millions of dollars?

Or maybe it’s time that we parents stopped passing the buck on education. Maybe instead of pointing the finger at everybody else, we should take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror, and place the blame for our children’s lousy test scores where it clearly belongs: on our children. They have a terrible attitude.

I have here a letter, which I am not making up, from a teacher named Robin Walden of Kilgore, Texas, who states:

“I teach math to eighth-grade students. This is an unnecessary task because they are all going to be professional basketball players, professional NASCAR race-car drivers, professional bass fisher people, or marine biologists who will never need to actually use math.”

Like Barry, I went to school in the ’50s and ’60s, when we needed to learn math because some snot named Ivan knew math. A lot of kids were planning to beat up Ivan, if they ever met up with him.

Iraqi teachers are eliminating Saddamite propaganda from textbooks. It’s a big job.

“There were things like: ‘The 28th of April is the birthday of Father Saddam. Happy birthday, Father Saddam. Here’s a song about Father Saddam,’ ” said Hisham Abdulla, a Ministry of Education official who co-wrote the English texts used during Hussein’s rule…

The editing panel had to review 556 books, sentence by sentence. Fuad Hussein, a returned Iraqi expatriate who chose the panelists, remembers seeing one teacher’s hand hesitate the first time she had to cross out a picture of the dictator.

“I told her, ‘Don’t be afraid. Just bring the pen down here, then across here, and he’s finished,’ ” he said.

The editors — all Iraqi teachers — also are removing “slurs against non-Arab ethnic groups.”

I’ve moved to Movable Type! We’re still doing some tinkering, of course. The old comments didn’t survive the move and we’re having trouble moving archives more than three months old from BloggerPro. Advice is welcome. I hope that RSS is now working, and that comments will be faster, and that I’ll figure out how to edit the blogroll so that I can keep the links updated.

College-bound students in Britain specialize too early, argues Michael Prowse in the Financial Times.

Successive governments have steadily increased the target for participation in higher education (it is now 50 per cent and probably unrealistically high). They have made A-levels easier so that a higher proportion of pupils can satisfy university entry requirements. The result is a curriculum that serves nobody’s interests. The exams are no longer demanding enough for the able pupils for whom they were first created. And the “pick and mix” provisions mean that students are now designing absurd curricula for themselves.

Where else in the world can students prepare for university without needing to study any of the following: maths, their native language and literature, natural sciences or a foreign language? Where else can students meet college entry requirements while shunning all the difficult subjects and opting instead for an ersatz combination such as media studies, sociology and sport?

Via Jane Galt.

A Jewish chaplain serving with the 101st Airborne looks for the synagogues, schools, homes and cemeteries of the Jews of Ninevah, now Mosul.

Scroll down to read about how soldiers make life bearable in the Iraqi desert. For example, they eat the matches in the MRE packet; sweating sulfur deters the mosquitoes.

Via Donald Sensing.

It had to happen. New York City’s new gay high school faces a discrimination lawsuit. The suit — filed by a conservative legal group on behalf of a Bronx mother and a state senator — charges the new school wastes tax dollars that could be spent to improve failing schools that serve low-income minority students.

The school theoretically is open to straight students, but Eugene Volokh, while dubious about the race angle in the lawsuit, thinks it’s legally suspect to recruit students on the basis of sexual orientation. I think he’s also framed the policy issue well:

One final note about the policy question — if it is legal to have a high school aimed at homosexual students, is it a good idea? I suspect that the backers of the high school (and of the smaller program that has apparently already existed for years) are correct that homosexual students get quite a bit of abuse, probably mostly verbal but often physical, from their classmates, and the school district has a duty to stop that. But my tentative sense is that having a separate program just for homosexual students isn’t the best solution, because it (1) undermines any “treat people the same regardless of their sexual orientation” message the school is trying to send, (2) makes it easier for other schools to inadequately protect the homosexual students who stay there (“Look, I know this kid is being abused, but the school district has apparently recognized that schools can’t really effectively protect homosexual students against such abuse, and that this is what the Harvey Milk program is for — he should just go there”), and (3) distracts schools from an even more fundamental need to protect all students, whether they’re being abused because they’re homosexual, fat, short, or unpopular for any other reason.

Twilight of the Idols is on the case too.

Students write more when they can use the Internet to find readers, says the NY Times.

“I always wanted my work to be read by someone else, someone out there who would grade me seriously, a regular person,” (10-year-old Raya Allen) said. “With a teacher, it’s their job. When someone else is reading it, they are doing it on their own free will.”

Other stories look at hot educational technology, Dartmouth students who’ve given up phones for “blitzmail” and classroom blogs.

A team of American teen-agers won the International Physics Olympiad, held in Taipei. Next came teams from South Korea, Taiwan and Iran.

Pavel Batrachenko won first prize overall, Daniel Gulotta won the theory section and Emily Russell was the top-scoring girl. Yes, Pavel is an American.

Arianna Huffington, the socialite populist, pays almost no taxes, reports the LA Times.

TV commentator and author Arianna Huffington, who launched her campaign for governor with criticism of “fat cats” who fail to shoulder a fair share of taxes, paid no individual state income tax and just $771 in federal taxes during the last two years, her tax returns show.

Huffington, who released her tax returns for the last two years to The Times, lives in an 8,000-square-foot home in Brentwood above Sunset Boulevard that is valued at about $7 million. She socializes with many wealthy and prominent people.

But the returns show that at least for the last two years, her income was far outweighed by losses that she reported were incurred by Christabella Inc., the private corporation she owns and uses to manage her writing and lecturing business.

In announcing her candidacy last week, Huffington blamed California’s fiscal crisis, in part, on the corrupting influence of special interest groups that have helped “corporate fat cats get away with not paying their fair share of taxes.”

Failing to close corporate tax loopholes, she argued, would “be a slap in the face of all the hard-working taxpayers being forced to dig deeper and deeper in their pockets so the well-connected can pad their bottom line.”

Huffington told the Times her deductions are “conservative.” While she earned $183,000 in 2002, her business expenses totaled $410,363 for research, travel, entertainment and rent on her Brentwood house, which is the address of her corporation. For example, she spent nearly $10,000 on make-up and a make-up consultant.

I write out of my home too, so I understand how those costs mount up. I wonder if I can write off the roof repairs as a business expense. Oh, I keep forgetting. I can avoid income taxes the old-fashioned way: No income.

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who earned $117,685 in 2002, donated $105 to charity. I guess he’s only generous with other people’s money.

Update: On her site, Huffington points out that she pays property taxes and payroll taxes, and that her employees pay taxes on their salaries. She also gives a quarter of her income (including child support?) to charity, she says.

Prince Harry’s grades aren’t good enough for a good university, so he’ll take a year off and go into the army. After five years at Eton, Harry earned a D in geography and a B in art on his A-levels.

Older brother William gained a C in biology, A in geography and B in history of art. The very best candidates gain five A-levels at grade A. The worst pass grade is an E.

Harry, 18, will take a year off before applying to the prestigious Sandhurst military academy, which trains military officers.

“I am very proud of Harry,” Charles said in a statement. “He has worked hard for these examinations and I am very pleased with today’s results.”

If Harry worked hard for a D in geography, he must not be very bright. Well, intelligence is not a requirement for royalty; it’s probably a handicap. Harry’s much-admired mother, Princess Diana, failed her 0-levels twice and left school at 16. That’s the equivalent of dropping out of high school because you can’t pass the basic skills exam.

Update: Joshua Kaye, an American studying at Oxford, says a D in Britain is not as bad as an American D.

While in the U.S. grade inflation runs rampant, in the U.K. national standards are applied to prevent grade inflation.  These standards do not only take the form of testing, but all graded work is examined by a board of examiners to whom the student being graded is anonymous (the examiners are anonymous to the student as well).  These examiners are drawn not only from the academic institution the student attends, but from peer institutions as well.  This keeps grade inflation well in check.

About 20 percent of A-level grades are As, which is low by U.S. standards, considering that only college-bound students take the A-levels.