Education business is booming with more federal money to pay for quick-turnaround diagnostic tests, books, tutoring and teacher training.

Harcourt Educational Measurement, a unit of publisher Harcourt Inc., says it has rewritten its key standardized test, renamed the Stanford 10, to tap the No Child Left Behind market. The new test is aligned with state curricula — that is, questions come from what’s taught in most classrooms rather than from general knowledge — and states can add their own questions. Ten states have already bought the new test, whose costs vary by grade but are about $7 for a third grader . . .

Hundreds of “supplemental service providers” have already lined up to offer tutoring, including Sylvan, Kaplan Inc. and Princeton Review Inc. — companies best known for offering college test-prep courses or homework help.

. . . No Child Left Behind also has created demand among schools for tools to help them track student progress and interpret the new data the law requires them to generate. Princeton Review is selling a Web-based product called Homeroom that lets teachers give frequent minitests to see whether their students are on track to pass the state exam. Test results come back immediately, identifying which youngsters are weak in, say, measurement or fractions, and providing exercises to help them improve their skills. The product costs $3,500 a school per year and is already in 3,000 schools, Princeton Review says.

Similarly, Kaplan offers the Kaplan Achievement Planner that, for about $20 a student per year, analyzes each student, then gives teachers different lesson plans for their fast, slow and average learners. It also supplies instantly scored minitests that look and read like the state exam.

Those diagnostic tests are proving very useful and, thanks to technology, inexpensive.

As a joke, popular students at Oakville Trafalgar High School in Ontario elected a nerd to give the valedictory speech at their graduation. Andrew Ironside threw out his cliche-ridden speech and told classmates they’d been snobs and jerks. The National Post named Ironside one of its courageous Canadians of the year:

. . . Mr. Ironside — dressed at his mother’s insistence in a crisp white dress shirt and black tie — paused and crumpled up the paper that held his carefully typed string of cliches.

“A lot of you were jerks,” he informed the rows of 18-year-olds, dressed in oversized suits and undersized skirts.

“I wasn’t thinking of a specific person, just people in general,” he remembers of the following indictment he issued against a high school atmosphere of snobbery and exclusion.

Via Education News.

Few American children learn traditional children’s songs, such as “Old MacDonald” or “The Farmer in the Dell,” according to this Chicago Tribune column. Kids sing pop songs; teachers don’t bother with the “Hokey Pokey.”

“I listen to nothing but the top 40,” says Shawna Bramlett, age 7, of Tampa. “Eminem really speaks to me. Old music is for old people.”

The traditional songs of American childhood — folk tunes, nursery rhymes and even the national anthem — are disappearing, victims of pervasive pop culture and funding cuts that have nibbled away at arts education in elementary schools.

Among the endangered or lost: songs tied to periods of American history such as “My Darling Clementine” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”; spirituals and songs with religious roots such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Amazing Grace”; nursery rhymes and activity songs such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Hokey Pokey”; even patriotic songs such as “America the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

. . . But in a survey I conducted last spring, music teachers said songs that could be considered American children’s musical heritage often aren’t part of the public school curriculum. Among their comments: “My school is low socio-economic, so I teach only pop music.” “Our curriculum is multicultural. We do not teach songs of the American culture.” “These songs aren’t in my textbooks, so I don’t teach them.” “These songs aren’t appropriate for us. I teach in Hawaii, not in America.”

Can this really be true? Little kids are singing songs in school, whether the arts budget has been cut or not, and they’re not singing Eminem. Surely “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” has not dimmed in the minds of pre-schoolers and kindergarteners. Parents of young children, what do you think?

Wealth is distributed — unfairly– but is not created or earned, according to a lesson called, “Economic Justice: The Scramble for Wealth and Power.”

The children sit in a circle. Some are wearing mittens; others are waiting expectantly with little plastic shovels. The rules of the game state that a few of the children must do nothing but sit and watch as the action begins. On the leader’s “Go!” the children scramble for 100 pennies that have been scattered on the floor in the center of the circle.

Of course, some players get more pennies than others. Those who’ve done well may give pennies to classmates and appear on a list of “donors.”

During the second part of this exercise students are asked to devise plans for a fair distribution of the pennies. They are asked to pass judgment on the other students who did or did not give away some pennies to others, and whether or not there should be a redistribution of wealth in America, and how to accomplish this redistribution.

Modern children all go to birthday parties featuring pinatas, so they have a lot of experience scrambling for goodies; all understand that aggressive grabbers will end up with more than others. But they often believe that the goodies are just there. It would be nice if they learned that there is wealth to distribute or redistribute because somebody filled the pinata.

Via Andrew Sullivan, a funny story about Hanukkah in Memphis.

This year’s Hanukkah program at Beth Sholom Synagogue featured a uniquely Memphis touch — telling the story of the religious miracle through retooled versions of Elvis Presley’s hits.

The synagogue featured an Elvis impersonator and students from Solomon Schechter Day School singing slightly altered hits of the King, including “Blue Suede Jews” and “Heartbreak Kotel,” a reference to Jerusalem’s Western Wall that’s also known as the Kotel Ha Maaravi.

Aint nothing but a hanukkiah.

Jay Leno took a bite of that 125-year-old fruitcake.

“It needs more time,” he said after a deliberate chew.

The fruitcake is a family heirloom.

Vern Williams teaches math the old-fashioned way, writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. Students love it.

. . . as innovative as Williams is, he is a stubborn advocate of what has worked for math teachers for centuries: demanding assignments, hard work and some repetition. He hates fads, hates the derisive term “drill and kill” for traditional math teaching and refuses to use the new textbooks with all those colorful pictures.

“When you start telling me that you have to print books with 10 different colors on every page, with charts and stories about the rain forest and what you are going to do at Giant today because we have to make everything relevant 100 percent of the time . . . I say, no, no,” he said. “I think we are doing our students a disservice.”

Williams thinks today’s students are just as capable of learning challenging material as students in the past. His students certainly are.

The War Against Excellence : The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America’s Middle Schools calls for a return to ability tracking and individual work. Advocates of cooperative learning — students work together on projects and share the grade — are firing back.

It’s hard to design effective group projects. It’s also difficult to get capable students to spend time helping slow students. Usually, the bright kids just do all the work. I know that was my daughter’s strategy.

SCSU Scholars has more on the question of fostering competitive individuals who can cooperate when necessary.

Frequent diagnostic testing and good data analysis improves learning, says a study of 32 Bay Area schools. In particular, black and Hispanic students catch up when their teachers learn how to analyze test data. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Researchers from the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative looked at achievement levels in two groups of 16 schools (kindergarten through eighth grade) with similar ethnic and low-income populations. In one group, black and Latino students were doing as well or better than their white and Asian American classmates. In the other group, the ethnic groups reflected the well-known “achievement gap”: Less than a third of black and Latino students typically score at the national average in reading, while more than two-thirds of white and Asian American students scored at or above the national average.

The researchers found that schools where black and Latino students’ test scores were rising did many things differently from the lower-achieving schools. Most notably, teachers diagnosed students’ needs a few times each week then changed how they worked with the kids based on what the data revealed.

. . . Besides frequent diagnostic tests, they found that at the higher- achieving schools, teachers were more likely to learn how to analyze data and apply it to teaching. Also, principals usually considered closing the achievement gap a primary goal, more people of color held leadership positions, and school goals were usually clear and focused.

The federally funded “Reading First” program requires teachers to assess children every two weeks. Then teachers adapt instruction to students’ specific learning needs.

I did my own little study several years ago of high-achieving schools with high minority enrollment. All the successful schools had learned to analyze testing data and use the results to improve teaching. Sadly, many educators are hostile to testing and data.

The U.S. is stuck in the middle in another international education study: We rank only 16th of 36 nations in school bullying. Canada — Canada! — has more bullies than the U.S.