Education Trust has two reports on Telling the Truth (Or Not) on teacher quality and high school graduation rates. There are many ways to fudge data. The creativity is impressive.

Nobody ate great-grandma’s fruitcake, baked an estimated 125 years ago.

Morgan Ford, 83, of Tecumseh (Michigan), is taking his great-grandmother Fidelia Bates’ fruitcake to Burbank, Calif., to share a piece with Jay Leno on Tuesday’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

The cake rests in a glass bowl, covered by a glass top. A large raisin and what might be a clove are visible among the brown mass — Ford says it’s fossilized — that emits a pleasant odor of spices.

The recipe has been lost.

Florida’s first voucher students are making progress, even though many were below grade level when the program started in 1999.

Most of Florida’s first voucher pupils have progressed more than one grade level on a standardized test for each of the four years they have been in the program, Roman Catholic school officials say.

Only two of 34 voucher pupils at Catholic schools have failed to meet that goal on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

Sister Mary Caplice, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, credits a focus on basics and a tradition of discipline, structure and communication and collaboration with parents.

Students at two failing public schools in Pensacola were offered vouchers in 1999. Almost all chose Catholic schools.

Cassandra Galloway obtained a voucher for her son, Jonathan, in 1999 because he couldn’t read although he had Bs and Cs on his report card. He is now 14 and in the eighth grade at Sacred Heart School.

“He was on a kindergarten level,” Galloway said. “He’s still not on grade level in reading and spelling, but he gets better every day.”

A judge ruled against spending public money on religious school tuition, but the decision is under appeal.

A Hissmass update from James Lileks, whose daughter is now singing — more or less — the Christmas classics in traditional pre-school style.

They sang five songs, including Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Same repertoire I sang when I was in the Elim Lutheran Cherub Choir back in Fargo in the early 60s. (As I’ve noted before, I’m still amazed by the way everything rolled around and clicked into place: Gnat was baptized in this church by the same pastor who baptized me in Fargo. Oy.) We had a choir director intent on unlearning our juvenile inflections. It drove him nuts when we hissed that wish: We WISSSSH you a Merachrismus we WISSSSH you a Merachrismus we WISSSSH you a Merachrismus anda HABBYNUYEER. Now I teach Gnat to lean on the Wish. Put your elbow into it, kid.

After the service the kids went back to the Educational Wing, and the parents hit the lounge for caffeine and sugar. The lounge is upstairs, but it’s still the Church Basement as far as I’m concerned. If you have a bunch of Lutherans standing around drinking coffee and eating those sugar cookies with a Hershey’s Kiss stuck in the middle, it is for all practical purposes the Church Basement. I talked to all the mothers oppressed by religion and the patriarchy, including one who’d taken a year off to tend to her newborn and was now going back to supervise large-scale construction developments. O ye invisible burqa of convention, begone!

It’s lovely to have Lileks back for Christmas.

Students at a Colorado Springs elementary school are giving a precious Christmas gift to two classmates: They’ve raised $3,000 to make it possible for Anthony Mitchell, 8, and Megan Mitchell, 7, to visit their wounded father for Christmas at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Staff Sgt. Roy Mitchell of Indiana was severely burned and lost part of his left leg in a land-mine explosion in Afghanistan on Nov. 23.

The parents are divorced, and there was no money to finance a visit till the kids at the school raised money for air fare and a hotel room.

Via the Mudville Gazette.

Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, now commanding our troops in Iraq, grew up with no indoor plumbing or electricity in dirt-poor Rio Grande City, Texas. His single mother was determined that her six children would go to college. Here’s a story from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times:

When Ricardo Sanchez was 13, he and an older brother told his mother they didn’t want to go to school anymore.

OK, she said. They could pick cotton instead.

“I woke them up at 5 in the morning and sent them off in one of the trucks,” said Maria Sanchez, the 77-year-old mother of the highest-ranking military official in Iraq. “They came home and they were very tired, but I just gave them some dinner and told them, ‘Go to bed because tomorrow you have to wake up early. You have to get up at 5 a.m. and pick cotton for the rest of your life.’ ”

After one 14-hour workday, Sanchez told his mother he was done. School would be just fine.

His mother had a fourth grade education. All her children are college graduates in professional careers.

Dick Gephardt, who voted for President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, now says it’s a deliberate scheme to undermine public schools.

“George Bush is deliberately setting up public schools to fail so he can say there is no choice but to take money away from public schools. There’s only one way to fix No Child Left Behind, and that is to leave George Bush behind,” he said Saturday at New England College in Henniker (New Hampshire).

No Child Left Behind penalizes schools that fail to show improvement and would allow parents to move their children to another school in the same district under some circumstances.

“Rather than support a struggling school, they tell parents to cut and run,” he said.

“George Bush is setting up children to fail and then using their failure to advance a right-wing agenda. If George Bush truly believed in this law, then he’d provide the funding to pay for it, rather than wasting the money on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.”

Gephardt defended public education, saying most schools are succeeding, and that Bush is highlighting those that aren’t.

Bush has raised federal funding for education dramatically, though it represents a small fraction of total education spending. Gephardt said he voted for the law two years ago because it raised education spending. “He said he hoped the flaws could be fixed.” With more funding.

School voucher advocates must argue the case for free markets — not just social justice — argue Herbert Walberg and Joseph Bast in the Chicago Sun-Times.

A public that does not understand what markets are is being asked to trust them to provide quality educations for their children. A conversation with an average person about how school vouchers would work in practice — as opposed to a conversation about whether school choice is a good idea in theory — reveals many disturbing myths and misunderstandings about capitalism.

Many people believe capitalism encourages greed and exacerbates inequality, tends toward monopoly and low-quality products, and allows corporations to manipulate consumers and waste money on advertising. Most people believe mass illiteracy was commonplace before government took over the funding and operation of schools.

Defending capitalism is hard work, they argue. But it’s necessary.

School bullies have high self-esteem, says a UCLA study of Los Angeles schools. It’s their victims who are depressed, anxious and lonely.

Bullies, seven percent of the students, are psychologically strong.

“Bullies are popular and respected: they are considered the ‘cool’ kids,” said Jaana Juvonen, UCLA professor of psychology, and lead author of “Bullying Among Young Adolescents: The Strong, the Weak and the Troubled,” published in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics. “They don’t show signs of depression or social anxiety and they don’t feel lonely.

Victims make up about nine percent of students, researchers said. They’re the ones who could use an ego boost.

“Young teens who are victims of bullying are often emotionally distressed and socially marginalized,” said Juvonen, who also works as a consultant to Los Angeles elementary schools on developing anti-bullying programs. “Many of the victims are disengaged in school.”

About six percent of students are both bullies and victims. They’re the most troubled and the least popular group.