The California Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a 15-year-old San Jose boy who wrote a poem including the words, “For I can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school” and “For I am Dark, Destructive & Dangerous.” The poem wasn’t OK because it was artistic expression, say the justices. They just didn’t think the poem was a threat.

The case weighed free speech rights against the government’s responsibility to provide safe schools. The justices said school officials overreacted to the poem by the San Jose boy, identified as George T. in court records.

“What is readily apparent is that much of the poem plainly does not constitute a threat,” Justice Carlos Moreno wrote for the unanimous, seven-member court.

George T. was expelled from Santa Teresa High, and spent 100 days in a juvenile jail. He has no record of violence before or after writing the poem, which he showed to a classmate.

In the conclusion of the Chicago Tribune series on a third grader who transferred to a better school, the girl’s mother, Yolanda Carwell, transfers her kids again to a school closer to home. Despite convenient bus service, the children continue to miss school frequently. The mother pulls them out two weeks before the end of the school year to go on a family trip that’s then postponed.

Carwell says she picked Attucks off the school district Web site from what she thought was a list of high-performing schools open for transfers under the federal law. But she is wrong. Attucks is on a list, but it’s the list of schools that scored so poorly for so long they must let pupils transfer out.

Last year, 35 percent of Attucks’ students passed state exams, compared with 56 percent at Stockton.

Now called Rayola once again, the little girl does well at her new school, despite irregular attendance. Much of what the classes is learning in winter and spring was covered in the fall by her teacher at the better school, Stockton.

In the beginning of March, (Barbara) Hodo is teaching her students how to compare and contrast in stories — something Rayola learned in September at Stockton. Hodo is teaching pupils how to use “less than” and “more than” symbols in math, a lesson Fromm went over in November.

And while Rayola and her classmates are learning about place values in math, her old classmates at Stockton have moved on to converting miles to kilometers and adding fractions.

But Rayola seems more content at Attucks, having moved into a world that is less demanding but more familiar.

Most of the children who transferred into Stockton did well or were placed in special education classes. Rayola and her brothers and cousin were the only transfers to leave. Apparently, NCLB transfers did help kids whose parents got them to school regularly. No school can save kids, however bright, whose families are too dysfunctional to get them to school.

For successful schools that accept transfers, a large influx of failing students may lower test scores, despite the school’s best efforts. It’s especially hard to make a difference with older students, who are farther behind.

Daniel Drezner says it’s impossible to generalize from the Trib series, which implies at the start that NCLB fails to deal with poor families’ “complex issues.” Stockton came up with social worker support and money to help the Carwell family with their issues, Drezner writes. The mother didn’t follow through.

Just because some families can’t be saved by social workers doesn’t mean that all poor kids should be written off. Many of them can succeed. We don’t know how many because we haven’t tried very hard. Rayola’s new all-black school has much larger classes than Stockton; it uses a “new math” curriculum instead of Stockton’s traditional curriculum. Fighting is tolerated at the low-performing school. It’s not all the fault of incompetent mothers.

Excellence shouldn’t be the goal of Washington state’s school system says Judith Billings, a former state superintendent who’s running for her old office on an anti-testing, anti-charters platform. Billings told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“Everybody does not need to be a math whiz. Everybody does not need to be a spectacular writer.”

Good thing too. Everybody’s not.

Billings may be the union candidate once again, writes Stefan Sharkansky.

On Volokh Conspiracy, Jacob Levy writes about the life-transforming joy of a summer at the Center for Talented Youth, which a New Yorker article jovially calls “nerd camp.” At CTY’s summer program, Levy realized he wanted to go to an academically first-rate boarding school, and got a scholarship to Exeter. That put him on his way to “nerd heaven,” the University of Chicago.

Had I stayed in my medium-town New Hampshire public school system– which was fine but nothing like the public-preps of wealthy suburbs — I would have stayed pretty miserable and continued to get full-time negative reinforcement for intellectual excitement and curiosity. I wouldn’t have understood the range of possibilities that were really open to me, and would have had my sights set much, much lower than they were ultimately set. And I do think I would have ended up internalizing (what I perceived to be) the hostility to nerdiness among my peers . . .

But what I remember about (CTY) . . . was the sheer joy and amazement at being around kids my own age who were not only not hostile to the desire to read and learn and think, but who shared it themselves.

Tyler Cowen endorses CTY too.

In 24 regions of the brain, big is better. Nature reports:

A brain imaging study suggests that human intellect is based on the volume of grey matter in certain brain regions, challenging alternative views about the basis of intelligence.

Those spam ads . . . They’re not about this, OK?

Duke is providing all of its 1,650 new freshmen with an iPod, reports the Durham Herald-Sun.

The iPods, which can download and make use of both audio and text material, will come stocked with Duke-related downloads, including information for freshman orientation and the academic calendar. Duke also will create a special Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes site from which students will be able to download music and course content from faculty, including language lessons, recorded lectures and audio books.

Students in visiting assistant professor Lisa Merschel’s elementary Spanish class will use the iPods to listen to audio examples of textbook exercises and hear Spanish songs.

And adjunct professor Sally Schauman’s students will use their iPods to record lectures in class and interviews while out in the field for her freshman seminar about the ethics and science of urban water conservation.

I can see why language and music classes might find iPods useful, but surely taping interviews can be done with a tape recorder. And students would do better to listen once to a lecture and then review their notes. Listening to tapes is very time-consuming.

Duke got a discount from Apple on 20-gigabyte iPods, which retail for $299. “The cost for the entire project, including hiring an academic computing specialist, grant funding for faculty, research and purchasing the iPods, is expected to reach $500,000,” reports the Herald-Sun. No wonder college tuition keeps going up.

SCSU Scholars suggests this may be an easy way to avoid lawsuits over student downloading of music.

Our smartest students come from immigrant families, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The children of immigrants are becoming the top math and science students in the United States, dominating academic competitions and representing the strongest hope the nation has of keeping an edge in high-tech and biomedical fields, according to a study released Monday.

According to the National Foundation for American Policy, which backs employment-related visas, 60 percent of the finalists of the Intel Science Talent Search, 65 percent of the U.S. Math Olympiad’s top scorers and 46 percent of U.S. Physics Team members are the children of immigrants. “Seven of the top 10 award winners at the 2004 Intel Science Talent Search were immigrants or their children. In 2003, three of the top four awardees were foreign-born.”

These young brains are not the children of the huddled masses. Typically, their parents are engineers and scientists.

Every year, the San Jose Mercury News runs photos and a profile of the valedictorians of local high schools. I’d guess the majority come from immigrant families, mostly Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Iranian and Russian. It’s rare to see a Spanish name. Here’s the most recent “best and brightest” page. (It takes all summer to do all the schools, many of which have multiple valedictorians.) The names are: Hsu, Bhople, May, Lin, Lai, Tran, Allen and Doan. Maybe not representative. Let’s try another one: Slagle, Lee, Zhang, Gottipatti, Harper, Avila, Claus, Dao, Jebens, Koval, Johnson, Kapulkin, Sato, Jhatakia, Decena, Ashe, Tran, Nguyen, Pham, Dick. Two of the non-Asians appear to be from Russian immigrant families. One girl is Japanese-American, and therefore probably not from an immigrant family.

In the new City Journal, Michael Knox Beran defends teaching children to memorize poetry.

In his book on Shakespeare, Michael Wood observed that the poet “was the product of a memorizing culture in which huge chunks of literature were learned by heart.” Such “learning by rote,” Wood wrote, “offers many rewards, not least a sense of poetry, rhythm and refinement — a heightened feel for language,” as well as an abundance of tales and myths, imaginative resources that are among the “most exciting gifts” a young person can receive.

In the 1920s, the New York City public schools required teachers to have students memorize poetry and speeches.

Poems “for reading and memorization” by first-graders include those of Robert Louis Stevenson (“Rain” and “The Land of Nod”), A. A. Milne (“Hoppity”), Christina Rossetti (“Four Pets”), and Charles Kingsley (“The Lost Doll”). Second-graders grappled with poems by Tennyson (“The Bee and the Flower”), Sara Coleridge (“The Garden Year”), and Lewis Carroll (“The Melancholy Pig”). In third grade came Blake’s “The Shepherd” and Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” while fourth grade brought Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Kipling. In the grades that followed, students read and recited poems by Arnold, Browning, Burns, Cowper, Emerson, Keats, Macaulay, Poe, Scott, Shakespeare, Southey, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Eighth-graders tackled Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address.

The great wave of immigrants, like my grandfather, learned the rhythm and rhyme of the English language.

From The Cat in the Hat on up, verse teaches children something about the patterns and relationships that bind together the words of which it is composed. Poetry sets up an abstract system of order and harmony; the rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves, just as he can grasp the rhythmic and harmonic relations of a piece of music.

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience . . . And of course memorization is a kind of exercise that strengthens the powers of the mind, just as physical exercise strengthens those of the body.

Children learn syntax and vocabulary. And they learn about “their cultural inheritance as members of Western civilization and citizens of a particular nation.”

Memorizing poetry had gone out when I was in school, though we did have to memorize the preamble to the Constitution to get out of eighth grade. I memorized anyhow for the joy of the language. If you know it, you own it.

Also in City Journal, Sol Stern writes that President Bush really is the “education president.” I disagree that requiring schools to show improvement by all subgroups (minorities, low-income, immigrants, disabled) is a Democratic idea inserted in No Child Left Behind; Bush was pushing this in Texas. It’s a critical part of the bill.

Eduwonk says Stern is right about the politics, and that NCLB foes should be careful not to play into privatizers’ hands. If public school officials say some kids can’t be expected to learn in their schools, others will volunteer to take those students away.

Nationwide, teachers’ pay averages $45,771 a year, up 3.3 percent from the previous year, according to the a survey by the American Federation of Teachers. Beginning salaries rose 3.2 percent to $29,564. But teachers are paying more out of pocket for health benefits, leaving them about even.

California teachers make the most: Average pay is $55,693. South Dakota pays the least.