Not only is “blog” the word of the year — the most looked-up word that’s not effect/affect — I’m pleased to see that “defenestration” ranked 10th. I’ve always been fond of defenestration. As a word, not a practice.

I’ve added Jenny D., formerly known as Dr. Cookie, to the blogroll. She’s a graduate student and mother interested in “why public education fails poor and minority kids so often.”

Check out her series on Robert F. Kennedy’s push to link federal aid to school performance back in 1965. Kennedy was raising issues then that are still hot today.

Children who play with computers and high-tech toys use their imaginations as much as ever, this NY Times story says.

Some psychologists say that young imaginations, even of preschoolers, are surprisingly good at appropriating electronic imagery. Images from games and shows may linger, but they often mingle with dreams, blend with other fantasies the child has, and are reshaped and recast in a running, magical movie whose script psychologists cannot always predict or interpret.

Children still invent imaginary friends, and kids who play with action figures and video games act out their own stories.

If you’re excessively cheerful, read this story about a teen-age mother with quadruplets and a new baby on the way. The father of all five is married. He rarely visits and pays no child support.

The Gantelope’s Andrew Coulson endorses South Carolina’s Put Parents in Charge proposal, which uses tax credits (and scholarships for low-income families) to make it financially feasible for parents to choose public, private or home schooling.

Here’s Coulson’s response to a proposal to allow parents to use tax credits only at schools that use South Carolina’s testing system.

We all want children to get a solid grounding in the academic basics and to be prepared for success in private life as well as participation in public life. An education system that is truly accountable to parents will also be truly accountable to the general public, because the two groups share the same basic aspirations.

That unanimity on core goals does not mean that we agree on every last detail of the curriculum, teaching methods or values that should be taught in our schools. Children are not widgets, and schools are not factories.

. . . Mandating a single state-testing program for every child in every school yanks the reins of educational power away from families and puts them back in the hands of bureaucrats.

Arizona’s tuition tax credit program is expected to become a revenue-saver for the state.

Students who fail an Advanced Placement exam are far more likely to succeed in college than students who never tackle AP coursework. That’s especially true for minority and low-income students. Jay Mathews cites data from the National Center for Educational Accountability in his Washington Post column: 57 percent of AP passers in Texas earn a college degree in five years, compared with 37 percent of AP flunkers and only 17 percent of students who never take an AP exam. While 8 percen t of non-AP Hispanics earn a college degree, 26 percent of AP flunkers graduate; 36 percent of black AP flunkers but only 11 percent of non-AP blacks graduate.

Students who struggle in an AP course with its college-sized reading list and flunk the college-level, three-hour final exam, I learned, are still much better off than if they had been denied a chance to take the course and the test. They have just played 72 holes with the academic equivalent of Tiger Woods, and although Tiger has beaten them, they have gained from the experience a visceral appreciation of what they are going to have to do to survive in college. That taste of academic trauma stays with them and helps them work hard enough to get their bachelor’s degree.

. . . Anglos who flunked an AP exam were twice as likely to get their degrees as Anglos who never took one. Hispanics, African American and low-income students were three times as likely to get their degrees if they at least tried AP.

Restricting access to AP classes is “educational malpractice,” Mathews writes.

I’m less impressed by the data, which doesn’t take into account the fact that students who fail the AP exam are self-selected (or school-selected) for academic ability and ambition. Still, I agree with Mathews that schools should encourage students to tackle AP classes, even if it means offering high-level AP for the best students and long-shot AP courses for mediocre students.

Twenty-five years ago, a class of 13- and 14-year-olds sang back-up for Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” despite anti-school lyrics: “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom – teachers leave them kids alone,” Now the former pupils, who weren’t paid for singing, are claiming royalties.

Via EdWonk, who now has fantasies of cleaning up on his performance of Simon the Zealot in the college production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Children learn to cope with the world through outdoor activities, writes a British educator. But adult fears are restricting children’s ability to explore the world. And they’re not any safer as a result.

No environment will ever be completely safe and risk-free, and even well-supervised children manage to hurt themselves. But by speculating on what can possibly go wrong rather than on what children might learn from experiences, we are in danger of creating anxiety in some children and recklessness in others. Children who are fearful will not be able to learn, and those who are overconfident will be unable to make sensible judgements about risk, because their learning environment has become sanitised and over-managed.

. . . Aside from the obvious benefits of taking children into the countryside – the greater awareness of the natural world and our place within it – outdoor and adventurous activities are ideal vehicles for many of the types of challenges and learning opportunities that are necessary for their development. These activities are physically active, and depend upon shared understanding, cooperation and trust. They also force children to draw upon their inner resources to address real problems, presenting children with challenges and perceived risks, and providing a framework for coming to terms with them.

The British have been more likely than Americans to send students on adventure trips — until recently, when “safety first” has made school a lot duller.

Boston University has been managing a nearby school district in Chelsea for 15 years now. After years of controversy, it seems to be working, reports Education Week:

Fifteen years ago, the school system in this small city across the Mystic River from Boston was a case study in failure. Test scores languished, school buildings were a century old, and middle-class families had long since made an exodus to the suburbs.

The school board invited BU to manage the district under a 10-year contract, now extended until 2008.

Today, the 5,600-student district, which serves mainly low-income Latino students, is one of only three urban districts in Massachusetts that met goals for adequate yearly academic progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Chelsea boasts an early-childhood-learning center that is the envy of wealthier towns, and a major construction project in 1997 helped erect new schools to replace buildings that had been crumbling for years.

Boston University has provided professional development and scholarships for ChelseaÍs teachers, started a private foundationthat has raised almost $12 million for the schools since 1991, developed a family-literacy program, and set up a school-based dental clinic that provides free checkups for students.

Along the way, the partnership has survived lawsuits from the state teachers’ union and from a coalition of community groups, as well as a financial crisis that left the city in state receivership for three years.

While BU took over in 1989, test scores remained low for years.

Until 1997, (Superintendent Thomas Kingston) said, Chelsea continued to have some of the lowest test scores in the state. And still today, the district struggles to match improvements in the early grades with gains at the middle and high school levels.

“The university thought reform would be easier than it was,” Mr. Kingston said during an interview this month in his office at Chelsea City Hall. “But people were not aware of how deep the constraints were, how low the expectations were, and how frustrated and demoralized teachers were.”

Chelsea schools use the Core Knowledge curriculum developed by E.D. Hirsch.

Maureen Dowd reveals that she comes from a politically and religiously conservative family that loves W and hates the New York Times editorial page. Most of the column consists of an e-mail from one of her brothers.