“To keep my edge, I must think and act like an immigrant,” said San Jose State’s graduation speaker, Omid Kordestani, a Google vice president and SJS alum.

Immigrants, said the Iranian born Kordestani, have unbounded optimism. “Inherently, you are a dreamer and a fighter,” he said.

At age 14, Kordestani convinced his mother to move to America. He had seen an American television show that taught him about this nation’s can-do spirit. It was “The Jeffersons,” he said, eliciting laughter from the crowd, and the theme song said it all: “We’re moving on up.”

I love that.

Another Mercury News story is about a graduation speaker at St. Francis High, a top student with a severe stutter. Daniel Ding, who came from China at the age of five, joined the speech and debate club in high school and sang in the choir. He worked with a coach, a retired speech professor.

“God gave me a voice to speak, and though I am far from perfect at it, I insist on speaking because I feel that I’ve something important to say.”

He plans to study neuroscience at Harvard.

Fort Worth seniors who failed the state exam are demanding the right to walk across the stage at graduation.

Crystal Martinez complained that while she finished at the top of her class with a 3.5 grade point average, she is now blocked from graduation by failing the TAKS test.

“We know we’re not going to get our diplomas, but we just want to walk across the stage,” Martinez said. “That’s all we ask for right now.”

I feel for Crystal, who was given A’s and B’s but wasn’t taught the basic skills necessary to pass TAKS. She was lied to. And now she wants the appearance of graduation without the substance.

If you click on the link and look at the photo, you’ll see a protester carrying a sign: “Let are kids walk.”

Education Gadfly is open to a nationwide pre-kindergarten program, but thinks Sen. Hillary Clinton’s proposal ignores accountability.

Clinton announced her universal pre-K idea in Florida, praising the state’s program. Gadfly notes Florida measures whether preschools really are preparing children for school. Kindergarteners take “a simple kindergarten ‘readiness’ test, which measures a student’s ability to identify letters, their fluency with the beginning sounds of a word, etc.” results for pre-K progams are posted online, so parents can evalute which do a good job of preparing students.

Pre-school providers whose wee students repeatedly do poorly on simple readiness tests when they arrive in kindergarten will have to improve their scores or be dropped from the state’s program.

It’s unlikely that Clinton would support such an accountability system for her pre-K plan, though. Why? Because she’s already opposed a nearly identical accountability system for Head Start, the $7 billion federal program originally designed to promote school readiness.

I like Education Sector’s pre-k plan, which focuses on preparing children from poor and moderate-income families for school. EdSector estimates it would cost $18.4 billion annually to provide school-quality pre-K to 56 percent of the nation’s 4-year-olds. Clinton’s plan estimates $20 billion — half federal, half state — would fund pre-K for all 4-year-olds (with middle-class families paying a portion of the cost).

Thanks to a classmate’s research for the 50th high school reunion, Blowhards’ Donald Pittenger is able to compare classmates with high grades vs. high test scores. The report gave information on the 11 students with the highest grade averages and the 13 Merit Scholarship finalists in the 1957 graduating class of 650 to 700 at Seattle’s Roosevelt High.

* The overlap between the two groups was three people.

* Seven of the 11 high-GPA people were female.

* Ten of the 13 Merit Scholarship finalists were male.

* Only one high-GPA student received a doctorate.

* Five Merit Scholarship finalists got Ph.D. degrees.

* The one high-GPA Ph.D. was also a Merit Scholarship finalist.

* All in the high-GPA group graduated from college, but only five earned higher degrees (MA, MS, JD, etc.).

* Five of the Merit Scholarship finalists completed their educations at the bachelors level.

* One Merit Scholarship finalist did not graduate from college. He dropped out of Cal Tech to become a successful professional bridge player.

So the mostly male high-scoring group went farther in college than the mostly female high-grades group.

It’s hard to tell how much of the difference was due to the limited opportunities and expectations for women in that era.

I was one of 32 National Merit finalists in my class of 500+ at Highland Park High in Illinois. (We had more Merit finalists than any public high school in the country that year.) I ranked 16th in the class based on GPA. I earned a BA in English and Creative Writing, got a job and think I’ve done fine.

A few of the Merit finalists were not top students in terms of grades, but there was a lot of overlap.

The Montessori method is celebrating its 100th birthday. What’s it all about asks Slate’s Emily Bazelon, mother of a Montessori preschooler.

The fog of magic and romance obscures the key to a Montessori classroom: It’s all about structure and framework and purpose. Maria Montessori might have called the child “an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form,” but far more important, in the end, is a different canny insight of hers: Those splendid kids crave order.

When the preschoolers are called to their “work,” they purposefully manipulate number beads, letters and cubes designed to teach lessons.

It’s about the appeal of precision: Sailor’s pink cubes fit together only in one way, so she instinctively corrected herself when she mis-stacked them. Montessori isn’t magic. It’s fine-tuned and detail-driven and tactile, like a workshop for two dozen good-humored but serious young elves.

Montessori showed advantages in a recent study, Bazelon writes. Researchers compared students at an urban, mostly minority Montessori school in Wisconsin to similar students who applied for the Montessori school but didn’t get in.

By the end of kindergarten, the Montessori students outscored the others on standardized tests of reading and math, treated each other better on the playground, and “showed more concern for fairness and justice.” By the end of elementary school, the test-score gap closed. But the Montessori kids “wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures,” responded better to social dilemmas, and were more likely to say they felt a sense of community at school.

Perhaps constructivists could learn from Montessori’s strategy: While children are learning actively, they’re operating in an environment designed to direct their learning.

Update: Here’s a story on a preschool using the Reggio Emilio method, which focuses on providing a beautiful and nurturing environment for young children. But also “orderly,” the teacher says.

When low-income D.C. parents get a voucher for their child’s education, choice changes lives, writes columnist Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post, citing an independent report on the program.

Strikingly, the report’s authors found that the parents aren’t just happy; they’re involved in their children’s education, and increasingly so the longer they are in the program, despite challenges related to time and transportation.

They also are demanding consumers. Parents visited an average of three schools before selecting one; the small minority who were disappointed with their first choice visited even more as they weighed the possibility of moving their children. They were primarily looking, the report found, for “smaller class size, a more rigorous curriculum and school safety.”

A study will be out soon comparing the achievement of scholarship students in the first year of private school to those who applied but didn’t get a voucher.

The program is open only to low-income families, who average $21,100 a year for a family of four. The report found parents’ greatest fear is getting a raise and earning too much for their children to continue in their new schools.

Four students apply for each $7,500 scholarship. A lottery decides who gets an alternative to the district’s dysfunctional school system.

Hiatt points out the vouchers passed with only four Democratic votes and must be reauthorized by a Democratic-controlled Congress.