Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Broward County, Florida and other urban school districts are losing students steadily, notes Education Gadfly.

Stiff competition from charter schools and other schools-of-choice may be partly to blame, but broader societal trends (middle class families continuing to decamp for the suburbs or to cities with stronger economies) are also factors.

If charters and parochial schools can do a better job educating students, declining enrollment in district-run schools is not a problem, opines the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The bottom line is simply this: Until the Cleveland schools get smarter – consistently, measurably, indisputably smarter, in ways that parents can see and believe – the Cleveland schools will keep getting smaller.

In Washington, D.C., enrollment in district-run schools is down 8 percent while charter enrollment is up by 20 percent.

Instead of telling students to sit still, some Wisconsin and Minnesota teachers are giving them stand-up desks and stability balls that let them fidget as they learn.

Reading teacher Pam Seekel’s fifth-grade students can use adjustable-height stand-up desks “as well as a big, tall table that lets students work in groups while standing and shifting their weight, leaning, stretching, wiggling and generally doing everything but sitting still,” reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

One school lets kids use stability balls instead of traditional school desk chairs.

Anecdotally, teachers have reported positive results after freeing their kids from the confines of “feet flat on the floor” and “no rocking!” — greater attentiveness, fewer behavioral problems, better posture and more enthusiasm. Kids who are habitually fidgety or who suffer from attention disorders appear to show the most improvement, teachers say.

Via Flypaper.

Richard Whitmire thinks boys, who are the most likely to be fidgeters, will benefit.

Asked to wear red, white and blue to show patriotism, 11-year-old Daxx Dalton came to his Colorado K-8 school in an anti-Obama shirt calling the candidate “the terrorist’s best friend.” He was suspended for refusing to turn it inside out or change shirts. Having asked students to express a message with their clothing, the school can’t censor the message.

Eighth graders with second-grade math skills — they can’t multiply, divide or solve fraction or decimal problems — are being placed in algebra classes, says a Brookings report on The Misplaced Math Student. Some 29 percent of students in the lowest 10 percent are taking advanced math in eighth grade.

(Tom) Loveless, who directs Brookings’ Brown Center on Education Policy, estimates about 120,000 kids are inappropriately enrolled in classes that are supposed to level the playing field and too often don’t. “It’s really counterfeit equity,” he says, noting that the mismatch inordinately affects black, Hispanic and poor kids in urban schools.

Loveless wants to wait till ninth grade to teach algebra to students with a weak math foundation. But, if they’ve been passed along all these years without mastering elementary math, what suggests they’ll catch up in eighth grade?

Catherine Johnson is sending her son to a Jesuit high school that reminds her (and her husband) of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. It’s not just the maze of corridors or the fact that the teachers are all “characters’ whose rooms are their domains.

I had been telling friends that the place was joyous and strict. That’s the way it feels, from afar. Ed said, at the end of the night, that the school is both “more serious and more fun” than a regular school.

That’s just how David Whitman describes Amistad Academy, a charter middle school for black and Hispanic students in New Haven, Connecticut, in Sweating the Small Stuff.