A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.

The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.

“I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world,” said Mr. Vanderhoek, 31, a Yale graduate and former middle school teacher who built a test preparation company that pays its tutors far more than the competition.

In exchange for their high salaries, teachers at the new school, the Equity Project, will work a longer day and year and assume responsibilities that usually fall to other staff members, like attendance coordinators and discipline deans. To make ends meet, the school, which will use only public money and charter school grants for all but its building, will scrimp elsewhere.

Seriously fascinating idea. Issues to hash out include whether teachers will be overwhelmed with administrative details, turning a six-figure salary into a lower per-hour rate of pay (like first-year associates who work like dogs through the evening) . . . there will be others but this is something for all citizens and voters to watch . . .

Students at many of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a “D+” average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

According to a report released yesterday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the average college senior at the 50 colleges and universities polled did not earn a passing grade.

“At the most expensive colleges, they actually graduate knowing less,” the executive director of the Jack Miller Center at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Michael Ratliff, said. “Colleges and universities are not directing students to the courses that would educate them. We want to know whether after getting $300 billion to do their work, universities are actually educating their students.”

At universities such as Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Berkeley, seniors scored lower on the test than freshmen, living proof of the broadening relevancy of the old Harvard adage that the university is a storehouse of knowledge because “the freshmen bring so much and the seniors take away so little.”

. . .

Less than half of the students who participated identified the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” as a line from the Declaration of Independence. Many of them identified its source as “The Communist Manifesto,” or said that it was an inscription on the Statue of Liberty.

Barack Obama has the teachers cheering. The National Education Association is meeting here, and Obama– like the Democratic candidates who have spoken before him — is telling the crowd everything it wants to hear.

He’s “committed to fixing and improving our public schools instead of abandoning them and passing out vouchers.” Washington “left common sense behind when they passed No Child Left Behind.” Teacher pay must be raised “across the board.”

But then Obama tiptoes into the minefield of merit pay for teachers, so delicately that he does not actually utter the words “merit pay” until the question and answer session.

“If you excel at helping your students achieve success, your success will be valued and rewarded as well,” he says — but he hastens to add that this must be done “with teachers, not imposed on them, and not based on some arbitrary test score.”

This is whispering truth to power. But for the teachers, Obama’s words are fingernails on a chalkboard. They fall silent, except for scattered boos, as he mentions a modest new program in Minnesota.

While I embrace the idea of merit pay intellectually, I’m not sold on the idea for reasons including the difficulty of creating an incentives system that doesn’t lead to teachers “teaching to the test.”

Still, the thing I find most fascinating is that it seems like the teachers — speaking through the NEA — are implicitly assuming that their pay will decrease once a merit-based system is implemented. Think about it. If the majority of teachers felt like they’d get a raise as a result of a new merit-based system, my guess is that they’d be clamoring to make this happen, instead of using their best passive-aggressive obfuscating tactics to stop it.

That’s interesting, because generally speaking people tend to overestimate their own situation relative to the mean.  For example, most people believe they are smarter than average, wealthier than average, etc.  Which, of course, is impossible.

So, you’d think that most teachers would believe themselves to be above average, and thus likely to benefit from a system that rewarded the best teachers.  That they don’t is indicative of a certain risk aversion, and it’s ultimately an argument for implementing merit-based pay.  If even the teachers themselves don’t believe they’re skillful enough to win an incentive-based bonus, then it’s probably time to take them at their word and weed out the ones who don’t cut it.

As always with education, there’s no simple answer, but the Seattle School District has, broadly, two ways to increase efforts on behalf of low-income students who enter school academically behind, from the first day of kindergarten. The first, and a fairly direct, replacement for the race-based policy the Roberts court rejected would be school assignment preferences for the children from low-income families. The second would be significantly increasing the money spent in schools in low-income neighborhoods. The latter would require significant changes in the way the schools do business but might in the end be more effective.

Dramatically varying school quality among Seattle schools and schools throughout the region, as measured by student test scores, correlates closely with the income of families whose kids are enrolled. The higher the percentage of children qualifying for free- or reduced-price school lunches, with notable exceptions here and there, the lower the test scores. This has been a given since the Seattle Times laid out the data in the first of its annual school guides 10 years ago. The increasingly urgent question for education is how to serve low-income children, especially those enrolled in schools serving areas of concentrated poverty. How can these kids be brought up to middle-class achievement levels, at least in the basic skills of reading and math?

The question is part of a constant conversation in the education world. The answer you hear among parents, school administrators, and school board members is the good-hearted and wonderfully ambitious “make all schools good schools.” In Seattle, the Southeast Initiative to pump $1 million-plus into Aki Kurose Middle School, Rainier Beach High School, and others, as part of a new assignment plan expected to be in place by 2008-09, grows from that unassailable sentiment: Every neighborhood deserves good schools. The new plan could limit transfers out of Southeast Seattle neighborhoods.

You can’t just “make all schools good schools.” You need to actively change the incentive structure for the staff so that the hardest schools to fix also have the greatest rewards attached to improvement. As it is, the best teachers often flock to the suburbs, where the pay is better and the kids are mostly white, middle-class, and easy to teach: in other words, the best teachers go where they’re needed the least.

So you’d have to change those incentives, perhaps via merit pay. Merit pay is sort of controversial because it (a) induces teachers to “teach to the test” and (b) assumes that the tests are themselves accurate predictors of achievement to begin with. Barak Obama recently told a teachers union (which opposes the concept) that he’d like to try to find a way to make it work. Chris Dodd punched back, but his response was telling:

I fear that instituting a merit pay system may encourage teaching to the test and discourage teachers from working in schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students.

In other words, the incentives are wrong. So what you’d have to do is have some kind of conversion rate, whereby the merits are multiplied for poorer schools. For example, the Seattle Schools could implment a system whereby a teacher gets, say, a $1,000 bonus for improving test scores by, say, 10 points. But that $1,000 is then multiplied by the percentage of students on free or reduced-price lunches. If 75% of the kids are on reduced-price lunch, the teacher gets $750. If only 25% are, then he or she gets $250. Now all of a sudden you’d have teachers fighting to get the most disadvantaged kids in their class. And that’s how it should be.

Update: Mickey Kaus points to a NYT article on the increasing support for merit pay among teachers in certain states.

Currently, Seattle’s Open Choice system allows students to choose their schools. Several popular — and mostly white — high schools have waiting lists while high schools that serve mostly students of color are losing enrollment.

School districts should now “think about other factors,” said Gary Orfield, a professor in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. “They need to think about geography, language, poverty and test scores, and combine those with race, and figure out how to increase diversity in that way.”

Seattle School Board President Cheryl Chow said family income is a better arbiter of success in school than race, anyway

I’m generally pretty sympathetic to the idea of replacing race-based affirmitive action with a more class-based system (so is Barack Obama, btw). After all, you get most of the same kids anyway, and you sidestep the race issue. But I’m not totally convinced it’s going to be successful in the long term. If there’s anything that’s more of an entitlement than being white in America, it’s being rich in America. How long until the rich parents sue because they’ve been crowded out by poor kids? Not long! In fact, the lawyer who brought the original suit is already thinking about it:

Instead of looking for a replacement for the racial tiebreaker, the district should focus on improving schools, said Harry Korrell, the attorney for the parents who sued the district.

“If what they’re trying to accomplish is the same racial balancing that the court rejected here, and they want to use that [socioeconomic] mechanism instead of race, then they may have trouble,” he said.

He has a point. The Open Choice program starts in high school. By high school, the achievement gap between poor students and rich ones is almost irreversible. In fact, if you recall Paul Tough’s article in the NYT Magazine last fall, it may start as early as 3 years old. Tough’s argument, which seems reasonable to me, is that you have to get the poor kids early, and actually give them a better education than the rich kids to make up for ineffective parenting* and put them on the same playing field as their wealthier counterparts.

So let’s make for some kick-ass elementary and middle schools — ones where the low-income neighborhoods have smaller classes and better teachers — and the high school issue should take care of itself. It’s a hard sell, but that’s what it would take.

* Lower-income parents, according to Tough, expose their kids to fewer words, which hinders their early brain development vis-a-vis rich kids.

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in a case that has attracted attention mainly because of its eccentric story line: An Alaska student was suspended from high school in 2002 after he unfurled a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” while the Olympic torch passed by. But the case raises important issues of freedom of expression and student censorship that go far beyond the words on that banner. The court should affirm the appeals court’s well-reasoned decision that when the school punished the student it violated his First Amendment rights.

Joseph Frederick and his fellow students were allowed to leave the grounds of Juneau-Douglas High School so they could watch the Olympic torch pass nearby. When the cameras began to roll, he unfurled his banner, which he says was meant to be funny and get him on television. The principal took it from him, and suspended him for 10 days.

Mr. Frederick says the suspension violated his rights. The school board insists the principal had the right to confiscate the banner and punish the student because the language undermined its teachings about the dangers of illegal drugs. The San Francisco-based United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled for Mr. Frederick, citing the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which held that students have the right to free speech, which can be suppressed only when the speech disrupts school activities.

What’s depressing is that almost 40 years after Tinker v. Des Moines we’ve gone from protecting free speech — in the case of Tinker, a principled stand against the Vietnam War — to a technical defense of boorish behavior. Sure, technically the Alaska student has a right to free speech off campus. But when you look at the details, you should be worried about where we’re headed.

You would think that if a child took advantage of a warm-and-fuzzy opportunity like a freakin’ Olympic torch run to act like a buffoon, his parents would cooperate with a principal to punish his boorish behavior. Instead, we have parents indulging the supremely childish fantasy to sue the school’s ass, like all the way to the Supreme Court, dude.

So, yeah, technically the student is right, but to debate that part of it is beside the point. This is really just another example of parents taking an overly litigious and unnecessarily adversarial stand against the schools — another reminder of why the school system is failing kids.

It’s senior year and the hardest work is over. For many high school students, that means it’s time to coast.

The usual way is to take four hours of class in the morning — including perhaps cooking, ceramics or as a teacher’s aide — then at 11:30 or so, head to a job or home to while away time on the computer.

But educators have a new message: The days when seniors can slide are coming to an end.

State and district officials are taking steps to ramp up the year’s value and intensity, including lengthening the school day.

Within a decade, the beloved half-day option will be extinct.

School officials are asking themselves why they allow so many students to ease off during their senior year when Arizona education is under fire and the global marketplace demands higher skills.

Students can expect to face more required internships and tougher courses just to graduate, such as the stepped-up math proposed by a governor’s panel last week. Schools also want to persuade students to stay on campus by offering a wider variety of college courses or online courses, such as Japanese.

. . .

Several districts are pushing beyond state requirements to get more seniors back into full school days.

• Mesa Unified is considering requiring students to complete two semesters of a subject to earn extra credit for accelerated courses. That would discourage them from shrugging off the second half of senior course work.
• Glendale Union plans to add internships and fieldwork that match a student’s career interests, such as learning in hospitals or at engineering firms.
• Peoria Unified is looking at more advanced online classes and additional courses that allow students to get both high school and college credits.

Many districts already require more than the state’s minimum 20 credits to graduate. Peoria requires 28, for example.

But rather than simply giving kids more work (and give teachers more jobs — win-win, that!), as it sounds like some of the proposals intend, why not push them out and encourage them to enroll in actual community college classes, participate in actual apprenticeships or take technicial classes in the private sector that surpass the typical auto-shop classes districts provide?

Warning that Americans face a grave risk of losing their prosperity and high quality of life to better educated workers overseas, a panel of education, labor and other public policy experts yesterday proposed a far-reaching redesign of the United States education system that would include having schools operated by independent contractors and giving states, rather than local districts, control over school financing.

The panel, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, included two former federal education secretaries, Rod Paige, a Republican, and Richard W. Riley, a Democrat; two former labor secretaries, William E. Brock, a Republican, and Ray Marshall, a Democrat; and an array of other luminaries, including former Gov. John Engler of Michigan, and the New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein.

The commission’s report, released at a news conference in Washington, rethinks American schooling from top to bottom, going beyond the achievement goals of the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, and farther than many initiatives being pursued by the Bush administration or by experimental state and local school authorities. Among other things, the report proposes starting school for most children at age 3, and requiring all students to pass board exams to graduate from high school, which for many would end after 10th grade. Students could then go to a community or technical college, or spend two years preparing for selective colleges and universities.

I’ve long thought that having students graduate after 10th grade and allowing them to enroll in community college classes is one of the smartest, most efficient ways of making eduacation mroe relevant to kids. Kids would be more self-directed and they likely would make smarter decisions about what to study in college and beyond. Of course then that would make shows like “Happy Days” and movies like Dazed and Confused irrelevant, but I think that’s a very small price to pay.

*You’re just going to freak people out if they assume “charter school” or “voucher”.

Anyway, to contextualize, most of the (non-student) residents of Georgetown are society widows who are now sitting on $4 million worth of property. Which is great, except for the rowdies who attend the local college. So a few years ago the Georgetowners got special zoning regs passed that mandated that no more than 6 unrelated people could live together in a Georgetown house. A few years after I left college, I think a bunch of guys all tried to get one of their fathers to adopt them, but IIRC that would’ve had too many legal implications for their trust funds. Now, they’ve decided to form a religious community to get around the laws.

This is where your classic town-gown dispute gets weird. The $2.4 million house that J. Brian O’Neill Sr. bought for his son is allowed only six unrelated residents under zoning laws. But if it’s a residence for a “religious community,” the number jumps to 15.

The solution? The Apostles of O’Neill. That’s the name the young men used Oct. 2 when they filed paperwork to incorporate as a nonprofit religious organization. In an e-mail statement, the group says that it has donated to charities and that its mission is “to be active and positive members of our community.”

I guess when papa buys you a house for you and your buds to live in, you probably have a serious sense of entitlement.

Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard and do your homework and you make an effort to be smart you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

But thankfully he’s not waffling.

Let me make it crystal clear, as crystal clear as I know how,” Kerry said. “I apologize to no one for my criticism of the President and his broken policy. If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the president and his failed team.

GOP leaders are calling for Kerry’s head like it’s 2004 all over again, apparently, the truth hurts.

Many of today’s recruits are financially strapped, with nearly half coming from lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data based on Zip codes and census estimates of mean household income. Nearly two-thirds of Army recruits in 2004 came from counties in which median household income is below the U.S. median.

Or, from Slate:

Further evidence that the war in Iraq is wrecking the U.S. Army: Recruiters, having failed to meet their enlistment targets, are now being authorized to pursue high-school dropouts and (not to mince words) stupid people.

This year the Army set a goal of recruiting 80,000 active-duty soldiers, but it wound up with just 73,000—almost 10 percent short. As a result, the Army Times reported this week, the Pentagon has decided to make up the difference by expanding the pool—by letting up to 10 percent of new recruits be young men and women who have neither graduated high school nor earned a General Equivalency Diploma.

More than that, the Los Angeles Times reports today that 4 percent of recruits will be allowed to score as low as in the 16^th to 30^th percentile—a grouping known as “Category IV”—on the U.S. Armed Forces’ mental-aptitude exam.

Makes me wonder why the GOP is so terrified of having this info more widely disseminated. So terrified that party hacks the Heritage Foundation [in an article I won't link to because of Google considerations] actually went to the trouble of creating one of the most bogus “research” projects I’ve ever seen to refute this.

Anyway, inelegant though his comments were, at least Kerry didn’t back away from his own truth-telling.

P.S.  John Kerry — don’t lose us another election.  STFU!!!

About the Dems, Paglia notes:

The Democrats have to start fresh and throw out the entire party superstructure. I was bitterly disappointed after voting for Ralph Nader that he didn’t devote himself to helping build a strong third party in this country. When the American economy was still manufacturing based, the trade unions were viable, and the Democrats stayed close to their working-class roots. But now the Northeastern Democrats, with their fancy law degrees and cocktail parties, have simply become peddlers of condescending bromides about “the people.”

About the Cocktober Surprise:

The Foley scandal exploded without any proof of a documented sex act — unlike the case of the late congressman Gerry Studds, who had sex with a page and who was literally applauded by fellow Democrats when they refused to vote for his censure. In the Foley case, there was far more ambiguous evidence — suggestive e-mails and instant messages. Matt Drudge, to his great credit, began hitting this issue right off the bat on his Web site and radio show. What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It’s a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over word being used? And why didn’t Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing — that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It’s very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way.

And she saves her best daggers to discuss Iraq, and the administration’s blunders in international affairs:

This administration lacks deftness in international relations. Worst of the lot is Dick Cheney, with his lumpish provincialism. What a narrow, limited mind! His geopolitics is a vintage-1870s version of frontier Americanism, but he managed to impose it on the over-credulous new president when this Bush took office. It’s all so simple to them: The majority of Iraqis and Iranians want peace and modernization, so let’s impose democracy at the barrel of a gun. But what ignorance of history: The mass of the population always want to live their own lives; change is always driven by small, committed groups of ideologues and fanatics — even in our own revolution. Representative democracy is a great ideal, but major shifts are rarely achieved by majority rule, which prefers the status quo …

This administration doesn’t seem to realize that the world is much larger than the United States. I hear on conservative talk radio the constant assertion that America is the destined leader of the world, that America is blessed by God and the best place on earth, where everyone wants to live. Therefore anything we do is automatically good, and the only problem is the people who hate us because we’re free. Now I’m very pro-American — my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream. My father and five of my uncles proudly served in World War II. But uncritical American boosterism — automatic endorsement of every government action — is myopic and self-defeating. I don’t think too many people at the top of this administration — or too many conservative radio hosts, for that matter — have traveled much outside the U.S. or had contact with other languages. They’ve had minimal exposure to other worldviews or lifestyles. It’s unsettling that politicians with such constricted vision will have been in charge of public policy for eight years of this presidency …

I’m not a Bush hater. I’ve always viewed him as a decent fellow who was pushed into the presidency because he was his father’s son. But he’s been out of his depth in foreign affairs from the start. He certainly lacks the basic verbal skills for the presidency — reading speeches authored by others is no substitute. But I’ve become concerned about Bush’s mental state in the past few months. Sometimes in his press conferences or prepared statements (which I listened to on the radio), I heard a sort of Nixonian tension and hysteria. His vocal patterns were over-intense and his inflections impatient, lurching and sarcastic. There was this seething quality to his speech that worried me and that seemed to signal that something major is being planned — perhaps another military incursion.

I have one minor point of disagreement with Paglia. She writes:

The Democrats’ portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn’t fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it’s job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy — not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality. The Democrats are in some sort of time warp in always proposing a government solution to every problem. It’s like Hillary’s philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, does it? Or does it take a strong family and not the village?

What’s broadened the appeal of conservatism in recent years is that Republicans stress individualism — individual effort and personal responsibility. They’re really the liberty party now — I thought my party was! It used to seem as if the Republicans were authoritarians and the Democrats were for free speech and for the freedom to live your own life and pursue happiness. But the Democrats have wandered away from their own foundational principles.

The official party line of the GOP may be that it’s the party of individualism, but as Bush’s (and Congress’) wanton disregard for the First and Fourth Amendments shows, that’s hardly how they act when in power. Nonetheless, as Bruno and I discussed on the show a couple of weeks ago, I do agree with Paglia’s contention that the bedrock of Republican support nowadays is the small businessman (and, yes, I do mean businessMAN) — the Rotarians and Optimists and State Farm reps of America’s small towns and suburbs, pasty white men with beedy eyes and minds shrunk by narrow vision.

Nonetheless, Paglia’s piece is a stirring indictment of the Democratic party, the Bush administration, and disaffected, privileged youth. It’s a call to arms for neo-libs like Bruno and me. Read it now.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation’s 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.

Except when you think about it, what exactly is wrong with making sure junior high students can actually read? After all, junior high kids are basically a captive audience, so it doesn’t make much difference whether they like being in school. And faced with wanting them to “like” school and wanting them to read, I think most people would take the latter. Besides, a subject like history isn’t all that beneficial if you can’t really read. But don’t tell that to some people:

The historian David McCullough told a Senate Committee last June that because of the law, “history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many or most schools, in favor of math and reading.”

Mr. McCullough might want to consider the benefits of having a literate population that will eventually buy books about, say, John Adams, but no matter . . .

The problem is that this approach seems to be working:

At King Junior High, in a poor neighborhood in Sacramento a few miles from a decommissioned Air Force base, the intensive reading and math classes have raised test scores for several years running. That has helped Larry Buchanan, the superintendent of the Grant Joint Union High School District, which oversees the school, to be selected by an administrators’ group as California’s 2005 superintendent of the year.

But in spite of the progress, the school’s scores on California state exams, used for compliance with the federal law, are increasing not nearly fast enough to allow the school to keep up with the rising test benchmarks. On the math exams administered last spring, for instance, 17.4 percent of students scored at the proficient level or above, and on the reading exams, only 14.9 percent.

With scores still so low, Mr. Harris, the school’s principal, and Mr. Buchanan said they had little alternative but to continue remedial instruction for the lower-achieving among the school’s nearly 900 students.

The students are the sons and daughters of mostly Hispanic, black and Laotian Hmong parents, many of whom work as gardeners, welders and hotel maids or are unemployed. The district administers frequent diagnostic tests so that teachers can carefully calibrate lessons to students’ needs.

Rub�n Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch.

Rub�n studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym. How does he enjoy taking only reading and math, a recent visitor asked.

“I don’t like history or science anyway,” Rub�n said.

One of the most depressing things today is seeing an 18-year-old who can barely read or write. By that point — at the high school level — educators are unable to help them. They often blame the middle schools (or junior high schools). So why not get it right at that level? And if it takes Bush to do it, then maybe he actually did something right — shudder to think!

*The fetishization of “the arts” by the upper-middle class is one of the most annoying, elitist things we have to deal with in education — something almost perverse in the face of kids who are basically illiterate.