Mike and Stafford discuss Miley Cyrus's new single, "Breakout," which disparages school-going.

Leaving aside the other problems he has with this week's Gadfly, commenter John Rim is exasperated by Checker's use of the word "kids" to describe America's school-going population:

You are in an elite group, together with Checker cabs and Chubby Checker.

You are also in another elite, those who prefer the word "kids" to students, pupils and the like. I counted four mentions of kids. Two in the same sentence.

Students ? No mention. Pupils ? No mention.

Do kids happen when goats mate?

"Kids" is more apt to be used when writing about poverty, disabilities--even tobacco smoking. ( Tobacco Kids )

Condescension, loud and clear.

Ignorant as I was of the symbolic significance of Checker cabs and Chubby Checker, perhaps my views on diction shouldn't be trusted, but I myself never hesitate to write "kids," especially when I've used up all the available synonyms, a point one arrives at frequently when writing about education policy. Nor, a quick scan reveals, do reporters for major newspapers:

When high concentrations of poor kids went to school together, Coleman reported, all the students at the school tended to learn less.... the district began assigning kids to schools based on the income level of the geographic zone they lived in.... In Wake County, the vast majority of the poor students are black and Hispanic, and so mixing kids by class tightly correlates to mixing them by race. ("The Next Kind of Integration," from Sunday's New York Times Magazine)

Too Much Drama? Not for These Kids. (Headline from today's Washington Post)... Watching With Kids in Mind (Headline from tomorrow's Washington Post)

It's true, as the commenter writes, that "kid" also can be used to refer to a young goat. But if we were to banish from the Gadfly all words that had animal-related homonyms, we'd find ourselves hard-pressed to comment intelligibly on the pressing education issues of the day. Take the word "school," which in addition to describing a place were pupils--thank you very much, Mr. Rim--gather to receive instruction, can refer to "A shoal or large number of fish, porpoises, whales, etc. swimming together whilst feeding or migrating," according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Unfortunately, imperfect as the English language is, we have to work with what we have. We hope you understand, Mr. Peripheral Portion Or Outer Ring Of A Wheel, Connected With The Nave Or Boss By Spokes Or By A Web.

Photo by Flickr user alumroot.

The Washington Teachers' Union president tells it like it is (on The NewsHour):

JOHN MERROW: Rhee is hoping to tie teacher pay to student achievement. Because teacher union membership is declining, Rhee may have an edge in negotiations.

GEORGE PARKER: The charter school enrollment is increasing. Public school enrollment is decreasing. We are now a competitive school district where student achievement may very well determine our existence.

JOHN MERROW: More than a quarter of D.C.'s school-age children now attend public charter schools, where teachers do not have to belong to the union.

GEORGE PARKER: Normally, unions have not had to contend with any sense of accountability or responsibility for student achievement, and our existence and survival has not depended upon that.

JOHN MERROW: Why hasn't student achievement been a bread-and-butter issue for teacher unions all along?

GEORGE PARKER: I think that there has been a union paradigm of union and management of, "This is your turf. This is our turf."

This front-page Wall Street Journal article reports on the financial woes of the states, which are in the midst of a budget crunch due to the ailing economy and falling tax revenue. No doubt that means budget cuts ahead for public schools, at least in some states and some districts.

If recent history is any guide, though, this pain will be short-lived. When good times are here again, school spending will see a healthy rise, outpacing inflation by a significant measure. But will recent history be a guide?

As I mentioned in last week's Gadfly editorial , over the long-term at least, it seems unlikely that school spending can continue its fast clip forever. Everyone knows that the Baby Boomers are about to retire en masse, putting a huge strain on public resources. Meanwhile, the percentage of households with school-age children is dropping precipitously, down to about one in four today. That means that advocates for increased school spending will have to convince people with no direct stake in the schools to keep opening their wallets, even while they're getting hit with the social security and health care bills of the Boomers. Oh, and did I mention that more and more of education spending is going to pay for the retirement and health care bills of former teachers, rather than educating today's students? This all sounds like a tough sell to me.

Reformers have generally failed to force the public school system to worry about "efficiency" and "cost-benefit analyses"--but these broader societal trends are going to force the issue. And the sooner we figure out how to "do more with less," the better.

Wow! What a Gadfly!

Diane Ravitch takes issue with Checker's criticisms of the "Broader, Bolder" stuff; Checker responds; AFT President Randi Weingarten writes about why Checker is wrong to believe that schools cannot offer social services and top-flight academics; and Checker, once again, responds. You won't want to miss this!

The American Scholar notes, "Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers."

Some are pushing for the government to apply Title IX to science education. John Tierney wrote on Tuesday an article about this; he??offers more on his blog.

You'll find sweeping assertions of discrimination in academia against female scientists if you read the executive summary of the National Academy of Sciences' 2006 report, which was issued by a committee led by Donna Shalala. But if you look in the report for evidence of bias, you find studies showing that female graduate students in general (and those without children in particular) are as likely as men to finish their studies, and that they're as likely to have mentors and assistantship support.

Dumbed-down and becoming more so?

"Please revise," indicates your editor, his note scrawled in red ink atop your latest submission. So you do. You rework the major points, you tighten where needed, you revamp and polish and tweak and shift around. That is, after all, how revision is done. Not, it appears, in Saudi Arabia. That country, which supposedly revised its textbooks after a 2006 analysis found that not a few of them contained hate-filled messages about hurting Jews and other unbelievers and so forth, has released a "revision"  that, unfortunately, still contains passages about hating and hurting unbelievers and so forth. The Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom released last week a report, about which Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote, that found that (in Applebaum's words) "the only textbook revisions have been superficial and the most disturbing part of the books' message--that faithful Muslims should hate Jews and Christians--remains." There's much wrong with American schools, but at least they aren't actively manufacturing odium.

"The Saudi Guide to Piety," by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, July 22, 2008

Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine included a piece titled The Next Kind of Integration, which was about school districts that have, since the Supreme Court's ruling last year regarding the race-based student-assignment plans of Louisville and Seattle, restructured their own plans to make them less race-based, more "race conscious" (Justice Kennedy's words), and more class conscious, too.

Identifying problems with these new plans and the jurisprudential logic that produced them is akin to shooting fish in a fishbowl. The scaly carcasses can be scrutinized here.

Buried beneath the dead seafood and likely overlooked by most is one tiny sentence from the Times Magazine article that is particularly troubling. Here it is: "This study underscores Ronald Ferguson's point about the value of seating students of different backgrounds and abilities in class together, as opposed to tracking them." (Italics mine.)

Some background: Diversity defenders have realized, it seems, that elaborately engineeered school-assignment policies that bus pupils from one side of a district to the other and limit parental choice are unpopular. They've also realized that justifying such Rube Goldberg assignments with fluffy diversity language--students will be exposed to different types of people, different ideas, etc.--just doesn't cut it with parents whose children are forced to attend class far from home and who want a compelling reason for it.

Thus, diversity defenders have now adopted "increasing academic performance" as their casus bussi. We're told that schools that mingle neat combinations of white, black, and Latino, poor, rich, and middle-class hold much promise to boost student  achievement.

Assuming that's true: Is forcing such amalgams the best way, the most efficient way, to improve student learning? Is it not eminently more sensible to devote resources to, say, attracting knowledgeable teachers and building solid curricula?

But it hardly matters because the whole idea is far-fetched. Pupils spend their learning time in class, and classes, even in putatively "diverse" schools, are for the most part segregated by academic ability, with low-achieving students taking courses with other low-achievers, and the high-achievers similarly grouped together.

Unless... unless... schools seat "students of different backgrounds and abilities in class together, as opposed to tracking them."

Call it diversity creep. What began as an admirable and justifiable goal has metastasized into an obsession, whereby young people are no longer seen as students in need of education but pieces, each with different race- and class-based attributes, to be strategically shifted among schools and now classrooms. The Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless long ago warned us about the harm that such classroom "de-tracking" can do.

If increasing academic achievement is the goal, then muddying course rosters by amalgamating pupils of all different academic abilities is foolhardy. It disserves the high-achievers, who must patiently wait while the material they've already mastered is repeatedly explained to the low-achievers and who must watch the level of their classroom discourse plunge. And it disserves the low-achievers, who may simply be unable to keep up with the curriculum, no matter how much their teacher waters it down. Teachers know this.

Promoting race- and class-based school-assignment admixtures as a method to boost academic achievement is a ruse and, if not fingered as such, could do much to stifle the academic achievement it purports to encourage.