The rigorous-math crowd continues its string of victories in California with this decision to test all eighth graders in algebra. State board chair (and generally good guy himself) Ted Mitchell wanted to allow a watered-down version of algebra but relented under pressure from the Gubernator. Here's hoping that other states follow California's lead.

Yes, Liam, some Democrats like charter schools and merit pay. But the base of the Democratic Party (the teachers unions) doesn't. And most politicians are careful not to alienate their core supporters. (Except on The West Wing.)

This week's Gadfly is now out. You won't want to miss Checker's feature editorial, in which he writes about why he sees "parallels between America's present condition and Rome circa 350 A.D." (Teaser: "Frappuccinos aren't very powerful weapons against Al Qaeda.") We're also offering a piece about why Louisianans can't get angered by jokes at their expense. (Teaser: It has to do with their legislature's rejection of modern science.) And Amber makes her podcast debut with her very own segment, "The Gadfly Research Minute."

Kindergarteners urged to learn key languages

WASHINGTON, DC (A.P.) -- Speaking to the National Association of Kindergarten Students (NAKS) today, presidential hopeful Barack Obama called on five-year-olds to embrace change and challenge themselves with languages from around the world.

"Si se puede," said Obama. "Si se puede."

* Real story here.

Check out the war of words happening at USAToday.com in response to its editorial (and a ridiculous rebuttal by Stephen Krashen) on Reading First. Reid Lyon learned how to fight in Vietnam and it shows.

Chinese students are, overall, far more advanced in mathematics than their American peers. Which is probably why they can create Segway armies.

(Hat tip to The Big Picture.)

Some days our blog exhausts me. Not writing for it--I'm usually too busy--just reading it and thinking how I would have said something differently myself or would have bitten my tongue and said nothing at all. When we started it, I promised not to edit, just occasionally to point out what I take to be errors--and once in a while to pen items myself that can't wait for next Thursday's Gadfly or aren't appropriate there.

In the past, these are the sorts of??"corrections" I would have sought to make via quiet meetings in the office, but Mike insists that today's fashion is to air our internal disagreements in public. So here are a few that cropped up today (which is just half over):

For reasons not clear to me, Liam wants to prove that the Democratic party is not anti-charter school??or anti-merit pay. So he names a few worthy Democrats and Democrat-leaning organizations that themselves have advanced the charter and/or merit-pay cause. He's right about the names. Indeed, there are more. But a few swallows do not prove that spring has come. Go to state capital after state capital around this broad land and anywhere that charter schools or some form of merit pay are on the table observe which legislators (with rare??and honorable??exception) are trying to make it happen and which (with rare and less honorable exception) are trying to kill it. Case closed. I'd love to see it reopened. But the ground is still mostly frozen.

Speaking of charter schools, I agree with our newest arrival, Stafford, that a two-hour-a-week high school is idiotic ; but far from being a charter school, I read that Los Angeles Times article to suggest that the school system is very likely going to shut down a (somewhat idiotic) charter and then create this bizarre inside-the-system alternative for the displaced kids (and to recapture more state dollars for itself). With a little more digging I'm sure that Stafford, who is very able, can find out what's actually happening in LaLa land rather than simply commenting on two short and less-than-clear grafs in a newspaper article.

And then there's Coby. He's very able, too (as is Liam, by the way), but I surely wouldn't have issued his vigorous defense of the NYC education department's new "truth squad." He suggests therein that the poor mayor and chancellor don't get nearly the media exposure that teacher union chief Weingarten gets (because she buys it) and that the poor, underappreciated bureaucracy thus doesn't get its "sensible reforms" adequately noticed. Balderdash. Some of those reforms are sensible, some not, but??I have rarely seen as overwhelming and relentless a??governmental PR machine as the one that Joel Klein presides over--at least not in what we used to call the free world. Overexposure might be more accurate.

By the by, the Checker quote in the New York Sun that Coby tees off from, while accurately reprinted, originated in my own error. When Elizabeth Green called to ask what I thought of the "Department of Education's new 'truth squad'," I, like any self-respecting Beltway dweller, assumed she was referring to the FEDERAL Department of Education. That's what I was referring to when I said they might better use their money for NCLB repair work or vouchers than to add media watchdogs and blog eagles.??It was Margaret in my imagination, not Joel.

And now I'm truly pooped.

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, referred to always as "young conservatives," have written a much ballyhooed book, Grand New Party, which purports to show Republicans how they can win in November and beyond. The key, say the authors, is to appeal to Sam's Club voters--i.e., working people without college degrees. Building on that, the latest National Review contains an essay by Douthat and Salam that offers Republicans a way to appeal not only to the working class but also to the upper middle class. And "School Choice for the Suburbs" is one of that article's major subheads. Whether or not offering school choice to wealthy suburban families is a winning political idea (it's not; they've already chosen schools they like), we were heartened to see the authors trumpet the benefits of weighted student funding (WSF), something about which we know a thing or two. Douthat and Salam write that promoting WSF nationwide is "a cause that could make mincemeat of the Left's claim to represent the interests of children." Wow. We're not absolutely convinced that WSF is the electoral savior of the Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter), but it's fantastic that such a fine idea is receiving national attention.

"Battle for the 'Burbs," by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, National Review, July 14, 2008

Must've been a slow day at the G-8 Summit. The Washington Post reports, on A1, that "Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time" at Thomas Jefferson High School (colloquially known as T.J.) in Fairfax County, Virginia. Some fret that the highly selective school, which garnered the top spot in U.S. News & World Report's 2007 high school rankings, suffers from insufficient diversity--a mere 2 percent of this year's T.J. class is African American or Hispanic. In 2004, the Fairfax County School Board put in place a T.J. admissions policy that took race into account as a "plus factor" but not a determining factor (whatever that means), and yet the number of Asian students accepted continues to rise and the number of Hispanic and black students remains low. Here's a thought: Who cares? T.J. is an academically selective school, and its enrollment reveals what NAEP scores and SAT and ACT data have long shown. Asian American and white students tend to do better academically than black and Hispanic students, for a number of varied and complicated reasons. We won't create a brighter American future by hurting high achievers and socially engineering their schools. The job of Fairfax school officials, and those in the other T.J. feeder systems is to educate their black and Hispanic pupils so well in grades K-8 that they're truly competitive when it comes to T.J. admissions.

"At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality," by Michael Alison Chandler, Washington Post, July 7, 2008

That's the message South Carolina is sending to undocumented students now that it's become the first state in the nation to bar illegal immigrants from attending its public colleges and universities. What a startling disconnect between that state's k-12 system--which, because of a 1982 Supreme Court decision, must educate all students who show up in its classes--and its higher education system. Concern about America's out-of-control borders is not ill-founded, of course, but it's difficult to envision a more punitive and ineffective solution to the problem than the one South Carolina has embraced. Nor one more damaging to the long-term prospects of illegal immigrants becoming useful, productive, law-abiding, and tax-paying residents. Public policy should encourage all children to fulfill their potential, not force those whose parents broke the law to hide in the shadows of our society. On this point, California and the nine other states that provide in-state tuition to all students graduating from their public high schools have it right. And South Carolina has it so very, very wrong.

"Illegal immigrants face threat of no college," by Mary Beth Marklein, USA Today, July 7, 2008

"Undocumented students have a degree of anxiety," by Gale Holland, Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2009