These kids need to be back in school, not in truancy court. So let's help keep them there.

All there is to know in the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day (updates and new stories are *):

• No standard left behind: As large a role poor instruction plays in fueling the dropout crisis and the nation’s overall crisis of low academic achievement, another can be found in efforts by many school districts to essentially water down academic standards set at the state and federal levels. From social promotion of laggard students (when they should be left back and given different teachers and instructional settings that fit their learning styles) to grade inflation, school districts engage in the kind of, well, let’s call it fraud that would lead to prison sentences if it were consider criminal offenses. Essentially, the districts are arguing that they are improving academic performance when all they are really doing is providing children with a slipshod education. So the report by the Dallas Morning News that teachers are annoyed at such an attempt by officials in the city’s Independent School District is both wonderful and disheartening to hear. The former, because teachers are being serious about their job. The latter? Because the district is up to the old nasty tricks again.
• When math teachers aren’t being well-instructed to teach math: The National Council on Teacher Quality released a study earlier this year on the woefully inadequate math instruction training by almost all of the 77 schools of education it surveyed. Now George Leef of the Pope Center offers some pointers on how math instruction must be reformed in order to improve the poor math performance of America’s students.
• Speaking of math (and immigration and teachers and H-1B): At Free Trade Nation, your editor analyzes one immigration skeptic’s criticism of the “H-1B Education” piece that ran earlier this week in The American Spectator.
• Teacher pay reform on sight: Kevin Carey gives a full report on the battle between new D.C. schools chief, Michelle Rhee, and the lackluster district’s teachers union over a teacher pay reform plan. Rhee may actually be winning over the younger (and more performance-oriented) teachers. But, while Carey is more optimistic about the results, I would argue that being the head of a school district within the nation’s capital — with a bevy of Democrat congressmen and senators who collect donations from the two major teachers unions – is no easy task; succeeding in winning salary reform may lead to a Congressional edict that will end the plan altogether.
• Speaking of Carey: Alexander Russo takes a shot at him for arguing with the Broader, Bolder gang. Although I understand Russo’s complaint that so many ed policy types aren’t as willing to engage in the dirty work of reforming schools in order to improve the education of poor kids, I would argue that the fact that Broader, Bolder includes the ones who do doesn’t mean that they are on the right side.  The latter, after all, is arguing for letting schools off the hook for their rather sizeable role in perpetuating the nation’s dropout crisis.