WASHINGTON – Kids in the U.S. are improving in reading and math, with low-achieving students making the biggest gains.

The 2008 scores come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test considered the benchmark of how students perform across the country. In a report issued Tuesday, reading and math scores were measured against long-term trends.

Results were particularly noticeable on reading. Reading scores tend to lag behind math scores, but in 2008, students in every age group — 9, 13 and 17 — made gains. That hasn’t happened since 1975.

In math, scores improved for younger children, but scores for 17-year-olds remained flat.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he was pleased but not satisfied with the results.

“We still have a lot more work to do,” Duncan said. “Our focus on raising standards, increasing academic rigor and improving teacher quality are all steps in the right direction.”

Results were in line with long-term trends, said Darvin Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, the bipartisan panel that oversees the test.

Over time, schools have done rather well with elementary school kids, better with middle school kids and stalled with high school kids, Winick said.

The biggest gains came from low-achieving students. That is probably not an accident — the federal No Child Left Behind law and similar state laws have focused on improving the performance of minority and poor children, who struggle the most.

“The big pressure for the last six, eight years in this country has been on bringing the lower-performing students up,” Winick said. “And what this long-term trend says is, generally, that’s what’s happening.”

Tom Loveless, an education expert at the Brookings Institution think tank, said the progress in reading is noteworthy.

“The gains are not huge, but they’re gains,” he said. “Something’s going on in reading. That’s a good thing.”

No Child Left Behind prods schools to improve test scores each year, so every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014. It holds schools accountable for progress among each group of kids, including those who have disabilities or are learning English.

The law was due for a rewrite in 2007, but the effort stalled in Congress. The Obama administration and Congress are gearing up now to make another attempt.

The House Education and Labor Committee chairman, Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, called it “deeply troubling” that high school students did not show improvement.

“We must redouble our efforts to ensure that all students, at every age, in every state, get a world-class education that fully prepares them for college and careers,” Miller said in a statement.

The long-term trend report issued Tuesday was based on a nationally representative sample of more than 26,000 public and private school students. It tracks student progress in reading since 1971 and in math since 1973.

Because it is aligned with older tests, the long-term trend may give a more conservative picture of how kids are doing. It is separate from the main NAEP assessments, which are given in nine subjects and have shown greater progress in math scores.

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ON THE WEB

National Assessment of Educational Progress: nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/

They weren’t goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School 10 years ago today weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied – in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”

Their rampage put schools on alert for “enemies lists” made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information – including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors – indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

In fact, the pair’s suicidal attack was planned as a grand – if badly implemented – terrorist bombing that quickly devolved into a 49-minute shooting rampage when the bombs Harris built fizzled.

“He was so bad at wiring those bombs, apparently they weren’t even close to working,” says Dave Cullen, author of “Columbine,” a new account of the attack.

So whom did they hope to kill?

Everyone – including friends.

What’s left, after peeling away a decade of myths, is perhaps more comforting than the “good kids harassed into retaliation” narrative – or perhaps not.

It’s a portrait of Harris and Klebold as a sort of “In Cold Blood” criminal duo – a deeply disturbed, suicidal pair who over more than a year psyched each other up for an Oklahoma City-style terrorist bombing, an apolitical, over-the-top revenge fantasy against years of snubs, slights and cruelties, real and imagined.

Along the way, they saved money from after-school jobs, took Advanced Placement classes, assembled a small arsenal and fooled everyone – friends, parents, teachers, psychologists, cops and judges.

“These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation,” psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.” “These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply ‘not ordinary kids.’ These are kids with serious psychological problems.”

Deceiving the adults

Harris, who conceived the attacks, was more than just troubled. He was, psychologists now say, a cold-blooded, predatory psychopath – a smart, charming liar with “a preposterously grand superiority complex, a revulsion for authority and an excruciating need for control,” Cullen writes.

Harris, a senior, read voraciously and got good grades when he tried, pleasing his teachers with dazzling prose – then writing in his journal about killing thousands.

“I referred to him – and I’m dating myself – as the Eddie Haskell of Columbine High School,” says Principal Frank DeAngelis, referring to the deceptively polite teen on the 1950s and ’60s sitcom “Leave it to Beaver.” “He was the type of kid who, when he was in front of adults, he’d tell you what you wanted to hear.”

When he wasn’t, he mixed napalm in the kitchen.

According to Cullen, one of Harris’ last journal entries read: “I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no don’t . . . say, ‘Well that’s your fault,’ because it isn’t, you people had my phone #, and I asked and all, but no. No no no don’t let the weird-looking Eric KID come along.”

As he walked into the school the morning of April 20, Harris’ T-shirt read: “Natural Selection.”

Klebold, on the other hand, was anxious and lovelorn, summing up his life at one point in his journal as “the most miserable existence in the history of time,” Langman notes.

Harris drew swastikas in his journal; Klebold drew hearts.

As laid out in their writings, the contrast between the two was stark.

Harris seemed to feel superior to everyone – he once wrote, “I feel like God and I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me” – while Klebold was suicidally depressed and getting angrier all the time. “Me is a god, a god of sadness,” he wrote in September 1997, around his 16th birthday.

Klebold also was paranoid. “I have always been hated, by everyone and everything,” he wrote.

On the day of the attacks, his T-shirt read: “Wrath.”

Shooter profiles emerge

Columbine wasn’t the first K-12 school shooting. But at the time it was by far the worst, and the first to play out largely on live television.

The U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Education Department soon began studying school shooters. In 2002, researchers presented their first findings: School shooters, they said, followed no set profile, but most were depressed and felt persecuted.

Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, co-author of the 2004 book “Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings,” says young people such as Harris and Klebold are not loners – they’re just not accepted by the kids who count. “Getting attention by becoming notorious is better than being a failure.”

The Secret Service found that school shooters usually tell other kids about their plans.

“Other students often even egg them on,” says Newman, who led a congressionally mandated study on school shootings. “Then they end up with this escalating commitment. It’s not a sudden snapping.”

Langman, whose book profiles 10 shooters, including Harris and Klebold, found that nine suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts, a “potentially dangerous” combination, he says. “It is hard to prevent murder when killers do not care if they live or die. It is like trying to stop a suicide bomber.”

At the time, Columbine became a kind of giant national Rorschach test. Observers saw its genesis in just about everything: lax parenting, lax gun laws, progressive schooling, repressive school culture, violent video games, antidepressant drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, for starters.

Many of the Columbine myths emerged before the shooting stopped, as rumors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking swirled in an echo chamber among witnesses, survivors, officials and the news media.

Police contributed to the mess by talking to reporters before they knew facts – a hastily called news conference by the Jefferson County sheriff that afternoon produced the first headline: “Twenty-five dead in Colorado.”

A few inaccuracies took hours to clear up, but others took weeks or months – sometimes years – as authorities reluctantly set the record straight.

Former “Rocky Mountain News” reporter Jeff Kass, author of a new book, “Columbine: A True Crime Story,” says police played a game of “Open Records charades.”

In one case, county officials took five years just to acknowledge that they had met in secret after the attacks to discuss a 1998 affidavit for a search warrant on Harris’ home – it was the result of a complaint against him by the mother of a former friend. Harris had threatened her son on his Web site and bragged that he had been building bombs.

Police already had found a small bomb matching Harris’ description near his home – but investigators never presented the affidavit to a judge.

They also apparently didn’t know that Harris and Klebold were on probation after having been arrested in January 1998 for breaking into a van and stealing electronics.

The search finally took place, but only after the shootings.

Meticulous planning

What’s now beyond dispute – largely from the killers’ journals, which have been released over the past few years, is this: Harris and Klebold killed 13 and wounded 24, but they had hoped to kill thousands.

The pair planned the attacks for more than a year, building 100 bombs and persuading friends to buy them guns. Just after 11 a.m. on April 20, they lugged a pair of duffel bags containing propane-tank bombs into Columbine’s crowded cafeteria and another into the kitchen, then stepped outside and waited.

Had the bombs exploded, they’d have killed virtually everyone eating lunch and brought the school’s second-story library down atop the cafeteria, police say. Armed with a pistol, a rifle and two sawed-off shotguns, the pair planned to pick off survivors fleeing the carnage.

As a last terrorist act, a pair of gasoline bombs planted in Harris’ Honda and Klebold’s BMW had been rigged apparently to kill police, rescue teams, journalists and parents who rushed to the school – long after the pair expected they would be dead.

The pair had parked the cars about 100 yards apart in the student lot. The bombs didn’t go off.

Looking for answers at home

Since 1999, many people have looked to the boys’ parents for answers, but a transcript of their 2003 court-ordered deposition to the victims’ parents remains sealed until 2027.

The Klebolds spoke to “New York Times” columnist David Brooks in 2004 and impressed Brooks as “a well-educated, reflective, highly intelligent couple” who spent plenty of time with their son. They said they had no clues about Dylan’s mental state and regretted not seeing that he was suicidal.

Could the parents have prevented the massacre? The FBI special agent in charge of the investigation has gone on record as having “the utmost sympathy” for the Harris and Klebold families.

“They have been vilified without information,” retired supervisory special agent Dwayne Fuselier tells Cullen.

Cullen, who has spent most of the past decade poring over the record, comes away with a bit of sympathy.

For one thing, he notes, Harris’ parents “knew they had a problem – they thought they were dealing with it. What kind of parent is going to think, ‘Well, maybe Eric’s a mass murderer.’ You just don’t go there.”

He got a good look at the boys’ writings only in the past couple of years. Among the revelations: Eric Harris was financing what could well have been the biggest domestic terrorist attack on U.S. soil on wages from a part-time job at a pizza parlor.

“One of the scary things is that money was one of the limiting factors here,” Cullen says.

Had Harris, then 18, put off the attacks for a few years and landed a well-paying job, he says, “he could be much more like Tim McVeigh,” mixing fertilizer bombs like those used in Oklahoma City in 1995. As it was, he says, the fact that Harris carried out the attack when he did probably saved hundreds of lives.

“His limited salary probably limited the number of people who died.”

Columbine High School students Dylan Klebold (left) and Eric Harris yell into the camera in these images from a video made by the two that was part of a school project at Columbine. This video was made prior to the killings at Columbine.

Harris (left) and Klebold in another scene from their school project video

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday takes up an Arizona case that could limit a federal court’s power to tell states to spend more money to educate students who aren’t proficient in English.

Arizona state legislators and the state superintendent of public instruction want to be freed from federal court oversight of the state’s programs for English learners. They’ve been ordered by a lower court judge to spend potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with rulings in a 17-year-old case.

Parents of students attending southern Arizona’s Nogales Unified School District sued the state in 1992, contending programs for English-language learners in Nogales were deficient and received inadequate funding from the state.

In 2000, a federal judge found that the state had violated the Equal Educational Opportunities Act’s requirements for appropriate instruction for English-language learners. He ordered state legislators to create a plan to provide sufficient funds and placed the state’s programs for non-English speaking students under court oversight.

Since then, the two sides have fought over what constitutes compliance with the order. Arizona has more than doubled the amount that schools receive per non-English speaking student and taken several other steps prescribed by the No Child Left Behind Act, a broader education accountability law passed by Congress in 2002.

Plaintiffs say that’s not enough to comply with federal law and a judge agreed. But the state appealed, and now the high court will answer the question.

Another key issue is the power of federal courts to take over functions of state or local governments when trying to remedy civil rights violations, attorneys involved in the case said.

The case has attracted a flurry of legal briefs from school boards, teachers and civil rights groups in support of the Nogales parents and students. Supporters of the legislators and the superintendent of schools also filed numerous briefs.

The lead plaintiff in the case, now called Horne v Flores, was Miriam Flores. She said her daughter had two years of instruction in her native Spanish, then was put into an English-language class in third grade. The daughter — also named Miriam Flores — began to fall behind. There were complaints she was a behavior problem, talking in class. It turned out she couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying and was asking a classmate for help.

Since the case was filed in 1992, a generation of Spanish-speaking students has passed through Nogales and other Arizona public schools, and Mrs. Flores’ daughter is now a student at the University of Arizona.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – For some high school seniors, landing a job means more than extra cash for the movies or the mall – getting a paycheck means a chance to graduate.

Yet many schools that place special education students in paid jobs leading to so-called “occupational diplomas” are finding their work cut out for them: Soaring joblessness means restaurants, small businesses and retailers that for years provided jobs to students with disabilities are increasingly hard-pressed to help in a sour economy.

“A lot of systems are having this problem where you have teenagers competing for jobs with 40- and 50-year-olds now that are back in the job market looking for anything to help put food on the table,” said Butch Starnes, director of a career technical center who regularly places students in jobs in northern Alabama.

The occupational diploma programs emerged in recent years across some Southern states to help young people with disabilities enter the work force through paid jobs while they complete high school.

Yet this isn’t a normal economy, and the work force is shrinking daily.

KELLY NIELSON

The No Child Left Behind Act is a huge concern of mine.

The Amphitheater school district has a lot of kids who come from Mexico and aren’t at the education level they should be.

It is difficult to get children to learn everything they need to know in one year, especially when they cannot speak one word of English.

My sister works at Prince Elementary. She has told me how the children are always in and out of the classrooms because they are working on their English and other skills they need to improve.

They are also very disrespectful toward her. She explained that it is extremely difficult to communicate with them when they cannot understand her.

One of her students had marijuana on his sandwich. He told her his father said it makes the sandwich taste better.

The point is, teachers have enough to worry about without NCLB.

It is difficult to have to teach English to a student from Mexico while trying to get them on top of their schoolwork, or even just catching them up to speed with the other students.

The teachers also have time constraints and cannot worry about dealing with the thought of getting reprimanded if they are not able to get a certain percentage of students passing the tests for NCLB.

They only have from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with the students. They cannot take the students home with them, though I am sure some teachers would if they could.

So why is the government putting more pressure on teachers, as if they do not have enough to deal with without NCLB?

From these stories, you can imagine how difficult it is to teach as well as learn. The teachers are not only concerned with teaching the children, but also worried about their personal lives as well.

My sister teaches the third grade, and the majority of her students lack structure in their home, or even worse.

Guaranteed, every district has students that deal with problems at home, but when the majority of students are dealing with this, it is obvious that No Child Left Behind needs to be changed.

Students are not worried about school, but just making it through life. With thinking like this, the teachers are putting a lot of stress on themselves to get the children through the system.

No Child Left Behind is a great idea but needs to be re-examined. We need to see where these children are coming from and make exceptions.

They need extra help, not time constraints. The teachers, not only in the Amphi District, need help. They need time!

Kelly Nielson, a 2005 Sahuaro High School graduate, is a senior at Marshall University majoring in business management.

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency will soon be adding a different kind of equipment to dozens of school yards around the country – air pollution monitors.

The EPA announced Tuesday a list of 62 schools in 22 states where the outdoor air will be tested for toxic air contaminants. The agency will work with state and local officials to begin the monitoring at the selected schools within three months.

No Arizona schools are on the list.

While the EPA and state and local governments already operate air pollution monitoring networks that collect information on a variety of air pollutants, this will be the first time school-yard air quality will be the focus of their investigations.

The schools were chosen because of their proximity to industrial facilities or other sources of pollution. The list includes elementary, middle school and high school campuses.

The list of schools that will be monitored can be found on the EPA’s Web site at www.epa.gov/schoolair.

What contaminants will be tested varies depending on the school. But the focus is toxic chemicals that are known to cause cancer, respiratory and neurological problems — especially in children, who are more susceptible than adults because they are still growing.

The monitors will measure the air for gases as well as solid particles such as heavy metals and soot, the EPA said.

“EPA, state, and local officials are mobilizing to determine where elevated levels of toxics pose a threat, so that we can take swift action to protect our children at their schools,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. The agency will spend $2.25 million purchasing the monitors and paying for the laboratory analysis.

Once in place, the new equipment will collect air samples on 10 days over a month. The EPA will cease monitoring at the school if the results show good air quality. But if high levels of contaminants are detected, the agency will take steps to reduce the pollution.

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ON THE WEB

List of schools: epa.gov/schoolair/schools

WASHINGTON – Hispanic students have become more segregated in suburban public schools over the last decade, even while blacks and Asians have become slightly less isolated, according to a new study.

The report by the Pew Hispanic Center challenges the conventional assumption that growing minority populations will create an instant “melting pot” in suburban and other districts. It raises questions about whether local school boards need to actively promote integration.

“Suburbia has changed — suburban schools are getting much more diverse,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at Pew, a Washington think tank. “But we shouldn’t assume that white suburban students as a result are interacting significantly more with nonwhites.”

The popularity of charter schools, now promoted by President Barack Obama, is a factor behind some of the segregation in grades K-12, Fry and other experts say. This is because many charter schools have special ethnic themes or offer bilingual courses, and minorities are choosing to enroll in schools with classmates of the same race.

The nation’s suburbs added 3.4 million students from 1993 to 2007, representing two-thirds of the growth in public school enrollment. Virtually all the suburban growth — 99 percent — came from the addition of Hispanic, black and Asian students.

But while black and Asian students saw small gains in integration, Hispanic students were increasingly clustered at the same suburban schools. The study found their segregation was particularly evident not only in counties around Chicago, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and in Prince George’s, Md., where their population is small compared with blacks and whites, but also in Hispanic hotspots in the Los Angeles, Miami and San Diego metro areas.

Among other findings:

—White students comprised 59 percent of suburban public school enrollment, down from 72 percent in 1993. Hispanics, who now make up 20 percent of enrollment compared with 11 percent in 1993, were the primary driver of overall growth.

—Minority students tended to cluster in schools where blacks, Hispanics and Asians made up the majority of students, rather than being evenly spread among schools.

—Nationally, blacks, Hispanics and Asians saw modest declines overall in segregation since 1993, as minorities began moving away from city districts, which were disproportionately minority.

The latest trends reflect some of the challenges ahead as public school districts educate a K-12 population that is increasingly minority.

David R. Garcia, an assistant professor of education at Arizona State University who has researched charter schools, said the dilemma of resegregation in some communities is complicated. That’s because many minorities are choosing to congregate in charter schools because of their emphasis on special needs such as Hispanic students with English-language problems.

The Supreme Court in 2007 rejected the explicit use of race in assigning students to schools, leaving districts scrambling to find new ways to alleviate isolation among racial and ethnic groups.

“We worked hard to have more diversity by bringing together students of different races who go to school together, learn together and become more tolerant as a whole, so there is concern,” Garcia said. But policymakers have been loath to intervene when minority and other parents are making the choices, he said.

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ON THE WEB

Pew Hispanic Center: pewhispanic.org

Schools are moving to four-day weeks, shortening the school year, staggering start times and making other schedule adjustments to save money.

Some altered schedules to fill budget holes for this year. Others are planning for next year but don’t know how much their budgets will be reduced as legislators face shrinking tax revenue.

Although federal stimulus funds will help, “most districts are still unaware of how much money that will mean for them,” says Mary Kusler, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators.

In Bisbee, schools Superintendent Gail Covington says she expects a 10 percent cut.

“Can we remove 13 teachers? Absolutely not,” she says. “Can we do deep salary reductions? Not if we want to attract qualified teachers and keep the teachers we have.”

As an alternative, Covington proposed – and the school board adopted – closing schools in the small town every Friday for the next two school years. The shortened school week will save $500,000 a year in costs of heating, air conditioning, maintenance, bus drivers and fuel, substitute teachers and cafeteria and custodial staff.

School days will be lengthened by one hour to make up for the lost instructional time.

All states require students to attend a minimum number of days or hours per year. Hundreds of districts are modifying schedules that meet those requirements but cost less, says Reggie Felton of the National School Boards Association. “It’s fairly widespread,” he says.

While school districts save money, the cost is transferred to parents who may have to pay for more day care, says Byron Garrett, CEO of the National Parent Teacher Association. For low-income families whose children get free or reduced-price meals at school, they must find a way to provide the food, he says.

“It will have a significant impact on the wallets and budgets of many families that are already struggling,” Garrett says.

School officials also are:

— Staggering start times. Schools in Florida’s St. Lucie County have had staggered start times for years. The district tinkered with the schedule this year, moving start times at two schools from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., says Marty Sanders, the district’s executive director of planning. The move saved $2 million by reducing the number of buses and having the remaining buses make more runs, he says.

Before- and after-school programs were expanded to help parents with child care.

— Dropping “block” scheduling. Next year, California’s Hayward Unified School District will end its three high schools’ “block” schedule, under which students take four 90-minute classes per semester, equaling eight courses per year.

The schools will adopt a more traditional schedule of six courses per year and will give students the option of taking additional courses through an extended day, Superintendent Dale Vigil says. The reduced teaching staff will save about $1 million.

— Shortening the year. The school day in Dighton, Kan., got 25 minutes longer on Feb. 4, letting the district end the year May 1 instead of May 22. Minimum class time is still met because the original schedule had more hours than required. Expected savings: $31,000, Superintendent Angela Lawrence says.

President Barack Obama speaks, accompanied by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, right, speaks during an unscheduled visit to a meeting of the Council of Chief State School officers, Tuesday, March 10, 2009, in Washington.

President Barack Obama embraced merit pay for teachers Tuesday in spelling out a vision of education that will almost certainly alienate union backers.

A strategy that ties teacher pay to student performance has for years been anathema to teachers’ unions, a powerful force in the Democratic Party. These unions also are wary of charter schools, nontraditional educational systems that they believe compete with traditional schools for tax dollars.

Obama, however, also spoke favorably of charter schools, saying that where they work, they should be encouraged.

He did acknowledge in his speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that his proposals could meet heavy resistance in both political parties.

“Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom,” he said, delivering the first major education speech of his presidency. “Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new investments in early education, despite compelling evidence of its importance.”

But he argued that a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s education system is an economic imperative that can’t wait, despite the urgency of the financial crisis and other pressing issues.

“Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us,” Obama said. “The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children. We cannot afford to let it continue. What is at stake is nothing less than the American dream.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, said the union would “embrace the goals and aspirations outlined today by President Obama.”

“Teachers want to make a difference in kids’ lives, and they appreciate a president who shares that goal and will spend his political capital to provide the resources to make it happen,” she said. “As with any public policy, the devil is in the details, and it is important that teachers’ voices are heard.”

The ideas the president promoted were nearly all elements of his campaign platform last year. He only barely mentioned the reauthorization of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, which introduced sweeping reforms that schools are struggling to meet without the funding to match. Obama said his administration would “later this year” ensure that schools get the funding they need and that the money is conditioned on results.

Among the principles Obama laid out were:

—Challenging states to adopt world-class standards rather than a specific standard. Obama’s economic stimulus plan includes a $5 billion incentive fund to reward states for, among other things, boosting the quality of standards and state tests, and the president said the Education Department would create a fund to invest in innovation.

—Improved pre-kindergarten programs, including $5 billion in the stimulus plan to grow Head Start, expand child care access and do more for children with special needs. He also said he would offer 55,000 first-time parents regular visits from trained nurses and said that states that develop cutting-edge plans to raise the quality of early learning programs would get an Early Learning Challenge Grant, if Congress approves the new program.

—Reducing student dropout rates. To students, Obama said: “Don’t even think about dropping out of school.” But he said that reducing the dropout rates also requires turning around the worst schools, something he asked lawmakers, parents and teachers to make “our collective responsibility as Americans.”

—Repeating his call for everyone to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training, with the goal of highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020.

On charter schools, he said the caps instituted by some states on how many are allowed aren’t “good for our children, our economy, or our country.”

Obama also spoke at length about what he described his policy toward teachers, what he called an `unprecedented commitment to ensure that anyone entrusted with educating our children is doing the job as well as it can be done.” In up to 150 more school districts, Obama said, teachers will get mentoring, more money for improved student achievement and new responsibilities.Also, Obama said, “We need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful. That means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom. Let me be clear: if a teacher is given a chance but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching.”

The president acknowledged that a rethinking of the traditional American school day may not be welcome — “not in my family, and probably not in yours” — but is critical.

“The challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom,” Obama said. “If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America.”

After the speech, Obama stopped at a hotel to drop in on another meeting, an already scheduled and ongoing round-table discussion between Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which involves the heads of education from every state and U.S. territory.

WASHINGTON – Roughly one-fourth of the nation’s kindergartners are Hispanic, evidence of an accelerating trend that now will see minority children become the majority by 2023.

Census data released Thursday also showed that Hispanics make up about one-fifth of all K-12 students. Hispanics’ growth and changes in the youth population are certain to influence political debate, from jobs and immigration to the No Child Left Behind education law, for years.

The ethnic shifts in school enrollment are most evident in the West. States such as Arizona, California and Nevada are seeing an influx of Hispanics due to immigration and higher birth rates.

Minority students in that region exceed non-Hispanic whites at the pre-college grade levels, with about 37 percent of the students Hispanic. Hispanics make up 54 percent of the students in New Mexico, 47 percent in California, 44 percent in Texas and 40 percent in Arizona.

In 2007, more than 40 percent of all students in K-12 were minorities – Hispanics, blacks, Asian-Americans and others. That’s double the percentage of three decades ago.

In colleges, Hispanics made up 12 percent of full-time undergraduate and graduate students, 2 percent more than in 2006. Still, that is short of Hispanics’ 15 percent representation in the total U.S. population.

“The future of our education system depends on how we can advance Hispanics through the ranks,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “In many cases it’s going to be a challenge, because they are the children of immigrants, and their English is not as strong. Many have parents without a high school or college education.”

Minorities are projected to become the majority of the overall U.S. population by 2042. For minority kids, that shift is seen coming in 2023, seven years earlier than the previous estimate, from 2004. The accelerated timetable is due to immigration among Hispanics and Asians, and declining birth rates among non-Hispanic whites.

Hispanics account for more than 23 percent of kindergartners in private and public schools, according to 2007 data. That is more than triple Hispanics’ percentage in the 1970s, the height of white baby boom enrollment in elementary and high schools.

More Hispanic kindergartners in 2007 were U.S.-born than foreign-born, assuring them of citizenship that will make them eligible to vote by 2020.

The changing demographics offer opportunity and political risks for Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, and emerging Republicans such as 37-year-old Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the first Indian-American elected to statewide office.

Obama, who took two-thirds of the Hispanic vote, is channeling billions of federal dollars to improve schools, reduce the dropout rate and make college more affordable by increasing the maximum Pell Grant for low-income students to $5,550.

Yet his administration has been sketchy when it comes to improving classroom performance and overhauling the No Child Left Behind Act, which sets goals for schools so every student can read and do math at his or her grade level by 2014.

The education law has major implications for both black and Hispanic students, including those who speak English as a second language, because they tend to lag whites in reading and math scores.

Obama has been largely quiet on immigration reform, which could pave the way for citizenship for nearly 12 million illegal immigrants.

Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center, said Hispanic growth cannot be ignored in policy debates for too long. While in recent elections Hispanics have only cast 6 percent of the total ballots, “Latinos’ electoral power and participation levels clearly are going to grow,” he said.

Other findings from the data:

• About 58 percent of children enrolled in grades K-12 are non-Hispanic whites, a group that represents 66 percent of the U.S. population. After Hispanics, blacks were the second-largest minority group enrolled in K-12 (15 percent), followed by Asians (4 percent).

• Fifty-three percent of Hispanic 4-year-olds were enrolled in nursery school, compared with 43 percent in 1997 and 21 percent in 1987.

The census data was based on the Current Population Survey. Data on U.S. regions and states came from the 2007 American Community Survey, the government’s annual survey of about 3 million households.

In an unprecedented step aimed at protecting children from toxic chemicals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce plans Monday to determine whether industrial pollution taints the air outside schools across the nation.

The EPA plan, promised by new administrator Lisa Jackson during her Senate confirmation hearings in January, calls for regulators to identify 50 to 100 schools where pollution might pose significant health risks. At many of those locations, the agency will work with state and local regulators to monitor the air for a variety of toxic chemicals.

The agency could begin taking air samples within five weeks and may release some results within a few months. The cost of the effort is expected to be about $2.5 million and will be funded “through redirecting resources from the current budget as well as from the next fiscal year,” says EPA spokesman Allyn Brooks-LaSure. “This is a priority.”

The plan, the agency’s first effort to systematically examine industrial pollution outside schools, comes in response to a USA TODAY investigation that used the government’s own data to identify schools that might be in toxic hot spots – areas where chemicals may permeate the air.

Children are particularly susceptible to toxic chemicals. They breathe more air in proportion to their weight than do adults, and their bodies are still developing. Exposure to some chemicals can trigger ailments such as asthma or lead to cancer years or even decades later.

The newspaper’s investigation, published in December, used a government computer simulation that showed at least 435 schools where the air outside appeared to be more toxic than the air at an Ohio elementary school closed in 2005. There, the Ohio EPA found levels of carcinogens 50 times what the state considered acceptable. USA TODAY subsequently teamed with Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland to take “snapshot” air samples near 95 schools in 30 states. At 64 of those locations, the newspaper found elevated levels of chemicals.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – A cold cheese sandwich, fruit and a milk carton might not seem like much of a meal — but that’s what’s on the menu for students in New Mexico’s largest school district without their lunch money.

Faced with mounting unpaid lunch charges in the economic downturn, Albuquerque Public Schools last month instituted a “cheese sandwich policy,” serving the alternative meals to children whose parents are supposed to be able to pay for some or all of their regular meals but fail to pick up the tab.

Such policies have become a necessity for schools seeking to keep budgets in the black while ensuring children don’t go hungry. School districts including those in Chula Vista, Calif.; Hillsborough County, Fla.; and Lynnwood, Wash.; have also taken to serving cheese sandwiches to children with delinquent lunch accounts.

Critics argue the cold meals are a form of punishment for children whose parents can’t afford to pay. Parents who qualify for free meals are not affected.

“We’ve heard stories from moms coming in saying their child was pulled out of the lunch line and given a cheese sandwich,” said Nancy Pope, director of the New Mexico Collaborative to End Hunger. “One woman said her daughter never wants to go back to school.”

Some Albuquerque parents have tearfully pleaded with school board members to stop singling out their children because they’re poor, while others have flooded talk radio shows thanking the district for imposing a policy that commands parental responsibility.

Second-grader Danessa Vigil said she will never eat sliced cheese again. She had to eat cheese sandwiches because her mother couldn’t afford to give her lunch money while her application for free lunch was being processed.

“Every time I eat it, it makes me feel like I want to throw up,” the 7-year-old said.

Her mother, Darlene Vigil, said there are days she can’t spare lunch money for her two daughters.

“Some parents don’t have even $1 sometimes,” the 27-year-old single mother said. “If they do, it’s for something else, like milk at home. There are some families that just don’t have it and that’s the reason they’re not paying.”

Albuquerque Public Schools students receive a cheese sandwich in lieu of a hot meal if they have exceeded a set amount of meals charged to their account, ranging from two at high schools to 10 at elementary schools. The schools’ Web site warns: “Once the charging limit is met, students will be offered an alternate meal consisting of a cheese sandwich and a beverage.”

The School Nutrition Association recently surveyed nutrition directors from 38 states and found more than half of school districts have seen an increase in the number of students charging meals, while 79 percent saw an increase in the number of free lunches served over the last year.

In New Mexico, nearly 204,000 low-income students — about three-fifths of public school students — received free or reduced-price lunches at the beginning of the school year, according to the state Public Education Department.

“What you are seeing is families struggling and having a really hard time, and school districts are struggling as well,” said Crystal FitzSimons of the national Food Research and Action Center.

In Albuquerque, unpaid lunch charges hovered around $55,000 in 2006. That jumped to $130,000 at the end of the 2007-08 school year. It was $140,000 through the first five months of this school year.

Charges were on pace to reach $300,000 by the end of the year. Mary Swift, director of Albuquerque’s food and nutrition services, said her department had no way to absorb that debt as it had in the past.

“We can’t use any federal lunch program money to pay what they call bad debt. It has to come out of the general budget and of course that takes it from some other department,” Swift said.

With the new policy, the school district has collected just over $50,000 from parents since the beginning of the year. It also identified 2,000 students eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, and more children in the lunch program means more federal dollars for the district.

School officials said the policy was under consideration for some time and parents were notified last fall. Families with unpaid charges are reminded with an automated phone call each night and notes are sent home with children once a week.

Swift added that the cheese sandwiches — about 80 of the 46,000 meals the district serves daily — can be considered a “courtesy meal,” rather than an alternate meal.

Some districts, she noted, don’t allow children without money to eat anything.

Albuquerque Public Schools “has historically gone above and beyond as far as treating children with dignity and respect and trying to do what’s best with for the child and I think this is just another example,” Swift said.

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ON THE WEB

Albuquerque Public Schools: ww2.aps.edu

New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty: www.nmpovertylaw.org/index

Food Research and Action Center: www.frac.org

A pupil raises her hand with a question as then-President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush, marked the anniversary of his No Child Left Behind law during a visit with students and teachers at the General Philip Kearny School in Philadelphia on Jan. 8.

Schools that fail to make the grade under No Child Left Behind in many states can skate through in Arizona, where standards are easy, a new study shows.

And that wide disparity in state standards – from easy Arizona to rigorous Massachusetts – underscores why NCLB doesn’t really provide accountability nationwide.

Results from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute study were released Thursday, just as a $5 billion incentive fund was included in the new economic stimulus bill to reward states for boosting standards and the quality of state tests.

Arizona’s standards could use some boosting, especially in reading, where proficiency in grades three through five is set in the 25th percentile.

Arizona also uses a generous margin of error, at 99 percent compared with 95 percent in most other states.

Now new Education Secretary Arne Duncan is proposing common state standards, saying “50 different goal posts doesn’t make sense. A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it’s from.”

We agree, and we are heartened that Duncan and President Obama share our concerns about NCLB.

Arizona’s example illustrates the good and the bad with the 2001 act.

NCLB’s chief goal was to eradicate educational disparities within and between the states, using “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) checks at schools to bring things in line.

In Arizona, schools with high test score averages previously could have masked their subgroups of low-performing students. Now, pockets of students disaggregated by race, income, etc., show up when scores are low.

On the other hand, Arizona schools with fewer such subgroups are more likely to make AYP, while those with lots of subgroups are not.

As the Fordham study asks about Arizona, “Does it make sense that having fewer subgroups enhances the likelihood of making AYP? Is it ‘fair’ for a state to have such generous margins of error and low elementary cut scores? Does it make sense that the size of a school’s enrollment has so much influence over making AYP?”

We are heartened that these questions and this study have emerged as a new administration casts a critical and constructive eye on NCLB.

Obama has echoed concerns about the costs of NCLB mandates and the disparities in standardized tests.

Now Fordham’s study highlights the equally yawning disparities in the standards themselves.

Duncan rightly recognizes that “we are lying to children and families” by saying they meet standards when, in reality, they could not succeed in a good university. We hope the new administration will replace NCLB with reforms that work, including consistently rigorous standards and tests.

Cafeteria food has always been the brunt of kids’ jokes. Many of us remember the grilled cheese sandwich that stuck to the plate when you turned it upside down and the egg soufflé that jiggled when you poked it.

But even that is a far cry from what’s served now.

In the midst of a growing childhood obesity crisis, school food now means federally subsidized chicken nuggets, low-grade hamburgers, french fries, hot dogs and pizza. “Cooking” usually involves a centralized kitchen similar to a fast food assembly line.

According to Ron Haskins, senior fellow of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, “behind the overcooked vegetables and steam-table pizza that American children confront each school day is an industry that rivals defense contractors and media giants in its ability to bring home the federal bacon.”

That industry is agribusiness – and, via the National School Lunch Program, it has a chokehold on our kids.

The commodities-driven National School Lunch Program, meant to feed 60 million children healthy food, has instead turned into a major public health threat.

The most vulnerable in our society are suffering the most severe consequences, including epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses.

While we need to be able to include more children in the School Lunch Program, we also need to be able to feed them higher-quality, more nutritious food, or else we are defeating the purpose of the program.

Over the past three decades, rates of obesity in the U.S. have more than doubled among children ages 2 to 5 and more than tripled among those ages 6 to 11.

Today, approximately 9 million U.S. children over age 6 are considered obese. America’s overweight teens consume an average of 700 to 1,000 calories more than they need each day.

The National School Lunch Program and its affiliated programs have unmatched size and scope, serving more than 35 million lunches every day in almost every school in the U.S., costing taxpayers more than $8.5 billion.

Close to 20 million K-12 students receive up to two meals a day, five days a week. The program recently was expanded to include all children enrolled in Head Start and child nutrition programs. The summer food service program feeds 18 million low-income children.

Where does agribusiness come in? Schools participating in the National School Lunch Program receive cash subsidies and commodity foods for each meal served plus bonus commodities from agricultural surplus.

The program’s authorizing language requires that participating schools serve the most abundant commodities – mostly milk and meat, with few fruits and vegetables.

In fact, the ties between the government and the commodities industry, aided and abetted by poor nutritional choices by state and local food service officials, trumps federal nutritional guidelines resulting in menu offerings that resemble fast food.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases hundreds of millions of pounds of pork, beef, and other animal products as well as surplus corn and wheat primarily as an economic benefit to agricultural interests.

This might have been a defensible idea a century ago, when a third of our population worked as farmers; now, only 2 percent of our workforce is in agriculture.

However, to help 2 percent of our citizens, these commodities are donated to the School Lunch Program and other food assistance programs. Unfortunately for our children, many of these foods are unhealthful.

Next year, The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004, which includes school lunches, will expire and the renewal battle will begin.

We must dramatically improve the federal nutrition requirements that guide this program, weaken the ties between the School Lunch Program and the commodities markets, revolutionize the quality of food in our schools, label the salt, fat, and sugar content of each meal served and educate school officials, regulators and the American public about the School Lunch Program and its potentially disastrous implications for our children’s health.

We need a congressional mandate for higher nutritional values for the School Lunch Program to improve the quality and types of food that are served in K-12 schools, with an emphasis on local foods and organics.

However, that’s useless unless we complement it with revamped nutrition curriculums for children and parents so that they can learn the value of good nutrition in preventing disease.

Significant progress can and must be made in overhauling school lunches. It will take millions of voices to bring about this change. The cost to the next generation is too high for this battle to be lost.

Kathleen Rogers is the president of Earth Day Network (www.earthday.net). This commentary was distributed by the American Forum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, educational organization that provides views of state experts on major public concerns to stimulate informed discussion.

ARLINGTON, Va. – Education Secretary Arne Duncan said schools desperately need new buildings and renovations as he made a pitch for more spending in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery bill.

“Why do you guys need a new building?” Duncan asked a class at Wakefield High School in this Washington suburb.

The students laughed, then spouted complaints. One said it was 96 degrees in one of his classrooms; another said, “Look out the window right there; do you see, like, the bird’s nest?”

There is no school construction money in the bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday. But the House has approved $20 billion for construction in its version of the bill and will push for those dollars in negotiations later this week.

“It makes no sense to me that we don’t see the huge stimulative impact of putting people to work now,” Duncan said. “We have tremendous unmet need well beyond that $20 billion.”

Despite the students’ complaints, their school seemed well-maintained. The building was spic-and-span clean and had highly polished floors and paint that looked fresh.

Duncan said later, after touring the school, that the building is more than 50 years old and has serious challenges. The school district is hoping to replace the building in four years.

Duncan is moving to Arlington and plans to enroll his daughter and son in a public elementary school in the district.

The secretary, who ran Chicago public schools for the past seven years, got tough questions from the students: Why not create jobs that would last beyond the building of a new school? How would the government pay for billions of dollars in new construction?

Duncan said it will boost the economy to put people to work building schools and to save teachers’ jobs. He cited estimates that as many as 600,000 education jobs are threatened by state budget cuts.

He didn’t directly answer the question of how to pay for construction, saying only that the money is important and that tough times call for drastic action.

Also in the stimulus package is state aid to prevent school-related budget cuts, money for special education and No Child Left Behind programs that fund K through 12 education and money to boost the maximum Pell Grant for college. And the package includes an important priority of the Obama administration: a multi-billion dollar incentive fund Duncan could use to encourage school reform.

Both the Senate and the House approved education spending, but the Senate would spend less in many areas.