Send these around!

From this month's Mother Jones comes two items that need to be read, shared, discussed, and passed on.

First, reporter Kristina Rizga spent 18 months at Mission High School in San Francisco, which generally makes the lists of "lowest performing" schools. What she found is that pretty much everything you hear (casually) about such schools is wrong.

 At Mission High, the struggling school she'd chosen against the advice of her friends and relatives, Maria earned high grades in math and some days caught herself speaking English even with her Spanish-speaking teachers. By 11th grade, she wrote long papers on complex topics like desegregation and the war in Iraq. She became addicted to winning debates in class, despite her shyness and heavy accent. In her junior year, she became the go-to translator and advocate for her mother, her aunts, and for other Latino kids at school. In March, Maria and her teachers were celebrating acceptance letters to five colleges and two prestigious scholarships, including one from Dave Eggers' writing center,826 Valencia.But on the big state tests—the days-long multiple-choice exams that students in California take once a year—Maria scored poorly. And these standardized tests, she understood, were how her school was graded.

This article includes the best yet breakdown of what it's like to take a test as a second language learner.

And as a follow-up, here's six myths of modern education; read the whole thing here for the myth-busting. All scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

• Myth 1: kids don't know as much as they used to. Nope, scores are (and have been) steadily increasing over time.

• Myth 2:...but we haven't made as much progress with black and Latino kids. Black and Latino kids have been making unheralded progress for quite some time, and, most tellingly, the progress was faster before NCLB.

• Myth 3: Private schools are doing okay, but public schools are still a mess. Nope, improvement's across the board.

• Myth 4: There's still a big gender gap. Not so much. The reading gap--girls leading--has been closing, and math is about even.

• Myth 5:...but the kids who really struggle are still far behind. The lowest decile--the kids who really struggle--is actually going up faster than the highest scoring kids. And again: improvement has been steady over time, so it is not a consequence of NCLB.
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• Myth 6: Everything's fine. Nope, all those gains? Mostly gone by high school.
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To quote (possibly) Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."