How de facto school choice operates now. Dan Weissmann and Lisa Lewis write in Catalyst (November) that 17,000 students left the Chicago Public Schools between September 1995 and September 1996. “Students bailed out at every grade level, but 8th grade topped the list, with about 2,700 students leaving for public suburban or non-public schools. Kindergarten was next with 1,600 students. Other grades averaged about 1,200. While the leavers are more middle class than is total CPS enrollment, most are low income. While they are much whiter than is total CPS enrollment, most are students of color. While they are more likely to do well on standardized tests, most do not score at or above national norms.”
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What does the Pentagon actually mean when it describes a region as “unstable”? According to Lieutenant Colonel Piers Wood in the “Weekly Defense Monitor” (November 6), it’s hard to say–unless it really means “things we don’t like” or perhaps “things we want to spend money on.” For instance, “It’s easy to understand ‘instability’ in the recent context of Liberia or Bosnia. But it’s more difficult to understand why the term is almost never used to describe circumstances in Northern Ireland.”
Union blues. “Sometimes the union steward would come looking for our cards” in the blues clubs around town in the 1950s, writes David Honeyboy Edwards in his reminiscence The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing. “He’d say, ‘At least one of you has got to have a card!’ I’d say, ‘I got mine!’ and slip him five dollars. He’d take that five and hit the road. Come back the next night and I do the same thing. Slip him some money, have a pint of whiskey waiting for him. They’d pull you off the bandstand if you didn’t slip them something, and you wouldn’t get to holler then.”
Happy New Year and welcome to the world, babies–it’s not as bad as they say. “The infant mortality rate for U.S. children born in 1996 was at an all-time low,” announced the suburban-based American Academy of Pediatrics in a December 1 press release, “and their life expectancy was at an all-time high.”
