Free Republic

The District of Columbia has a reputation for serving black students poorly. And now, a new report by the Council of Latino Agencies confirms that it serves Latino students just as badly. o Close to 9 percent of Latino students drop out of school, the highest rate of any group in the D.C. public school system. o In 1999, 31 percent of Latino youth who dropped out said they left because of fear of violence in their schools, compared with 19 percent for dropouts as a whole. Spanish-speakers are 81 percent of the 9,000 children in D.C. public schools whose...

When Winston Churchill was a boy, his boarding school teacher said of the future British prime minister in a report card: ``Constantly late for school, losing his books and papers and various other things into which I need not enter: He is so regular in his irregularity that I really don't know what to do.'' A schoolteacher's complaint like this in a report card would cause any parent immeasurable distress. Inevitably, young Churchill's grades were the worst in his class. This seems incredible, given that he went on to become one of the 20th century's greatest statesmen. Saddened, his mother...