It’s not a bad thing when someone who is high-profile lends their name to a good cause. This time it is Tina Fey.

Fey attended public schools in the Upper Darby School District in
(Nicole Rivelli) Pennsylvania. She was in the choir and drama club while an honor student at Upper Darby High School, and performed in plays. She was Frenchie in a performance of “Grease.”

So when the three-time Emmy Award-winner heard that her old school district had proposed eliminating specialized elementary school classes in arts and music (along with library and gym) to help deal with a multimillion-dollar deficit, she decided to join the fight against the changes.

Jack Andraka is a 15-year-old kid from Maryland who just won the world’s largest and most important high school science fair by devising a new way to detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages.

(Evy Mages/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) And then there’s Lori Anne Madison, the 6-year-old Virginia girl who is the youngest student ever to qualify for the National Spelling Bee — but she’s more than just a great speller. The prodigy, who lives in Prince William County, was reading at the age of 2.

Andraka, from Anne Arundel County, nabbed the first-place $75,000 scholarship award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Pittsburgh and will also receive and $12,000 in cash for his discovery.

This was written by Larry Cuban, a former high school social studies teacher (14 years, including seven at Cardozo and Roosevelt high schools in the District), district superintendent (seven years in Arlington, VA) and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 20 years. His latest book is “As Good As It Gets: What School Reform Brought to Austin.” This appeared on his blog.

By Larry Cuban

As a result of inhabiting a different world than teachers, policymakers make a consequential error. They and a cadre of influentials confuse teacher quality with teaching quality, that is, the personal traits of teachers — dedicated, caring, gregarious, intellectually curious — produce student learning rather than the classroom and school settings.

Both are important, of course, but policymakers and their influential camp followers have accentuated personal traits far more than the organizational and social context in which teachers teach daily. So if students score low on tests, then who the teachers are, their personal traits, credentials, and attitudes come under close scrutiny, rather than the age-graded school, neighborhood demography, workplace conditions, and resources that support teaching. The person overshadows the place.[i]

In attributing far more weight to individual teacher traits rather than seriously considering the situation in which teachers teach, policymakers and civic and business leaders end up having a cramped view of teaching quality.

Quality teaching is complex because an essential distinction is masked: the difference between “good” teaching and “successful” teaching. Both “good” and ” successful” teaching are necessary to reach the threshold of quality instruction and student learning. To lead us through the thicket of complexity, I lean on Gary Fenstermacher and Virginia Richardson’s analysis of quality teaching.[ii]

Correction: The explanation for the answer to No. 2 gave an incorrect number of war dead in an earlier version of this post. It is now correct.

Here’s a quiz to test yourself on how much you know about Memorial Day and the wars in which U.S. soldiers have fought and died.

Answers, with a bit of history, follow the questions.

Sscouts light more than 17,000 candles at the Fredericksburg National Cemetery in Virginia. (Peter Cihelka/AP) 1. Memorial Day was a response to the loss of American lives in which war?

a) Revolutionary War

b) Civil War

c) World War I

d) World War II

2. What was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history?

a) Battle of Antietam

b) Battle of Gettysburg

c) Battle of Shiloh

d) Battle of Okinawa

Memorial Day commemorations ordinarily involve parades, concerts, barbecues, sporting events and a lot of flag-waving. Here's a more introspective way to commemorate the national holiday: Read some poetry about war. It’s a great way for parents and teacherss to help children understand the emotion bebhind war — the glory and the horror.

World War II veteran Jesse R. Turner embraces Helen Marie Misel at a display of over more than 1,700 United States flags in Shawnee, Kan. (Orlin Wagner/AP) Memorial Day is a federal holiday to honor all Americans who have died fighting the country’s wars while serving in the U.S. armed forces. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the first official observance was on May 28, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. By the 20th century, the holiday was extended to all soldiers who had fallen in all American wars.

Here are several of the greatest poems about soldiers and war that have ever been written, along with some links to more poems. Some idealize soldiers and hold up their triumphs on the battlefield as glorious; others reveal the ugliness of combat and condemn war as man’s great folly.