An Extra 'S' on the Report Card

Perhaps the law's greatest success, according to educators, is its requirement that students of all racial and demographic "subgroups" attain the same proficiency, which has focused schools on closing achievement gaps. The gap "is starting to narrow," said Amy Wilkins, a vice president of the Education Trust, who helped draft the law. "But not fast enough."

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The education innovators, however, have not come up with a solution to the gap that sometimes separates the president's meaning from his words. Bush's grammatical goof here Wednesday seemed to track neatly perhaps his most famous verbal faux pas. While in South Carolina in January 2000, he said: "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" Democratic strategist Paul Begala gleefully used it as the title of a Bush-bashing book he wrote.

At Wednesday's event, Bush was pointing to the test results when he stumbled. "As yesterday's positive report card shows," he said, "childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured." Bush pushed on without pausing to correct himself, but the official White House transcript released later cleaned up the sentence for him by making it "children."

The gaffe came a day after a White House draft of his speech to the U.N. General Assembly was mistakenly posted on the U.N. Web site, complete with phonetic guides to the names of various foreign countries and leaders -- "KEYR-geez-stan" (Kyrgyzstan), "moor-EH-tain-ee-a" (Mauritania), "sar-KO-zee" (French President Nicolas Sarkozy). A White House spokeswoman said it was "offensive" to ask if that indicated Bush has problems pronouncing foreign names.

Still, during his trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Australia last month, Bush did seem to have a bit of a pronunciation problem. "Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit," he told the prime minister of Australia, which like the United States is not actually a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. He also thanked the Australian leader for visiting "Austrian troops" in Iraq.

While such moments amount to a Full Employment Act for Late-Night Comedians, Bush has effectively played them off, regularly telling audiences that he was only a C student and casting himself as an ordinary fellow and not some elite intellectual, never mind his Ivy League education. Supporters see such moments as humanizing -- who wouldn't lose his verbal footing from time to time?

At a dinner with broadcast journalists in 2001, Bush poked fun of himself for his "Is our children learning?" statement. "Let us analyze that sentence for a moment," he said. "If you're a stickler, you probably think the singular verb 'is' should have been the plural 'are.' But if you read it closely, you'll see I'm using the intransitive plural subjunctive tense. So the word 'is' are correct."

Staff writer Daniel de Vise in Washington contributed to this report.