Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.” This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. But there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record. If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up — giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.

The data obtained by the Chicago News Cooperative shows that where race was not used as a factor in admissions, 85 percent of either black or white students would have to change schools to achieve an even distribution between the two groups across the entire school system.

The Chicago public schools’ response to a recent court desegregation ruling — a plan to use students’ social and economic profiles instead of race to achieve classroom diversity — is raising fears that it will undermine the district’s slow and incremental progress on racial diversity.

In short, Mr. Weis’s strategy boiled down to this: launch a concentrated attack on street gangs by assembling a special force of 400 officers to work with residents in poor neighborhoods to pre-empt and reduce violence. The superintendent and his team faced an intriguing new challenge. Past crackdowns by the police had created a shifting landscape in the world of street gangs; as an older generation of gang leaders was put behind bars, the sociology of gangs changed, spawning fragmentation and turf wars. With no leadership to enforce discipline, once-petty arguments over dice games or girlfriends quickly escalated into violent and even fatal attacks, making enforcement particularly tough.

The experts propose that both conditions should be subsumed under the term “autism spectrum disorder,” with individuals differentiated by levels of severity. It may be true that there is no hard and fast separation between Asperger syndrome and classic autism, since they are currently differentiated only by intelligence and onset of language. Both classic autism and Asperger syndrome involve difficulties with social interaction and communication, alongside unusually narrow interests and a strong desire for repetition, but in Asperger syndrome, the person has good intelligence and language acquisition. The question of whether Asperger syndrome should be included or excluded is the latest example of dramatic changes in history of the diagnostic manual. The first manual, published in 1952, listed 106 “mental disorders.” The second (1968), listed 182, and famously removed homosexuality as a disorder in a later printing. The third (1980) listed 265 disorders, taking out “neurosis.” The revised third version (1987) listed 292 disorders, while the current fourth version cut the list of disorders back to 283. This history reminds us that psychiatric diagnoses are not set in stone. They are “manmade,” and different generations of doctors sit around the committee table and change how we think about “mental disorders.

Segregation is like the elephant in the china shop. No one wants to admit it’s there,” said Jonathan Kozol, award-winning writer, educator and activist. “Yet America’s public schools are more segregated today than they were when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.

Seriously, why would Republicans, who have traditionally opposed big government, encumber schools with the testing requirements attached to No Child Left Behind? The kind of testing we are doing today is sociopathic in its repetitive and punitive nature. Its driving motive is to highlight failure in inner-city schools as dramatically as possible in order to create a ground swell of support for private vouchers or other privatizing schemes.