EDITORIAL READING DIFFICULTIES.IF one looks carefully, there are some positive signs in a national reading survey that ranks California's students among the worst in the country: The proportion of under-performing African-American and Latino students has shrunk shrunk v. A past tense and a past participle of shrink. shrunk Verb a past tense and past participle of shrink shrunk, shrunken shrink , suggesting that the state is improving its outreach to inner-city schools. Only a fraction of California's fourth- and eighth-graders participated in the test, so the dismal dis·mal adj. 1. Causing gloom or depression; dreary: dismal weather; took a dismal view of the economy. 2. results might not be reflective of the entire state. Still, California students ranked dead last in the survey among the 43 states that participated; only the District of Columbia District of Columbia, federal district (2000 pop. 572,059, a 5.7% decrease in population since the 1990 census), 69 sq mi (179 sq km), on the east bank of the Potomac River, coextensive with the city of Washington, D.C. (the capital of the United States). , Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa American Samoa, officially Territory of American Samoa, unincorporated territory of the United States (2000 pop. 57,291), comprising the eastern half of the Samoa island chain in the South Pacific. fared worse. Despite vast efforts and tremendous sums of money, the state's public education, as a whole, is still in desperate shape. The need for serious reform couldn't be any more clear. |
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