THE CASE FOR CONTENT STANDARDS. Students at a New Jersey elementary school performed a song honoring President Obama as part of Black History Month and Presidents' Day observations.

The video has not pleased the Loyal Opposition.

The CBS Political Hotsheet attempts to lower the heat.

Two observations. First, some reports I have seen have suggested that "Jesus Loves the Little Children" is the same tune as "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (which is some older tune, also used in "John Brown's Body.") The first tune, which might have been composed by an eight-year old, borrows a line ("Red, Yellow, Black or White, All are equal in his sight")
from "Jesus Loves the Little Children", which uses the tune of "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," a prisoners' song that Union prisoners probably used to get under the skin of their rebel guards. The second song uses "Battle Hymn," a tune well suited to third-grade parodies ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school ...")

Second, and more substantively, I trust that the youngsters will have an opportunity to grasp the complexities of that "Equal work means equal pay" line. The content standards of the Council for Economic Education, which provide teachers with material to meet their state benchmarks, include income determination among fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students. These materials shy away from engagement with comparable worth, probably wisely. Experts in the economics of work and pay tend to discover that income differences reflect differences in human capital and attachment to the labor force, this despite the academic culture's willingness to reward research that would find residual discrimination against women and selected ethnic groups. (The formulas that some people use to determine comparable worth tend to diverge on weighting pink-collar jobs.) I suppose it would be churlish to ask a tenured elementary school teacher in a unionized district to justify the difference between her compensation and the compensation cobbled together by an adjunct lecturer of freshman composition at four community colleges. Churlish, but entertaining.