At last, ceaseless Wire-blogging leads to an actual policy issue as Zachary Norris recalls his days in the Baltimore City school system: “I had no formal teaching experience and no real qualifications other than a college degree and a strong desire to ‘close the achievement gap.’ I joined the Teach For America program and ended up teaching in Baltimore for three years. The experience was humbling.”

But what would it mean — what could it mean — to close the achievement gap between high- and low-SES students in American schools? For a whole variety of reasons, this just doesn’t seem like it’s going to be possible. At the outer limit, more prosperous parents are always going to be able to re-open the gap by investing even more resources in their kids’ education. An education and child development arms race to the top might not be a bad thing, but it wouldn’t close any socioeconomic gaps. To do that, you actually need to tackle inequality itself. In the context of a reasonably egalitarian society, a well-functioning school system shouldn’t exhibit massive achievement gaps, but in the context of a wildly inegalitarian one there’s no way the school system can singlehandedly set everything back to zero. See also super-intern Conor Clarke’s thought on the latest homework “debate.”

The new edition of BloggingHeads features an epic three segment battle between myself and Jon Chait about Iraq, incompetence, liberal hawks, etc. In addition, since I stopped working out of the Prospect offices and moved at roughly the same time, I had to try setting up my camera in a totally unfamiliar location and let’s just say I think it might be my worst lighting ever, which is a fairly impressive feat in light of the track record.

I’m in a bit of a bad mood, and this news doesn’t really help matters: “Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.”

But now here’s the rub. Cooperating with Syria on our common interest in combatting Salafist terrorism seems like a very good idea to me. Certainly a much better idea than trying to provoke conflict with Syria by nonsensically lumping it in with some “Islamofascist” bogeyman. And yet, since the United States shouldn’t be in the torture business, colluding with Syria in order to have people tortured is not the sort of cooperation we should be engaged in. That’s my view, and it strikes me as a coherent one reflecting a standard liberal worldview. “Cooperation good; torture bad.” Somehow, though, to the Bush administration we should cooperate with Syria only insofar as it once provided a convenient mechanism for the conduct of torture. That, it seems to me, is a truly deranged worldview.