Is Ed Balls trying to kill off grammar schools?

Janet Daley writes on Ed Balls’ latest initiative:

So what Mr Balls is proposing is effectively merging local secondary moderns with grammars. And what do you call a grammar school that is merged with a secondary modern? Why, a “comprehensive school” of course. It was precisely that sort of “take-over” (or merger) that produced the first generation of comprehensives – and which resulted not in the raising of all schools to grammar standards, but to the collapse of the grammar school ethos and its tradition of academic achievement. Having failed to extinguish the remaining grammars by traducing them, Labour had to find another way of removing this embarrassing bastion of high achievement from the educational scene: so it has devised a fiendish ruse in which it seems to be extending the reach of grammar school education when it is in fact planning to eradicate it.