Schools with Power to Adapt to Individual Children
Dear Diane,
I picked up a nice button in D.C. that reads: "Those who can, TEACH. Those who can't, pass laws about teaching."
I, too, once proposed a law: "Any legislative body that mandates a test for K-12 students must first take the test and publicly post their scores."
Rick Hess and Terry Moe, I suspect, would score at the top of that list. I grew suspicious of this talent for test-taking only when my oldest son, an early and fluent reader, gave wrong answers on a 3rd grade test. While his test failure may have fooled his teacher, it didn't fool me. But it made me curiouser and curiouser. So I tape-recorded 8-year-olds in Harlem "doing" the test. I discovered that they mostly read OK, but still gave "wrong" answers.
It felt much that way at the recent American Enterprise Institute session in D.C. in which I took part. I had a long list of issues to take up with Terry Moe and, even stretching my time limit, not enough time to get through them. So I felt semi-incoherent. I focused on Moe's historical amnesia about the rules and regulations imposed on
