Yesterday I sent in an op-ed to the WP to the effect that even if the achievement gap in reading and math is narrowing, and it is not at all clear that that is happening, the achievement gap in a broader senseis growing.  It makes some of the arguments Monty Neill just made on ARN about what tests measure and what's worth learning.  Not too far removed from James Crawford's recent Ed Week piece, but not cast in civil rights terms, just experiential with examples of kids learningscience from the real world vs. learning from a book vs. not learning it at all.

Also yesterday this arrived:

"We should have seen this coming.  We and others who have pressed for higher academic standards in recent years--particularly since theCharlottesville education 'summit' set national education goals in1989--should have anticipated the 'zero sum' problem that it would give rise to...Insofar as we recognized this, however, we naively assumed that school days and years would expand to accommodate more of everything...

"We were wrong.  We didn't see how completely standards-based reform would turn into a basic-skills testing frenzy or the negative impact it would have on educational quality.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Diane Ravitch

Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children.

This grew out of a conference sponsored by Checker & Fordham last December.

Finn and Ravitch point to 4 trends that need to be reversed for a rebirth of liberal education:

1. The gradual death of liberal learning in higher education

2.  A standards-and-accountability movement increasingly focused onlyon "basic skills."

3.  Growing support for math and science at the expense of the rest of the curriculum.

4.  Widening gaps: "the accelerating advantage of the have-a-lots over the have-littles--and we see a worsening gap, not its opposite."

For those of us predicting that 4th trend not just since NCLB but since the Minimum Competency Testing madness of the 1970's it's hard not to ask what took you so long, but still the realization is a welcome one.

The book is at www.edexcellence.net.  I can't get the whole book to download, but have taken down individual chapters.  Dana Gioia's suffers a little bit from being on paper as one might expect of remarks delivered by a poet (he's head of the National Endowment for the Arts), but it's still a wonder.  The webcast of the December 12 conference is still up at the same site for anyone want to see and hear his comments.

Jerry