To muddy the waters here a bit, I thought I'd bring up one of the great educational controversies -- testing. Some call standardized tests the only guarantee of real standards in education. Others complain that they force educators to "teach to the test," and waste precious classroom time. I don't intend to get into that debate now, but readers are welcome to take it up in the comments box if they so choose.

Instead, though, I'd like to raise the question: Are we testing the right way? I ask in light of a conversation I recently had with my wife, who for several years taught first and second grades before becoming a full-time, stay-at-home mom.

In my wife's -- and most teachers' -- experience, classroom learning varies widely depending on what students bring with them from home. That is, some kids come "pre-educated" -- they've been read to, exposed to a wide vocabulary, maybe even taught to read -- before ever setting foot in a school. Others come not even knowing English, or having been "pre-educated" no further than whatever they happened to glean spending the day in front of a TV set.

The problem with the current testing system is that it tells us what kids know -- which is a combination of what they brought to school and what school gave them -- but doesn't necessarily measure the education that's been done on campus. In some communities, where parents don't have much education at all, merely getting the kids to grade level may be quite a feat. In others, where students already come in at grade level, keeping them there is a sign of failure.

Might part of the solution to this problem be in (shudder) more testing? What if we tested kids at the beginning of the year, and then again -- using the same standards -- at the end of the year? Unlike current annual testing, we wouldn't be evaluating kids against how they stack up to other kids, or how simply well they know certain material, but how well they've improved their knowledge of that year's standards over the course of that year.

Could such an evaluation give us a better sense of which teachers, which schools, and which curricula are most successful?