The weakly standards: one teacher's losing fight with high-stakes, low-logic testing.(Educating America)

WHEN STANDARDS OF LEARNING (SOLS) FIRST APPEARED in my Northern Virginia public school classroom nearly seven years ago, they were hardly more than a lunch-table punch line--another unfortunate abbreviation coined by board-of-education bureaucrats to browbeat our low-achieving, high-minority school.

SOLs constituted a body of knowledge that students would learn in each academic subject. The initials became the sobriquet for both the curriculum and a test that, after a phase-in period of six years, kids would have to pass in core subjects by 2003 in order to graduate. Sometime after ...

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