The 
American Prospect is running a series on education entitled Children Left Behind that describes how current educational policy is destroying quality education in the guise of improving it. In Testing our Patience Rothstein describes how a systematic pattern of poor measurement encourages teachers to spend less time working on advanced skills, since those are less likely to be measured by the standardized tests.
State policy-makers may conclude from rising test scores that students are closer to meeting high standards, but those policy-makers would be wrong.
Moreover, although this drilling can even out differences between students on simple tasks, by denying disadvantaged students any opporunity to engage with sophisticated skills, the differences reappear at a magnified scale at higher levels.
This morning Lucy and I were having breakfast at Kelly's when Tom Hoogendyk walked in. He and Kirsten joined us for breakfast and we chatted happily for an hour or so. They had been in town for the weekend and were getting ready to head back to Boston. They attended a party last night and got to see the infamous flying squirrels, which they said were very cute. (It turns out that I had gotten an invitation to attend the party too, but wasn't checking my email yesterday afternoon.) It's always great to see Tom.
The Dozen Tongues project is doing another book this year! I've worked as a translator on the last two books -- a third one had been planned for last year, but fell through. This year the theme is "The Night Sky" with profits donated to support The Space Race. I've put some postings in several likely places and received two submissions already. For the first two editions, there were no original Esperanto-language haiku. For the first one, it was because I was brought into the project late. For the second, I was unable to find enough authors to submit haiku. I'm hoping this year, we'll have one.