We have had blue ribbon commissions, congressional committees, corporate roundtables, university consortiums and dozens of non-profit organizations struggle with the central question of American education: How do we prepare students for success in college? The written output of these groups numbers tens of thousands of pages, at least.

And yet I just got more useful information from a 198-page book written by an unknown assistant professor of education at Seton Hall University than I ever learned from those stacks of well-intentioned reports.

Dear Valerie,

I stand corrected. We geezers get confused easily. Thanks for forgiving my failure to understand who was being forgiven.

Before I recharge my batteries after this challenging exchange, I have just one complaint about one paragraph in your response.

[This is my Local Living column for Nov. 5, 2009]
Sputnik got me into algebra early, almost. The Soviet satellite frightened the U.S. government into approving lots of money to accelerate math instruction just as I was completing eighth grade in San Mateo, Calif., in 1959. Hillsdale High, where I was to attend ninth grade, got some of these funds and decided to finance summer school in Algebra 1 for four incoming freshman math wonks, me and three other socially awkward friends of mine.

My colleague Valerie Strauss, purveyor of The Answer Sheet blog on our shared Post education Web site, just posted a letter to me saying I wasn't, as she once thought, a vile merchant of student stress for rating high schools based on Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge test participation. My Challenge Index list was still a bad idea, she said kindly, but she now realizes it is the schools and parents who fell for my evil scheme--not me--who are to blame.
Uh, thanks Val. I always welcome plugs for the Challenge Index. A new ranked list of all public high schools in the Washington area (here's the current list) will be out in a couple of months. But I reject your theory about what has created AP fever in our schools.

The Common Core blog, which shares my distrust of the 21st century skills movement, is warning about the appointment of Apple executive Karen Cator as head of the U.S. Education Department's Office of Education Technology. I don't know Cator. Common Core says she once chaired the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the movement's leading organization, and might push their agenda in Washington. I think the partnership is led by well-intentioned people, but so far they have done a lousy job showing how their approach will improve schools.

I have put out a best education blogs list the last two years, but I wasn't a blogger myself then, and really didn't know what I was doing. Now that I face personally, each day, the pressures of being both interesting and true, I face this responsibility reborn, determined to make this the golly-whiz best list of the best education blogs ever. Fortunately Valerie Strauss, czarina of the Post's The Answer Sheet blog, has agreed to be my colleague in this venture. Now we need your help.

Arne Duncan is the latest in a splendid crop of U.S. education secretaries over the last few decades. The ones I have known best include, in alphabetical order: Bill Bennett, Rod Paige, Dick Riley and Margaret Spellings--all fine people who care about kids and understand the issues. But I wish all of them had not spent valuable time trying to deal with the painfully slow pace and often politically-addled reasoning of national education policy. Their best work for kids, in my view, happened when they were NOT education secretary. So let's abolish the office and get that talent back where it belongs, where school change really happens, in our states and cities.

Michael Birnbaum, one of the Post's newest and youngest reporters, has just shamed this geezer columnist by producing a feature on Monday's education page full of stuff I didn't know. Go to our education page for the "Public data on private schools" link to Birnbaum's story, "Mining the Web for public data on private schools." It is full of tantalizing information you won't find on private school web pages and ways to discover even more.

In the last half of the 19th century, many inventors pursued the dream of building an airplane. Duds and crashes were frequent and skeptics numerous. Only a decade before the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight, British physicist and engineer Lord Kelvin had declared that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” American educators are similarly scrambling to create a teacher evaluation system that will raise the level of instruction and student achievement in the same reliable way that modern jetliners take us home for Thanksgiving. They have not been very successful.

A very thoughtful and persistent reader who signs in as bermanator4 has gone after me for not warning readers of my personal views whenever I address issues about which I have written extensively, particularly when I have written books on the topic. This is something that I and the many other Post writers who have done books have heard before, and it deserves consideration. Does producing a book that comes to strong conclusions---as many of our books do---make us biased, and untrustworthy when discussing the issue and presenting facts on it in the Post, and on washingtonpost.com?

I don't have a transcript of yesterday's raucous D.C. Council hearing over the disputed layoffs of 266 teachers early this month, but the TV clip I saw had Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray asking D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee if she thought she was smarter than everybody else in deciding not to cut $9 million for the 2010 summer school, as the council told her to do. Anyone who has looked at the data on summer learning loss would have to say Rhee was right, and the council was wrong. That won't solve the communication problem the city government is struggling with, but if you are concerned with raising the achievement of D.C. kids, it is important to emphasize that point.