To use one of Alan's favorite words, FIRE is a remarkable organization. It is more interested in protecting those freedoms than in scoring points or making its founders famous. When faced with a campus controversy, FIRE's first step is not a press conference but a letter calling on the administration to follow its own principles. On a gratifying number of occasions, this approach works, though rarely does it elicit as eloquent and principled a response as Hamilton's. Today's eighth graders will be the first Texas students to face a new battery of tests in order to graduate from high school.
Critics doubt that the schools can improve enough to close that gap within four years.
Unfortunately, the facts are that scores on tests like these don't go up very quickly. Testing fans predict that the stick of failure will make those schools shape up. School bureaucracies do indeed change slowly, and there are some bad ones in Texas, notably the utterly inept Dallas Independent School District. Now that we're Texas residents, we can expect to receive a free movie in the mail, and we don't even have to join the Academy. Following the journalist's conflict-demanding formula, reporter Jeffrey Weiss rounds up the usual victim groups.