For most of the history of schooling, the process has been shaped by the control of time. Schools operate on a schedule. Teachers create lesson plans that determine when and how things will happen. Education has been a teacher-centered process. As we leap headfirst into the era of standards and accountability, this will be even truer.
Coverage becomes the crucial variable for getting kids ready for testing.
You can t answer what hasn t been taught. There was a brief period of time when we experimented with a different model. Back in the late 1960s and early 70s, many schools tried to convert to the open-classroom model. The concept behind that approach was that time was not the variable to be controlled. Space was the variable.