- Students should meet learning expectations—passing kids along
with a weak foundation means they will never achieve higher
level knowledge and skills and will be excluded from the idea
economy. - Students should show what they know—it’s not about
turning work in, earning point, or showing up to class, they
should demonstrate in several ways that they have mastered
important knowledge, skills, and abilities. For most people that
sounds logical and for twenty years we’ve been saying “it’s
about learning not time” and “learning is fixed and time is
variable.” Only it’s not—it’s all about time and the structures
we’ve ensconced with policies, budgets, and contracts. Since
Horace borrowed the idea from the Prussians we’ve been batch-
processing kids based on birthdays through a print curriculum.
This batch-print system was moderately efficient until we tried
to retrofit it to work for all kids. It just created a mess of
tacked on services and a crazy patchwork quilt of courses. As
educational demands of society in