> But will we finally have a path away from standardized testing, middle-of-the-road education? I am hopefully optimistic. We'll rediscover the need for human growth and development in our schools.

I worry that the availability of this path will be extremely unevenly distributed, amplifying existing educational gaps along class, race, and language-proficiency lines.

That might be better than a forced average denominator, but the social effects of further amplifying those gaps are pretty severe and don’t take that long to happen. Combine that with the fact that education isn’t like new miracle drugs, where improvements inevitably tend to become more and more widely available to different groups, and I’m not as optimistic about the future.