School not fun.

WaPo discovers. Click on the link to read plenty of quotes from high school kids who didn't like that the teachers assigned so much reading, chose classics instead of the books they'd have picked for themselves, and pushed them to analyze sentences and understand metaphors instead of letting them enjoy their own meaning.

Why isn't the Post more critical of the students' cliché whines? And why is this news? Because nowadays we're blaming those standardized tests. They're ruining everything.

Or are they? Read this, from the New York Times:

Spurred by President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, educators across the nation are putting extraordinary effort into improving the achievement of minority students, who lag so sharply that by 12th grade, the average black or Hispanic student can read and do arithmetic only as well as the average eighth-grade white student.

Here in Boston, low-achieving students, most of them blacks and Hispanics, are seeing tutors during lunch hours for help with math. In a Sacramento junior high, low-achieving students are barred from orchestra and chorus to free up time for remedial English and math. And in Minnesota, where American Indian students, on average, score lower than whites on standardized tests, educators rearranged schedules so that Chippewa teenagers who once sewed beads onto native costumes during school now work on grammar and algebra.

"People all over the country are suddenly scrambling around trying to find ways to close this gap," said Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard professor who for more than a decade has been researching school practices that could help improve minority achievement. He said he recently has received many requests for advice. "Superintendents are calling and saying, 'Can you help us?' "