Fads rule much of American education. A good example is block scheduling. In most high schools in the Washington area — and much of the rest of the country — that innovation has replaced the traditional 45-minute daily class periods with classes that meet every other day for as long as 90 minutes each.

The block approach, influenced by the work of University of Virginia school administration expert Robert Lynn Canady, swept through this area in the 1990s. I had to explain it in several stories then. It was not easy. The array of colors and numbers used to distinguish each class was bewildering.

Still, about three-quarters of this region’s high schools, and many middle schools, have stuck with block schedules, even though many educators have a difficult time explaining why. Studies say neither block
Arlington County schools Superintendent Patrick K. Murphy (Arlington County schools) nor regular schedules make much of a difference.

Some schools have shifted back to regular schedules. Few had adopted block scheduling in recent years until Arlington County sparked a parent rebellion this year with a plan to install block scheduling in all five county middle schools.

Arlington middle schools are already doing well in a county with the nation’s highest percentage of college-graduate residents. Many parents ask: Why mess with a system that works?

My topic today is something people in the Washington area rarely acknowledge. The lawyers, educators, government officials, consultants, journalists and other analytical types so numerous here prefer to fix what’s wrong---how about those Redskins?---rather than celebrate what’s right.

Still, they might examine the annual report on Advanced Placement released Wednesday by the College Board and appreciate that this area leads the nation in public school achievement.

There are many ways to measure school success. The College Board numbers are impressive because they show the academic level reached by our students at the end of the entire kindergarten through 12th grade process. Maryland ranked first in the nation and Virginia third in the percentage of graduating seniors in 2011 who scored a passing grade on an AP test during high school.

The numbers would look even better if they included International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education test results. Like AP, those programs give high school students courses and exams similar to what they would receive their first year of college. The AP, IB and AICE exams are much longer than high school course finals. They are heavy with essay questions. They are written and scored by outside experts insulated from appeals to give Tommy a good grade so he can graduate even though he devoted last semester to video games.

The AP data also show how much most of our schools have improved in just a decade. In Maryland, 27.9 percent of seniors graduating in 2011 had a passing score on an AP test, double the 2001 rate of 14.8 percent. Virginia’s percentage of graduating seniors with a passing score went from 16.5 in 2001 to 25.6 in 2011. The national average in that period went from 10.8 to 25.6 percent.

Arizona State University sophomore architecture major Scott Johnson (James Carreno - Associated Press) I picked my college major, Government, because I was interested in politics and knew that its demands were less than other majors I might have attempted, such as history or East Asian languages. To put it more simply, it was a gut major that many of my colleagues on the student newspaper chose because it would allow us to spend all our time at the paper and get by with entertainingly written, if thinly sourced, papers and exams. Our managing editor (now my wife of 44 years) switched to government from American History and Literature, a wise move that prevented her from suffering the fate of many managing editors before and after her. They were put on academic probation and had to leave school for awhile.

My wife and I are on a health kick. We go to the local gym. We eat fish, lean meat and vegetables. I resist cheese, a life-long favorite. I astonish our children by consuming only one milkshake a week.

Still, we understand the potential for backsliding. At our age, people live for the present and worry less about the future. We are like high school students who gravitate toward fast food because the consequences of too much sugar, salt and fat don’t interest them.

I noticed, then, when the many optimistic stories about the U.S. Agriculture Department’s new school meal nutrition standards---based on the assumption that teenagers will happily pile more fruits, veggies and whole grains on their plates—were undercut by a visit to school lunch lines by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times.

She found trouble with the L.A. school menus changed last year to more healthy choices---black bean burgers, tostada salad, fresh pears--- in tune with the new federal guidelines.

“Principals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away,” she wrote in December. “At many campuses, an underground market for chips, candy, fast-food burgers and other taboo fare is thriving.”

Luke Chung, president and founder of a software development company in Tysons Corner, volunteered many times to help the Fairfax County school system with computer and business issues. He was a nice guy, so when the county needed to fill two slots reserved for outsiders (what educators often call non-educators) on the Teacher Performance Evaluation Task Force, he was appointed.

He might have seemed to some a genial innocent who would not get in the way of the teachers, principals and administrators who were the majority. But Chung was an experienced manager motivated to nudge the task force in new directions. He revealed in his company blog his astonished reaction to the key issue:

“As an outsider who has never been evaluated as a teacher, you can imagine my surprise to discover that although principals were judged by their school’s student performance, student performance is not part of a teacher’s performance evaluation in our county,” he wrote. “Are you kidding me?” Chung’s italics, not mine.

He got the basics. “Not all students are equal, and we don’t want to have a system where teachers are evaluated solely on student performance because the incentive would be to only want to teach good students,” he wrote. He saw some sense in value-added measurements, rating teachers on how much their students improved. But there were practical problems, he said, “such as kids moving in and out of classes within the year, impacts on kids outside teacher control, whether the test is a good measurement, multiple teacher collaborative environments, etc.”