A Report on Moral Character Best Left Behind

But in Fairfax, and in schools across the land, the instinct -- no, the compulsion -- is to amass data points and "disaggregate," ed-lingo for looking at children not as individuals but as members of a group. The move to quantify grows from a religious devotion to test scores, a faith that the shaping of a mind can be mapped like a cancer cell and expressed as a number. And the resort to race stems from the balkanization of society, the self-destructive notion that we are a collection of groups rather than a nation of individuals who believe what it says on the coins in your pocket: e pluribus unum -- out of many, one.

"The superintendent told me that the reason they broke it down by race was that two years ago, the board decided to report all data by race," Hone said. "That was part of the No Child Left Behind frenzy. This is a classic case of a pendulum overswing."

Hone believes that as long as the achievement gap that divides the races persists, it's important to break out test scores by race. Otherwise, the failure to push underachieving students up to par might be hidden beneath overall strong numbers in a system such as Fairfax's.

But discerning right from wrong goes to the intimate core of the relationship between student and teacher, Hone says. It's just not something that you can reduce to a number. "This is on the teachers," she says. "It's not a problem of one group of kids. If I as a teacher saw a kid being left out because they were a nerd or fat, it was my job to figure out how to get that child together with the others."

Just as solutions to a child's struggle to learn to read must be molded to each kid's needs, so too must each moral compass be fixed, one at a time.

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