When I think about education these days, the last thing I would ever want to promote or promulgate or push or favor or flog would be the kind of thing that I experienced with the good religieuses of the Community of the Holy Spirit in the 1960s and ’70s, just west of Columbia University. There was rote learning, taped mouths (discipline!), weekly chapel, uniform inspections (we knelt! in rows! in the gym! all vaguely fascistic-seeming now). But something happened there, among the boxes of SRA cards.

Ah, the SRA cards. They sat, color-coded, in their box at the back of the classroom. You (if you were me, or Cara Morris, or Noelle Nicholson) vied to get from the bottom of the color barrel to the top. The trick was that the ranking order changed from year to year. So while orange might be the color to win in 3rd grade, a charged-up violet could be the prize in 5th grade. All very disorienting each September. Thinking I might be the only being left on the planet who remembers them — much less remembers them fondly — I was amazed to see the blogger at the above link saying that they still exist & in some bizarre way, could be viewed as a forerunner of the trend du jour, personalized learning. Oh me, oh my.