I have been trying to wrap my brain around that thought this week and hope to connect some seemingly unconnected thoughts and ideas on this page.

We are putting the finishing touches on “REBIRTH: New Orleans,” our 1-hour film about schooling there since Katrina and the flooding. We’ve dedicated the film to the kids who were shot to death with handguns during the years we filmed there. That casualty list includes a young girl who is in the film. Christine Marcelin was just 15 when she was murdered.

When you meet Christine early in the film, you learn that she wants to go to Princeton and become a veterinarian. She was killed last spring in an act of senseless violence, shot by teenagers who apparently feared that she might know something about a murder they had committed a few days earlier.

Life is tragically unfair.

Here’s another example: This week the obituary page of the New York Times reported the news of the death of 82-year-old Olen Burrage, a long time member of the Ku Klux Klan and owner of the Mississippi farm where the bodies of three slain civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were found in 1964. Burrage died in Meridian, Mississippi.

The Times article comes as close as it can to declaring, “Burrage was guilty” without saying it. It points out that he had built a dam on his property and offered it as a burial ground. “An F.B.I. agent, John Proctor, claimed to have learned from an informant that Mr. Burrage had said something quite different, telling a roomful of Klansmen discussing the arrival of the civil rights workers, ‘Hell, I’ve got a dam that will hold a hundred of them.’”

To further convince the reader of Mr. Burrage’s guilt, the obituary includes a version of events described by someone who was convicted: “The Klan had arranged for the bodies to arrive at Mr. Burrage’s property at midnight. Mr. Burrage was waiting in a 1957 Chevrolet to direct Klansmen to the dam site. After the bodies had been buried, the top of the grave was bladed off so it looked undisturbed.

Mr. Burrage and several other Klansmen then went to his trucking company garage, and Mr. Burrage filled a glass gallon jug with gasoline, to be used to burn the civil rights workers’ 1963 Ford station wagon, which had transported their bodies. He said he would pick up the men assigned to do the burning in a diesel truck as it would be a normal vehicle to see on the highway late at night.”

As a final bit of damning evidence, the obituary notes: “Many who have studied the case have noted that Mr. Burrage consulted an agent of the federal Soil Conservation Service about possible subsidies for the dam he planned. It turned out he was eligible for the subsidies. He never followed up.” That sentence just hangs there, letting the reader absorb the implication–he didn’t follow up because…..

But Olen Burrage lived a long and seemingly satisfied life with his wife of 62 years, three children and ‘many’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Life is unfair…but, happily, sometimes it’s not.

Some good men and women live long and honorable lives and create living monuments that will improve society for years to come. One such man turns 85 this week. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., the unassuming, proud and occasionally feisty intellectual who created Core Knowledge schools, observes his birthday on March 22nd. Don Hirsch was a widely unknown English professor at the University of Virginia when he published “Cultural Literacy” in 1987. The book’s subtitle–”What Every American Needs to Know”– outraged liberal intellectuals, many of whom, I suspect, did not read the book before condemning Professor Hirsch as an elitist. He is anything but. He’s a proud ‘small d democrat’ who believes that knowing lots and lots of things actually levels the playing field for rich and poor.

Don did not stop with Cultural Literacy, still hasn’t stopped. He created the Core Knowledge Foundation and began issuing curriculum guides, grade by grade. “What Every First Grader Needs to Know,” and so on up the ladder.

Before long there were Core Knowledge Schools, several of which I have visited over the years. I wish his critics would make that trip. The ones I have seen (in several states) have been vibrant places where everyone seems engaged in learning and discovering. On one visit, I selected kids at random and asked them to read aloud from books I knew they had never seen, books that were either grade-appropriate or one step above. All read flawlessly, probably because students in Core Knowledge schools do a lot of reading.

They don’t practice taking reading tests because, as Don wisely observed, “if you want children to do well on reading tests, they ought to read a lot.”

About 800 US schools use the Core Knowledge approach. While that’s not even one percent of our schools, the number is growing. Perhaps someday Core Knowledge schools will be as ubiquitous as Starbucks.

There’s no point to cursing the dark truth about life’s unfairness. It is what it is, and so, while we rage against the dying of the light, let’s embrace each day. Every chance you get, tell those you love that you love them. Because life is unfair, they, or you, might not be around to say those words tomorrow.

And Happy Birthday, Don.

With apologies to Charles Dickens, “It is the best of times (to be an education reporter); but it is the worst of times (to be in a classroom).”

Why a field day for reporters? Let me count the ways: The ‘war’ that I wrote about in The Influence of Teachers in 2011 is far hotter today. Michelle Rhee and her non-profit advocacy organization, Students First, have been instrumental in persuading 25 states to use test scores to evaluate teachers. She also wants restrictions on collective bargaining and teacher tenure.

Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice have declared a national emergency in public education and have called for more “rigor,” a term I tend to associate with death (rigor mortis).

The other side is punching back. Diane Ravitch, the most prominent opponent of privatization, Rhee, Klein at alia, has formed a new organization, The Network for Public Education, which will, its press release says, “give voice to the millions of parents, educators, and other citizens who are fed up with corporate-style reform.” The organization’s treasurer is the less-well-known activist Anthony Cody, a passionate and eloquent defender of his chosen profession.

Echoing Rhee’s organization, which evaluates states according to their adherence to her principles, The Network for Public Education says it intends to evaluate political candidates based on their positions on charter schools, excessive reliance on standardized testing and the like.

There’s more: The Common Core has become–depending on one’s perspective–either an unstoppable bandwagon or a runaway freight train.

Education’s money spigot is attracting attention from those who would sell schools the latest technology and siphon off some of the money–and those who would privatize the entire enterprise and make away with all the dough. What a great story!

No Child Left Behind is still hanging around, although Education Secretary Arne Duncan seems to have replaced its onerous restrictions for his own set of rules. He’s granting waivers to states (and now to Districts) that will agree to do things his Administration’s way.

Some thought the lesson of No Child Left Behind was that Washington–regardless of political party–wasn’t equipped to run public education. We know who did not learn that lesson.

That’s the big picture. The contradictions make things even more fascinating. We know that 75% of young people ages 17-24 don’t even qualify to take the test to get into the military because they haven’t finished high school, have criminal records or are physically unfit. But 25% of those who qualify to take the test cannot get a passing grade. a few cannot find ‘X’ in the equation 2 + X = 4, but many more apparently lack the so-called softer skills: being able to gather and make sense of data, work with others and communicate effectively. The business community has the same complaint. So what would many in the business community and the military suggest be done to produce more graduates who measure up? Do they want the ‘rigor’ that those on the right are clamoring for, or would they endorse ‘deeper learning’ and more self-directed, project-based learning? A good story to report, for sure.

So it’s the best of times for reporters, who have hundreds of great stories demanding to be told. However, I believe it’s probably the worst of times for those in classrooms, by which I mean both teachers and students.

Start with teachers: We continue to be test-obsessed, but with a twist. Tests used to be used to evaluate students, but now teachers and administrators have their heads on the block. The people in charge seem clueless. By putting all their eggs in the bubble test basket, they are making a mistake that basic social science warns against. “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” That’s Campbell’s Law, formulated in 1976 by esteemed social scientist Donald Campbell (1916-1976) .

Applied to education, it might go this way: “If you base nearly everything on one test, expect some principals and teachers to cheat.”

Sadly, some have. Atlanta remains the poster child, of course, but scandals have emerged in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and Houston, not to mention a number of states.

It’s tough to be a teacher in Washington, DC, a district I know fairly well, both as a former parent of students there and as a reporter who has covered the District pretty carefully. Six years after Michelle Rhee was given a blank check to ‘fix’ the schools, classrooms seem to have become a revolving door for teachers. Half of all newly hired teachers (rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is said to be between three and five years.

Is it the worst of times for students? Graduation rates are up, which at least proves more students are hanging in. They may be going to school because they know that there aren’t jobs for dropouts or because they want to hang with their friends, but being in school has to count for something.

I think these aren’t good times for kids, because their school experience is increasingly irrelevant to their needs and to the realities of the world outside of school. They are growing up surrounded by–saturated by–information. Because of the internet, they swim in a sea of information, 24/7/365. They ought to be in classrooms where they can learn to sift through that flood and determine what is true–because ‘information’ is not knowledge. They ought to be learning how to ask good questions, but most often they are expected to regurgitate answers.

They ought to be practicing production–making stuff and gathering information–but instead their habits of consumption are encouraged.

Come to think of it, it may be the worst of times for reporters, because we have to watch this tedium from the sidelines, instead of shouting to the kids, “Wake up! Playing games on your phone and killing time will not solve this problem. Demand more from your teachers, not less!”