At lunch with some second-graders, I asked what they were learning in history. A boy named Michael said eagerly, "We're doing ancient Egypt, and we did China and Greece."

Michael's friend Duncan explained that the Chinese had built a series of walls to keep out intruders, before and linking them all together to form the Great Wall.

"Who built it?" I asked.

"Emperor Qin Hai," Michael said. Duncan then explained the Egyptian belief in the transmigration of souls. Both boys were able to give me a pretty passable explanation of gravity. Both seemed delighted with their own knowledge.

Half the kids at Morse are poor enough to qualify for free lunches, but in 1998, five years after the school installed its new curriculum, all grades scored at or above the national norm in math and reading. The first-graders placed third in the city in reading, behind two upper-class schools.

Several months later, I was invited to participate in a round-table discussion of school reform at Harvard. In most settings I'm an educational moderate, but among professors at the Harvard Graduate School of education I qualify as a reactionary. The prevailing attitude around the table was that schools were far too preoccupied with "assuring academic skills," that "we've gone berserk in this country with standardized testing," that we need to cultivate "emotional intelligence." Everyone talked about their favorite school; I talked about Morse. Immediately two of the speakers jumped on my comments.

Morse wasn't really a high-poverty school, they said; it was full of Asian immigrants. It wasn't the Core Knowledge curriculum that accounted for Morse's success; any school with a strong "identity," one said, would succeed. The other compared schools with specified curricula to "McDonald's franchises."

What's going on here? Why the wish to deny an obvious success?

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