"We took out a long sheet of paper that looked like an application for a mortgage."

American educators have always had a weakness for educational fads, and most teachers have seen many of these "innovations" come and go. But even veteran teachers are sometimes startled by the latest novelty. That was the reaction of retired teacher and special education supervisor Leon Schuchman when he saw his granddaughter's "New Age" report card, which, as he says, isn't a card and doesn't report. He describes it in a recent issue of New York Teacher:

In early November, our daughter, Linda, who lives with her family in Spokane, alerted us to the very exciting news that we soon would be receiving in the mail a copy of our eldest granddaughter's report card. She hinted that we would be pleasantly surprised by Katy's accomplishments in the first grade.

Wasn't it only yesterday that we held little Katy in our arms, playing with her, feeding her, laughing with her, and reacquainting ourselves with the fine art of diapering? And now she was a first grader. ...

Trembling, we opened the letter from Spokane. We took out a long sheet of paper that looked like an application for a mortgage. It had so many small squares, check marks, pluses, and Xes, that we thought we would need a Guide for the Perplexed.

Today's modern report cards are neither reports nor cards. The Spokane Board of Education apparently has joined thousands of other school districts and has morphed (to use a trendy expression) the once familiar report into psycho-social evaluation babble, in which NO CHILD FAILS! This keeps the parents and teachers and school board and taxpayers HAPPY!

I looked at Katy's New Age report, which is now called The Academic Social Growth and Effort Indicator --TASGEI for short -- and counted 54 attributes subsumed under a variety of curriculum areas. For each area the students are ranked on a scale of I to 5, with I being the best.

For example, a I means that the pupil is meeting the objectives and is performing skills independently in reading or in math or in work habits. A 4 (formerly called a D) indicates that the pupil needs more time to develop. A 5 (formerly an F) means that the "student chooses NOT to perform skills or activities!"

Had any of us brought home a report card in the good old days with a comment by the teacher that so-and-so " ... did not choose to participate in arithmetic or in reading," he would have received direct instruction on parts of his anatomy! ...

So far as Katy is concerned, we are happy to report that she was satisfactory in all the curriculum areas, with special pluses for being self-directed and for following directions, which pretty much covers the field.

On one of those 54 attributes mentioned above, the teacher noted that Katy has learned to form D'Nealian letters and figures. My wife and I looked at each other and thanked God that we were able to make it past the first grade back in the ancient days. We don't think we could have gotten an S in constructing those D'Nealian letters and figures.

Come to think of it, we don't know what the heck they look like! Do you?

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But TASGEI is a timid innovation in comparison with what is going on in Alpine Valley school, a private school that opened this September in Edgewater, Colorado.

According to an article in The Denver Post, (August 3, 1995), Alpine Valley has dispensed with curriculum, schedules, classes -- the works. On a given day, if students "want to climb trees, read, bake a cake or learn physics, it's all OK and completely up to them." And this goes for long-term learning, too. If a kid doesn't feel like finding out how to read until he is 12, that's no problem. The same is true if a 5-year-old has an urge to learn algebra.

The idea is that children's learning should not be constrained; it is natural and will happen when the children are ready. "The school is based on freedom for the students," is how one of the founders puts it. It is also based on the idea that adults have no knowledge or experience that makes their ideas about what to learn and when to learn it any more valuable than their students'. It's no surprise that the kids get the deciding vote about who is going to teach them: "Every year at the annual school meeting, students and staff will -- by majority vote -- choose which teachers stay for another one-year contract."

Of course, Alpine Valley is a private school, and as such it does not have to adhere to the rules that govern public schools. But with voucher proposals and charter school.s legislation, we could soon see taxpayers' money paying for innovative approaches to education that are just as far out, as well as others that are less loony but may be no more effective.