When I left a reporting job at The Washington Post several years ago, I lost an institution I loved—not to mention free LexisNexis and an affiliation that pretty much guaranteed that my phone calls were returned right away. But I gained the opportunity to immerse myself in a project that I’m sure could never have been created for the newspaper.

From the time I started writing about education for the Post in 1998 until I quit in 2004, I was given a lot of freedom to delve into issues I thought important, and a lot of inches, too. In addition to my daily duties covering school systems, I wrote 3,000-word magazine pieces; I wrote A1 trend stories; I wrote a four-part series about life in middle school, a topic I pursued further in book form, on leave from the Post. But neither I nor even the paper’s greatest stars would ever have been able to write for the Post what I thought the country really needed at the time: an honest, sweeping, in-depth criticism of how elementary education has changed in the era of standardization and testing.

The simplest reason that project wouldn’t have happened at the Post is, ironically, the paper’s influence. In 2004, I approached two major school systems with my idea for Tested, and both quickly agreed to participate. Tina McKnight, the principal of Tyler Heights Elementary in Annapolis, Maryland, the school I ultimately chose, later told me she never would have done so if my work was intended for the Post instead of a book. The Tyler Heights Elementary School teachers said the same thing: We trusted you, but still…

Still what? Well, there’s the time factor. Books are usually published years after first contact with the people you’re writing about, which somehow eases the...

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