Opinion Exchange

UPDATE: The State Department of Education has said it will scrap the six questions related to the “Pineapple and the Hare” reading passage. The state also released the test’s version of the story, and related questions: http://bit.ly/HW2lWd

The talk began Tuesday, when eighth-graders tackled the reading portion of the state’s standardized English Language Arts tests. One reading passage was about a pineapple and a hare. The pineapple had challenged the hare to a race, and lost. The moral of the story — pineapples don’t have sleeves — appeared to be an incongruous as the rest of the “fable.”