I have required reading for my kids over the summer. Even at 13 and 16, they are still allowed to read "The Cat in the Hat" and have it. It just doesn't count for much. I help direct them and I try to ensure that they are reading slightly more complicated things. They don't have much time for pleasure reading during the school year it seems, so I'm encouraging them to read things that are fun and that stretch them a little. Sometimes I force them to read a particular item - Animal Farm, Siddhartha, the Euthyphro, but that's a very small part of it. Most of the material is stuff they pick for themselves, comes out to maybe 1 - 1.5 hours per day during the summer. (I also have them do some math problems in the summer - just so they don't come back to school having forgotten everything the teacher was hoping they had learnt in the previous years.)
I strongly favor standardized testing. The tests are trivial for students who are getting the stuff and the hullabaloo about teachers having to teach to the test is gross exaggeration in most cases. If they're teaching what they're supposed to be teaching, then the students will pass the tests. I do not approve of every test and I do not approve of all the types of questions - but in general, it has my strong support. I also wish there were federal instead of state standards of learning.
OTOH, I also think there needs to be some differentiation. These tests tend to be trivial and I think that's right. The tests should be easy - did you get anything at all out of your schooling? But there should be higher level testing as well, for some students - and it could be that the various AP tests could fill part of this function. I don't see this happening any time in the near future, as there's this mythology that has come up about the "bad old days of tracking." Practices and Standards for some teachers reads like a socio-political manifesto. As every individual is held to be an interchangeable cog, then every student needs to learn the same things and be held to the same standard. We want to get the slower students up to speed and we want to hold the quicker students back.
In our school district, they're trying to flood the AP classes. In my kids' particular school the goal is that every single student take at least one AP class, because "everyone's good at something" - a questionable "fact," but more importantly it is both more expansive and more restrictive than the more probable case, "Nearly anyone can do nearly anything (at the hs level) if he applies himself."
As to page numbers, I don't know that they're necessary, but I'd be open to teachers using this as a primitive metric (it seems most are). Quantity is important early on, as well as quality. Students should get a broad swatch of things to read throughout K-12. The quality of the books should be high throughout, but the demand for quality of the reading done on those books should increase as the student progress through the grades.
There is hardly a day goes by that I don't disagree with the teachers about something. I generally don't get involved unless there's something egregious. Nor do I feel compelled to express my dissent to them. If a teacher is knowledgeable of the subject, is able to communicate it, and willing to do so, then I will make sure my kid does her part - and I will do whatever I can to help. I will do this even though I have extremely visceral opinions about some of the stuff. example: I've signed up to be a science fair judge even though I consider their implementation of it to be stupid and counterproductive - the ideal experience to destroy any nascent interest a student might have in the subject.
