Sameness as fairness and finding the perfect anything

I am not sure what happened that my orginal post didn't go up but I am retrying. Cross your fingers.

I found as I read the chapters on Sameness and Fairness, Permission to Fail, Issues of Literacy and Power and Building Success with Underachieving Adolescents, I found myself drawn to parts of the readings and just irritated by others. Though when I really thought about my irritation it wasn't what they were saying it was the fact that I have been witness to some of it and here is some pointing it out in a much grander scale.

What really stuck out to me was the video by Gladwell. I LOVED IT! I loved it because it said exactly what we as educators already know, but maybe we need to keep hearing it. There is no perfect.....(lesson/student/teacher/etc.) What Howard Moskowitz released and then passed on to the food industry is that different kinds people like different kinds of food. The data that was collected from the Pepsi research showed no bell curve but was scattered, extremely scattered. The data didn't make sense, until Moskowitz looked at it a different way. They were asking different people what they prefered, and by doing that they got different responses.

So take that into the education field. Why do we have such extreme scores on standardized testing? Because, there is no standardized student. Different backgrounds, different cultures, different family structures, different everything and anything and you get scattered results. Our students don't learn the same way, some need more time, some need less, some need to figure it out on their own and still others need it broken down to the bare bones to understand what it is that we are teaching. As each teacher has a different style so do our students. When do we stop doing the "universal search" and start on the "understanding of variables"?