When standards of learning (SOLs) first appeared in my Northern Virginia public-school classroom nearly seven years ago, they were hardly more than a lunch-table punch line -- another unfortunate abbreviation coined by board-of-education bureaucrats to browbeat our low-achieving, high-minority school. SOLs constituted a body of knowledge that students would learn in each academic subject. The initials became the sobriquet for both the curriculum and a test that, after a phase-in period of six years, kids would have to pass in core subjects by 2003 in order to graduate. Sometime after that, the state promised, schools' accreditations would be at stake.