Teachers need to stick to a tight schedule imposed by a system that determines a teacher's success by how well students do on a standardized test. Leaders of public education, in a kind of panic, impose new reforms on schools with such frequency and failure that they've taken on the character of fingernails scraping on a blackboard. The imposition of Virginia's SOL tests is an example of what Howard is talking about. For one thing, teachers start narrowly teaching to the test. Elementary schools become like SAT review courses, with curiosity and discovery stripped out in favor of training for the answers.
Teachers have no opportunity for flexibility, spontaneity or creativity.
Teaching becomes more of a chore for teachers and more of a bore for pupils. A teacher's individuality ought to count for something. Teachers and principals acting on their own instincts and judgment, however, are the last thing you can find in America's schools today. Doing what's personal might as well be illegal. The larger point of Howard's book is that traditional authority figures in American society no longer have any authority.