They come because of the poetry. If we reduce teachers to automatons with test-driven curriculum, the profession will lose all of its joy and the most poetic teachers will not stay. 502-507, highlights important issues in the burgeoning performance assessment movement. At the same time, I think it is dangerous to be too sanguine about the prospects of reforming the assessment community and disrupting commonsense script for education reform, in which schools are cast as damsels in distress, remote experts are cast as heroic saviors, and teachers are written out of the production altogether. Neo-conservative columnists play to this audience constantly, stoking the fires of educational crisis and inspiring suspicions about the competence of our public school teachers.
Students are culturally illiterate and illiberally educated.
Both writers are provocative and make us think. I also hope that they make us reflect on the multiplicity of reform and accountability schemes that are being promoted on a daily basis to address the problems associated with public schools.