I just found Doug over at the Borderland through Will’s blog, and I find a post that absolutely floors me.:

Teachers are being asked to serve a monster. NCLB is a mechanism to enslave us and our students to definitions of competence that are outright fabrications. The entire issue is based on lies, justified by a claim that attempts to link economic well-being and national security, and will indeed destroy public education if we don’t figure out how to reframe the discussion. We need to actively define an alternative vision from the one that is being legislatively promoted. I do see a ray of hope in this dark cloud. If teachers ever manage to summon the will to begin working on the legitimate weaknesses and failures of the system we toil within – weaknesses that we ourselves identify – we might begin to reframe this discussion from one of educational reform to one that is focused on changes that will matter. The power to control definitions is the power to control thought. However, as I mentioned in my previous post, we lack consensus. Consensus has been managed for us by administrators.

Normative claims that masquerade as objective truth are tools of propaganda. Fear and lies serve devious ends. Do not allow people to use terms like achievement gap, failure, or proficiency without challenging their meaning. The problem isn’t simply “failing” schools. Schools are being asked to clean up a broadly distributed social mess caused by centuries of materialism and greed. Education has been colonized. We are being trampled by our rescuers. This is not a new story.

I love it when I find someone who has taken the thoughts rumbling around in my head and makes them live.

We must change the game… there’s more for me to write about this, but Jakob is waking up. But whenever I read stories this one from the New York Times about schools cutting back curricular diversity to focus on reading and math for "struggling" students, I want to question the notion of those struggling students. Struggling according to what metrics? According to only a test? When did they start to struggle? What are they good at? What do they do well? And what have they been forced to lose because of a score on a test? (O.k. — those are only one set of questions that article raised, but again, Jakob is stirring in his crib.)

We cannot keep allowing NCLB to be scope of the way we talk about education in this country. The very term it uses to show that schools are not failing — "Adequate Yearly Progress" — is damning us with faint praise.

We must not allow their terms to become our terms.

We must not allow their metrics to become our metrics.

And we must not allow the questionable political priorities of that bill to become our priorities.

Teachers are being asked to serve a monster, and we must remember who we really serve — our students. Thanks again to Doug for saying it so powerfully.