Take me to your leader

A Martian landed at Tweed Courthouse the other day and commanded the first bureaucrat he spotted, "Take me to your leader." Did the pencil-pusher lead the green creature to the Chancellor? to the Mayor? to the State Commissioner of Education? None of the above. He led the alien to the corporate headquarters of Pearson publishing, who claim to be "neutral" providers of assessment materials.

A blogger named  Ariel Sacks begs to differ with that "neutral" tag:

It is not neutral to give an outside for-profit company sole control over the assessment of our children's learning, hold that up as evidence of our teaching quality, and then require teachers to keep silent about the particulars of these measures. This feels like an instrument of control out of a very different era than the one in which I thought I lived.

Read the complete article at teacherleaders.typepad.com.

Picture credit: http://latimesherocomplex.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a765a01d970b-250wi.jpg