With all due respect to Joanne Yatvin, who has made important contributions to NCTE and to literacy (notably her work confronting the flawed National Reading Panel), this is why we cannot be fatalistic about Cash Cow $tate $tandards:
CC$ advocacy is being driven by corporate interests, the allure of money to be made.
If no one could profit from CC$ or the tests, if no one could build political capital off CC$, how many advocates do you think would remain?
I suspect around none.
It is not too late. Even DC political insiders believe the fate of CC$ is deeply in question.
To reclaim the teaching profession, it is time for non-cooperation and that must start with CC$. As Bill Ayers (who did not write CC$) implores us in To Teach:
Teachers are not mindless bureaucrats or soulless clerks. Teachers must become inventors and creators, thinkers and doers....
The collective, ongoing conversation about teaching allows us to glimpse something of the depth of this enterprise, to unearth the intellectual and ethical implications beneath the surface. This conversation is the responsibility of each of us. Talk back, speak up, be heard. (xiv, xv)
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