like you, i love the culture of standardized testing. like you, i believe in accountability, and i believe simultaneously that accountability is itself the only goal, so that there is nothing one should be accountable for other than accountability itself, in an endless loop in which all is assessment and there is thus nothing to assess but assessment itself. like you, i think like you, talk like you and pretend to be able to read like you. and like you, when i raise my children, i think only one thing: how can i render them competitive, in a world standardized testing regime, with little fuckhead in hong kong? that is what i call love. but japan has the right idea, which is to count pages in textbooks and make sure that our textbooks have more pages than the textbooks in hong kong. who is counting the total number of textbook pages and making sure that we are in the lead? i would take some of the people currently assigned to be sure our children's textbooks are unreadable dreck and reassign them to counting pages, a task for which their skills so admirably suit them.

at any rate, let me say this about the educational approach of george bush, margaret spellings, barack obama, arne ducan, michelle rhee (now superintending the school system that both created and expelled me): if i could, i would destroy everything you're doing. your program, your position, your institutions: first i'd club them down, then i'd stab them, and as i soaked them in gasoline and set them alight i'd riddle them with bullets. then i'd blow them the fuck up. then i would pursue them to the afterlife and vaporize their immortal souls before the throne of god. after that...

now if you're an fbi agent (which, if you're reading this, you probably are), you're wondering why i'm threatening these fine authority figures. but i want to note that i did not threaten these persons. indeed, in the world they are making, threatening persons is impossible. for in that world, there are no persons.