Standardized testing is, by definition, a product of large scale education, just as automobile is the product of mass production. The only way to produce a good car cheaply enough to be accessible to everyone, it was said, was to cut out all of the irregularities of the production process. You can only maximize profits if every McDonald’s fry is the same, every time, everywhere in the world.

We paid a certain cost in the qualities of our work lives for these profits, of course; all of those inconsistencies in the production process reflected the people making the cars or the fries. People always find small and large ways to put their individuality back into the process, but the push-back…

Here’s a piece so rare that I almost can’t believe I just read it: an academic- an administrator, no less- demanding that the education mass media and the education community address biases in class both in journalistic and financial priorities. It’s a response to a spate of stories of how elite institutions are handling the budget crisis precipitated by the recension. Drew A. Bennett (chancellor of Missouri State University-West Plains) says things have to change.

First, Bennett says, the media need to “stop drawing attention to the alleged sacrifice of doing without cookies [at Harvard] and ask what’s wrong with a system where some institutions have that much money in the first place.” This is a fact of…