Concerned that various reforms promising greater professional autonomy and status as well as student success are actually disempowering teachers, impoverishing intellectual life in schools, and serving as a portal for the marketization of teaching and education, editors invited teachers to respond to the ways in which the proliferation of standards and testing combined with their own loss of professional control is altering the landscape of American education. The editors' goal was to raise questions about whether and how educators are balancing the demands of high stakes testing, scripted curricula, and a focus on performance outcomes with the emotional complexity of classroom life. Selections include: (1) Squeezed, Stretched, and Stuck: Teachers Defending Play-based Learning in No-nonsense Times (Karen E. Wohlwend); (2) Invisible Ink: A Psychoanalytic Study of School Memory (Lisa Farley); (3) Imaginary Stories in School: First Steps towards Literacy (Gillian Dowley McNamee); (4) In Defense of Playfulness (Peter Nelsen); (5) Mouthy Students and the Teacher's Apple: Questions of Orality and Race in the Urban Public School (Alyssa D. Niccolini); and (6) Confounded and Compounded by Language: English Language Learner and High Stakes Testing (Elizabeth Park). (Articles are footnoted and referenced individually.)