This collection of essays focuses on educational testing, showing how testing encroaches on teacher freedom and how narrow standards can actually reduce student achievement. The chapters are: (1) Testing Is Not Teaching; (2) The Freedom Factor; (3) Sharing Power with Intelligent Expectation; (4) Everyone Has a Story To Tell; (5) Lets Change the Face of Competition; (6) Necessary Qualities in the Twenty-First-Century Learner; (7) The Child Is the Most Important Evaluator; (8) When Testing Lowers Standards; (9) Accountability; (10) A Pessimist Looks at the Future of Education in America; (11) Assessments That Raise Standards; (12) Tap Teacher Expertise for Higher Standards; (13) Are Long, Slow Thinkers an Endangered Species?; (14) What Writing Does; (15) The Bottom Line; (16) Whats That For?; (17) What Happened to Time for Teaching?; (18) Teaching When Time Is in Short Supply; (19) The Energy of Continual Composition; (20) A Mutual Trust; (21) Building an Energy-Filled Future for Public Education; and (22) That No Child Mat Be Left Behind: A Modern Parable on Public Education. (Contains 23 references.) (SLD)