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An interesting quote from Dennis Carlson:

"The quantification of quality has been an element of hegemonic reform discourse in public education for a long time, going back to the early twentieth century 'cult of efficiency.' But in the 1980's, corporate CEOs and corporate think tanks began to assume a more active role in shaping urban school policy and in overseeing school reform consistent with the 'bottom line' of test scores. The high-stakes testing movement has involved the deployment of a whole network of micro-technologies and apparatuses of control, everything from the test itself to the skill-based curricular materials, to the forms and reports teachers have to file, to the performance-based 'individualized educational plans' they have to follow for special education students. The 'real' story of urban educational reform over the past decade or so has been the emergence of powerful new discourses and technologies, including computer-based technologies, that bring corporate control into the classroom, and thus make it more difficult for teachers to resist or to carve out an oppositional discourse and space."

I wonder how teachers, parents and family members might carve out oppositional discourse and space?

Carlson, D. (2005). Hope without illusion: telling the story of democratic educational renewal. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 18(1), 21-45.