ABSTRACT
The portraits painted by certain researchers can be compelling: fabulous teachers, doing fabulous classroom assessment, thwarted by evil NCLB 1 -required tests, and fleeing the profession in response. Perhaps I live in some alternate universe, but that is not what I see and not what data tell me. Not only do survey data from teachers point to higher job satisfaction today than at any time during the last decade, but teachers’ leaving rates are about the same as they have been in the last decade. Furthermore, teaching is still among the most stable of all professions—perhaps more stable than it should be, given teaching’s rate of pay, working conditions, and general level of prestige.
