ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author reviews some of the studies, which mention or briefly discuss the emotional impact on teachers of high-stakes testing without explicitly theorizing emotions. In addition, there are publications theorizing the relationship between high-stakes tests and power more explicitly, not just in classrooms and schools, but also at the level of the testing industry and governmental policies. Shuttling between a discourse of inevitability and a discourse of unfairness seemed to produce emotion labor due to the irreconcilability between belief in the necessity of high-stakes literacy tests and trepidation about the ones in place. The discourse of inevitability signaled the extent to which high-stakes literacy testing has been naturalized as the most practical way of determining if students need instruction in academic reading and writing. As to emotion labor, the author found an overall sense of ambivalence towards the current reading and writing tests, their uses and the effects they produce, including on instruction and teacher/student relationships.
