Before we can have the idea of relative evaluation at all, we must have a tertium quid, a third essence, an ideal ideal, as it were ("Humanism in the Age of Science" 17).

Let us assume the goal of the SOLs, in terms of both intent and practice, is to make educators both responsible and liable for student learning. First, Weaver would suggest this rhetorical/logical move requires the production of a term that dialecticizes learning--that is, makes learning a process of becoming (un)learned. The second move would be to produce a third term, an ideal ideal, allowing one to treat individuals as something more than simply examples of the coming-to-being of another term. This term would be what each of the elements of that set are qualitatively, what each represents not potentially but essentially.

Given that "creative" responses to the SOLs have been provoked by the pairing of the SOLs with the potentially contrary demands of other standards, other readings, other language skills, other assessment tools, other visions of the profession, we can then ask to what extent the standards themselves (or someone or some principle) can take credit for such creative responses. If one shouts, "fire," in a crowded auditorium, who can take credit for a timely and safe egress? The fire, the arsonist, the administrator who insisted on fire drills, the person who shouted, the architect, the people who departed in an orderly fashion?

It would be too easy to say "the people who departed in an orderly fashion" because, in terms of liability--that is, if (heaven forbid), not everyone got out--many people would be seen to be responsible (not simply the arsonist). And there will then be an attempt to assign degrees of liability/culpability. Of course, if everything goes well, then everyone will want to take some credit home for themselves.

Now, imagine that the part of "fire" is being played by the SOLs; the extras who depart in an orderly fashion are students; the one who shouts "fire" is the would-be school reformer; the fire drill and its implementers are school teachers and administrators. Who wants to play the part of the arsonist? Who gets to be the most responsible (not merely liable), who gets to be punished?

Many school administrators and teachers fear that they may have to stand in for the arsonist. Certainly, there has been discussion of linking teachers' pay increases to pass rates on the exams; administrators might even be threatened with school closures if "their" schools aren't accredited. But by what logical or rhetorical leap can we associate these "fire drills" (school teachers and administrators) with "the arsonist"?

To trace the logic/rhetoric of this associations, we can see how liability requires what Weaver calls a positive term or a series of positive terms (student doesn't know this; does know that; X started the fire; x didn't start the fire), while responsibility (we all in some sense are involved) requires the introduction of a third term (what Weaver calls a "tertium quid") that allows us to evaluate or measure a series of positive terms that have been dialecticized in terms of some "ideal term" and thereby made a set. For example, if we return to our example of the auditorium fire, we can see that punishment requires only that the arsonist/fire be understood as positive terms of liability (did so and so set the fire or not)? At the level of responsibility, everyone involved is in the process of becoming responsible: contractors, the arsonists, the people leaving the building.... Only with the creation of a third-term can some schools/teachers (some schools/teachers not) be caught with the hot potato of the SOLs. And who is helping to make the SOLs that third term? As teachers, the SOLs can prompt us to rethink our classroom practice, and indeed it will take some thought to imagine that all that we do is part of the becoming or not of the SOLs. And such activities show that we understand in what ways we are responsible for student learning. But as we continue to respond and rethink--that is, to put the SOLs into practice through the creation of a tertium quid--we will find ourselves more and more in the position of being liable for student learning. What took us a good deal of thought and creativity to produce will be shared as a teaching activity/product (a positive term), and the doing or not doing of that teaching activity/product will make some of us both responsible and liable, while others (politicians, parents, perhaps even the students themselves) will get away with being just as responsible as everyone else. Imagine that a teacher is fired because her/his students have not met the standard (whatever it might be). The teacher details all of the wonderful things that he/she did in response to the SOLs. The principal or personnel officer for the school can justify the firing simply by looking to all of the activities that other teachers suggested and pointing to one or three things that the should have done. Unfortunately, the should-have-done is not itself a set; it is not organized as a "knowledge" to which the now unemployed teacher and the people who trained that teacher were privy before the administrator's rationalization for the firing.

It is no wonder that many teachers and school administrators have gladly accepted the challenge of implementing standards of learning while offering not-so-effective resistance to the use of these standards to accredit schools and evaluate teaching performance. Unfortunately, explaining this position to people who are not educators is very difficult. The rhetorical challenge proposed by standards of learning is to understand and communicate the difference between the function of activities proposed by ourselves and others as responses to the SOLs and the use of these activities to identify what someone could have done to keep his/her job.

But there's hope–that is, if we are talking to people who don't believe that you need to know everything about American film history in order to win a game of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." One succeeds at this game not by embracing contraries (by constructing an "ideal ideal" that allows one re-invent the whole of American film history). One succeeds by linking any one actor to one or more character actors who have eked out an income playing bit parts in a lot of movies. For accountability does not transform the creative efforts of teachers into a body of knowledge; accountability transforms our creative efforts into the appearance of mastering a body of knowledge: one fact, one skill at a time.