Teachers; Literacy as a Social Process; *Student

This paper explores how teachers who choose the New Literacy approach to the teaching of reading and writing reconcile the conflict between their need for personal pedagogical integrity and public demands for accountability. The paper's first section describes one teacher's changing conceptions of evaluation of e'ndent writing. The second section explores the long-standing belief that it is possible to assess written work according to some absolute, reliable, and valid standard, and argues that this belief is a myth. The next section argues that evaluation of student work is a function of a teacher's perception of his or her professional role and purpose, which is in turn linked to beliefs in how meaning is made from and with text. The problem for the teacher is the choice between a supportive role with textual meaning as open to negotiation versus an authoritative role with textual meaning largely fixed. The fourt