American schools have spent close to $4.4 billion on testing in the past decade thanks to No Child Left Behind. The ideal of the accountability movement was to impose some quality standards where few existed: to sanction schools, and sometimes individual teachers, whose students don’t perform up to par. Schools labeled as “persistently low-performing”–based on the results of standardized, multiple-choice tests–may be automatically subject to closure, mass firings, or the removal of the principal. Sounds objective, right?

Den här skulpturen heter Patterns of failure. Den påminner oss om betydelsen av imperfektion.