One of my freelance jobs is writing and designing a newsletter for our local chapter of Parents for Public Schools. This fall the head of the Jackson chapter wants the newsletter to help parents understand Mississippi’s new standardized tests. Richard and I have been playing around with images to illustrate the newsletter. Here is one. When I served as a test proctor last spring — when some questions for the new test were being tried out in the field — I was struck by how the only thing students were able to keep of their own during tests was their pencils.