A recent blog post by Rick Hess nails it:
One of my least favorite things about education is how eagerly we turn sensible discussions into bizarrely polarizing moral crusades. Aided by competing, mindless invocations of “it’s for the kids,” we manage to turn otherwise sensible discussions about school accountability, teacher evaluation and pay, school choice, or tracking into incoherent, hysterical morality plays.
Of course, certain left-leaning politicians and the organizations that support them strive to turn every discussion into a polarizing moral crusade, but the rest of us should try to resist the temptation to follow suit.