In "The Politics of Education" Paulo Freire considers writing evaluation to be the expression of educational ideologies. An examination of the scholarly writing in composition and rhetoric research shows a division between formative or process evaluation and summative or product evaluation, with advocates for each side. As readers, composition instructors attempt to construct students' texts--projecting on to those texts expectations, knowledge of codes, and normative beliefs regarding texts. Freire advocates that the evaluator and the learner join in evaluation, thus establishing distance from the work under consideration and achieving one of the central goals of education--demystification of inherently ideological codes. Freire's ideas were tested in writing workshops, with several important benefits: (1) evaluation became a dialogue between writers and readers, wherein reading and writing were viewed as cogenerative activities; (2) commentators never wrote directly on the students' papers, leaving the writers with authority over their texts--a dialogical model; (3) after each reader protocol session, reader expectations became clearer; and (4) reader protocols allowed the evaluator to render some particular biases less opaque and more open to question by the students. Studies show that such evaluation could eventually be viewed as a dialectical process, a transactional event between students and teachers (readers and writers), and an exploration of summative criteria as a formative process. (NKA)