English education continues to be threatened by standards for research, measurement, and evaluation that ignore the nature of the discipline and devalue teachers' practices. The dominant models for assessing the effectiveness of English teachers reflect assumptions taken from quantitative social sciences or, in the case of models of accountability, from business--this in the era when social sciences themselves (and even sciences) are being profoundly influenced by research in language, rhetoric, and culture. Students' grades, evaluations of teachers, teacher certification, and curriculum reveal domination by ideology and standards belonging to other epistemologies. Rhetoric could be used to construct a discipline of English studies that validates the local knowledge of teachers, yet also places this knowledge in a larger field of inquiry, the cultural memory. (KEH)