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Linda Darling-Hammond remains a convenient bogeyman for too many education commentators looking to score cheap political points. That's unfortunate, because they make constructive debates about important education issues all but impossible.

Most recently, Kathleen Madigan cast Darling-Hammond as the chief vice in her education reform morality play: "A debate is raging about the future of academic standards in American public education," she writes:

On one side, University of Virginia Professor E.D. Hirsch and organizations like Democrats for Education Reform [DFER] are working to extend standards-based reforms. On the other side is Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, once considered a top candidate to be President Obama's education secretary. She blames detailed standards testing and their focus on discrete facts for wide achievement gaps and the nation's failure to perform better on international assessments. Instead, she proposes allowing teachers to interpret broad curriculum guidelines and develop their own student assessments.

Darling-Hammond--together with DFER's Joe Williams--came to her own defense last Friday:

I have never made the arguments Madigan asserts: that a focus on skills should replace content, or that achievement gaps are caused by tests. In fact, I have been an advocate of standards-based reform, and my research shows that achievement gaps derive from disparities in resources, including teaching quality, not from tests themselves.

Democrats for Education Reform, of which Williams is executive director, holds no position on standards-based reform but supports internationally benchmarked national standards outlining the knowledge and skills students need to be successful in today's world, a view with which I agree. We note that many of the Core Knowledge schools of E.D. Hirsch, whom Madigan cites in her attempt to polarize, develop solid knowledge and rigorous thinking skills through a project-based curriculum, defying the silly idea that we can't develop both knowledge and skills in our schools.

Darling-Hammond is quite right to take exception with Madigan's characterization, which exaggerates the conflict between knowledge and skills. (And Madigan isn't alone in exaggerating this conflict.)

Madigan's use of Darling-Hammond's name is particularly unhelpful. It's unfortunately common enough to erect and then topple straw men as a means of simplifying complex arguments--and the relationship between knowledge and skills is nothing if not complex.

But it's inflammatory to create those straw men in the image of specific people. Such behavior causes people on all sides of important issues to dig in their heels and stop talking.

(Hat tip to the Core Knowledge Blog for unearthing Darling-Hammond's letter.)