A reader sees how the pieces of the reform movement fit together:
I think that all the double-speak is just to divert attention away from the major process of dismantling education that has been taking place across the country, and the smoke and mirrors is to conceal the intention to ultimately declare brick and mortar schools obsolete and teachers expendable and unnecessary. Effectively, the goal is to not have teachers anymore.
One online teacher I work with put it this way recently, “We’re just glorified graders now.” Honestly, for a teacher, there is no glory when your job boils down to just grading. But politicians, corporate reformers and companies like Pearson and K-12 seem to think that education can be reduced to presenting material on a screen and testing, and that they can train virtually anyone to be graders.
Actually, online, you can set it up so that tests are self-administered and automatically generate grades, so currently instructors are grading papers, class discussions, group projects, participation, etc. and I can see how that might one day be considered superfluous to the powers that be.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Anti-union ed reformer Tom Vander Ark relayed his message to school districts on August 18, 2011, at a presentation at Georgetown U.
He said, ‘Give me two more weeks a year and two more hours a day and you can subtract two teachers.’ Also appearing was former Gov. Bob Wise, who went on to mock teachers, sarcastically calling them ‘sages on the stage’.
Kids with headphones on, sitting in front of tablets or laptops for hours a day, all get online curriculum and assessments . Since the teachers no longer provide the curriculum, they are expendable. The junk science behind the teacher evaluation methodology is the trigger for the mass firings and resultant large class sizes.
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A principal told me that the CEO of CPS said the ratio he wants is 6 classrooms of students, each managed by classroom monitors, reporting to one “super” teacher.
about 180 students :1 teacher
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I fear the same thing. My fear arises not so much for reasons related to job security, but for reasons related to my students’ learning. What is lost when education is reduced to interactions mediated by a screen? I love many types of online learning; (the time spent reading postings on this blog is just one of many examples).
But what about everything else? Discussions with family, friends and colleagues, walks in the neighborhood, witnessing real events in the real world, attending a play or watching a live musical performance, holding and examining real objects…what about these types of experiences? I know how to establish an appropriate balance, but I am an adult.
In my classroom, I can hear the emotion in a student’s voice when she reads aloud a piece she wrote about losing her dog, I can see two students giggling together and know they are friends, I can see a student doodling on his notebook and hand him a book about M.C. Escher during independent reading time. How my students interact with each other and me is at the very heart of teaching and learning.
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I agree with this. I fear the same losses as you. In the brave new world, I know I will be one of the “superteachers”, because I have positioned myself well for that spot, so I am not worried about losing my job. But the thing I do that students write back to me from college about–that “Your class prepared me for life by challenging me and really teaching me to think.” thing that motivates me and justifies my move from a high-powered corporate job to teaching will totally disappear when I am merely monitoring monitors. Of course, the alternative for some of us will be to teach the children of the rich, but there are only so many rich . . .
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We’ve already started in my district. Our reading intervention program is computer based, taught and graded. Plus, students are expected to take weekly, monthly and quarter assessments, which reduce actual instruction time. My job? Explain the computer generated databases on their progress to students and parents. That’s teaching?
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*Effectively, the goal is to not have teachers anymore.*
For the simple reason that paying teachers interferes with profit. The dismantling of public schools isn’t about educating kids – like all privatization schemes, it’s about companies like Pearson and K12 Inc making as much much money as possible while the opening to do so exists.
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