Some states, as Audrey Beardsley reported in the previous post, are silencing educators by law or regulation or threats. They definitely don’t want teachers to express their views about high-stakes testing or political interference by legislators in the state capitol or from D.C. Nor do they want teachers to express their need for professional autonomy or to complain about mandates and paperwork and scripted lessons. Why anyone would presume that elected officials know more about teaching than teachers is a great puzzlement.

But as Anthony Cody shows in this post, legislatures are not the only ones who are trying to stifle teacher voice. He recounts a sad story about exemplary teachers who were invited to write a report about “a new vision for accountability.” When the report came out, Cody wrote about it, and I posted his commentary. We both thought it was a teacher-written report. Then he began hearing from teachers whose names were on the report, complaining that their words had been edited, revised, in some cases deleted by the consultants in charge. He dug deeper and learned that the consultants in charge of the project–ostensibly sponsored by the NEA–were funded by the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Cody includes in his post the statements of several participants in the process, all reporting that their recommendations were altered without their consent, in ways they did not approve. Their voices were muted, stifled, silenced.