A comment from a reader who signs as M:

 

Contracts are sacred…unless they’re made to a teacher.

 

What is perhaps the most disheartening is that the deformers have identified every crutch that we leaned on for determining education policy and worked in earnest to commandeer them or dismantle them.

 

Education research – let’s hire a bunch of researchers to generate what we want to say

 

Standards – Let’s govern what’s taught in classrooms whether it’s reasonable or not, educationally sound or not (this leads into all the VAMish nonsense)

 

School boards – let’s buy the races or have control seized from them, or both (buy the board then have it turn over power).

 

Money – Let’s find every end run through taxes and otherwise that will take money out of the schools from the students we’re trying to save, and blame that on teachers for being so greedy that they need to accept less – let’s take their money spend it elsewhere then blame them for their bloated pensions too.

 

Purpose of Education – Rather than being student centered it is now job market centered with schools being responsible for generating appropriate human capital (the student matters so much as they need to be come the chattel for said market)

 

I went into teaching to help students and make a living to help support my family. Pretty simple. If you look at the lens of effectiveness through all of these elements and how they’ve shifted over the last 20 years, it’s pretty disheartening.

 

They are succeeding (right now anyway) in turning school from a place of wonder, fun, community, and learning, into a hellish individualistic market centered hell hole focused on prepping each individual student for the test they must pass to be deemed “good product” – that takes away from so much of developing students into the types of neighbors we’d want in society. The message is insanely cynical.