This was written by Kipp Dawson, an experienced teacher of English and social studies in middle school in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh won a large grant from the Gates Foundation to apply its ideas about evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. Things have not gone well, as Dawson reporters here, especially since the city schools have a Broad superintendent who is a true believer in test scores as the measure of one’s worth.

Before becoming a teacher, Kipp Dawson spent ten years as a coal miner. She knows the importance of collaboration with colleagues. In the mines, her life depended on it every day.

She writes:

Education “reformers” are pointing their “effective teaching” arrows in precisely the wrong direction. In real life, anyone who wants to see really bad teaching can walk into any “highly effective” teacher’s classroom in public school in any Broad-trained-superintendent’s district infested by any Gates-type teacher “evaluation” system and see what fear has turned “effective teaching” into.

The day begins with an administrator’s announcement over the PA system of how many days are left until the BIG test.

Children, our precious children, then go from room to room (or the little ones stay in one room) led by a teacher who fears every moment for her/his job, and “knows” the way to keep it is to get those high test scores from those actual real children from the real world who are going to make or break her/his employment by which circles they fill in on those answer sheets during all of those days. So fear guides her/him as lessons are planned, as letters are sent home to parents, and as children’s time in school is more and more frenziedly taken up with frenzied, fear-inspired “teaching” of how to fill in those bubbles, by golly, we’re gonna make this happen, aren’t we, kids. And if any parent of a “high achieving” child dares mention opting out of these tests, fear guides the teacher’s response — fear based on real possibilities that in and of themselves make this whole scene draconian.

This is what classrooms across this country are becoming/have become for our beautiful kids — kids who come to us to get away from the growing poverty and violence which in too many cases controls their lives outside of school.

Fear.

Fear is coloring the days of children and teachers alike. THIS is what “education reform” ala Broad and Gates hath wrought. This is what we teachers and our organizations need to recognize, stand up against, and fight. Alongside our real allies. Along with parents who are telling the truth about what is going on even as they do all they can to stop the attacks on us teachers, too many of whom have been pushed into being agents of this horror.

Let us raise high again, out of the dust this mess is creating, the images of what real teaching and learning can be like (for a quick refresher, go back to chapter 9 of Diane Ravitch’s “Death and Life of the Great American Schopl System” — “What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?”). We have to stop this madness.