Our obsession with accountability and market-driven educational reforms has turned teachers in to robots and robbed our students of our teachers’ creativity.
That’s teh point of this week’s Dispatches.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
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Hank Kalet 
Follow the money. It's all about ideology and money. The Dells (Dell Computer), Gateses (Microsoft), Waltons (Walmart), many other billionaires, millionaires, all the corporate funded right wing phoney baloney think tanks, the US Chamber of Commerce, and hedge fund managers are pushing school choice, charter schools and school vouchers. The ultimate goal is to privatize our school system and to kill what's left of unions in this country. All the politicians (D or R) are for this nonsense. Obama and Arne Duncan are promoting this crap and backing it up with billions in federal dollars. Test, test, test, and punish, punish, punish.Once they get rid of tenure, they will fire the older and more expensive teachers no matter how great they are. Merit pay will compel teachers to teach to the test even more than they do now. It's called the Walmartization of our educational system.The other advanced countries have teacher unions and they do not have charter schools or school vouchers.
I too retired after 38 years of teaching. I saw \”the handwriting on the wall,\” with NCLB and constant testing a growing barrier to creative, innovative teaching. We cannot really measure our students' true learning by numbers on standardized tests, nor should we measure our teachers' skills by those numbers.