ABSTRACT

The profession of teaching is in a crisis from media criticism blaming teachers for school failure, increasing requirements for certification, the deskilling of the profession with more scripted lessons and the use of classroom tablets, attacks on teacher unions, and calls for teacher evalu - ations based on student test scores. Writing in Education Week about steep declines in enrollments in teacher education – California enrollments dropped 53 percent between 2008 and 2009 and 2012 and 2013 – Stephen Sawchuk illustrates the problem facing the profession with teacher candidate Zachary Branson worrying, “I feel like teachers are becoming a wedge politically, and I don’t want anything to do with that.” Leaving the Air Force at age 33, Branson started an online teacher preparation program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Then, according to reporter Sawchuk,

he had something of a crisis of faith. It was brought on, he said, by the sense of being in the middle of an ideological war that surfaced in everything from state-level education policy on down to his course textbook, which had a distinct anti-standardized-testing bent.