ABSTRACT
In just over two decades, all 50 states in the United States have adopted a similar sequence of policies that reformed teaching, learning, and teacher preparation. Each tightened links between what teachers know and are able to do with what students learn, the purpose of that knowledge, and how it is validated. Using the theoretical tenets of policy problems, legislative instruments, and tipping points, this chapter examines how national authorities usurped the jurisdictional power of individual states to decide who becomes teachers and their purpose in classrooms. Each change in policy tools also privileged particular conceptions of what counted as knowledge and whose knowledge was of most worth. Today’s de facto national teacher education curriculum brings to bear a new era of metricization of performance and increased regulation tying the standards of student success at each grade level to teacher effectiveness. As a result, local notions of education as a common good are subsumed by standardized measures of ‘academic achievement,’ which are used to mark the nation’s standing on a plethora of international comparisons. The findings raise questions about the political and cultural notions of teachers, teaching, and the common good.
