“Do You Have Fidelity to the Program?”

In today’s public school system, an almost blind faith has been invested in top-down school reform policies, many of which are aimed ostensibly at addressing the needs of poor students, that have created intense competition for public dollars while being exclusively connected to state standardized tests (Kohn, 2011). In the name of catching poor students up with their wealthier peers, policies such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top have diverted attention from what happens within the classroom—teaching and learning—and instead perpetuated a “pedagogy of poverty” (Haberman, 1991) that obsesses over memorizing disconnected facts, demands compliance (Kozol, 2005), and fails to close the so-called achievement gap they purportedly are meant to address.