ABSTRACT
In an ideal world, students and teachers would thrive in classes full of purposeful learning. But in schools as they are today, too many educators report the opposite. In studies I have conducted in North America, they have frequently complained about high levels of constraint upon their professional judgment. One principal in a policy environment that emphasizes competition describes how “much of what we do every day is to market ourselves. We need to keep parents happy so we have good accountability results. I have become, in many ways, more of a marketing manager than an educator.” Another principal in a district that now requires that she spend much of her time evaluating teachers complains about how “It’s pulled me in a lot of different directions.” In addition to all the time taken up with evaluations, she says,
These concerns reflect the long-term trend over previous decades toward higher levels of pressure on educators, increased accountability, and greater uniformity. Ironically, it was market competitiveness that promised innovation that often provoked this standardization, because schools can’t be ranked with one another without a common set of measures. Likewise, educators’ efficacy
can’t be compared on systems of teacher quality without shared evaluation protocols and tests. The more competitive education has become, the more that uniform assessments have been needed to measure performance. As if this push for compliance and conformity was not enough, educators have also found themselves faced with contradictory expectations to turn out students who are critical thinkers and creative problem solvers. But an excess of metrics has marginalized creativity in teaching and therefore also in learning. These constraining imperatives act as commands for professional compliance. They impose on teachers questionable pedagogies and curriculum materials that are unsuited to the learning demands of today’s complex societies. These old imperatives of educational change are the result of policies that have been in place for over a quarter of a century and that have been codified into law, then mandated upon schools. They are:
1 An ideological imperative that has emphasized market competition, testing, and standardization as levers to improve schoolsdespite the absence of evidence to support these directions.
