Whom Do You Trust with Your Child? Teachers or Business investors?

In this post, the issue of trust is brought to the forefront of the education discussion. Interestingly, this Gallop Poll ranks teachers near the top of the trusted list and politicians and lobbyists (and car salespeople)  near the bottom. 

Why then, are so many teachers feeling demoralized and dehumanized?

Newsweek covers the issue of teacher morale here. Surprisingly, they are on pointe with a number of reasons why your children's teachers may not feel like they used to:

"Over the past few decades, teacher professionalism and morale declined as education was turned into a market with a push for high stakes testing and centralized control of education."

"Since the beginning of the latest rounds of education reform in the early 2000s,  billions of dollars have been spent at the local, state and national levels on programs such as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core."

Chris Christy lets loose on a teacher... again.

"Supported by a wide variety of “reformist” groups, which include foundations, consulting firms, charter school and voucher advocates, neoliberal think tanks, and teacher bashing politicians of both political parties, education reforms ended up making way for privatization, charter schools or voucher systems."

"As a result teachers no longer control the curriculum as they should. This vacuum has been filled by a host of commercial companies that have developed products to be used both inside and outside the classroom. They range from Professional Learning Communities, Competency based education, Smart Boards, Khan Academy, Flipped Classrooms and Personalized Learning to name but a few on a very long list. Teachers in school have seen a variety of such ‘edu-fashions’ in the form of reforms, flicker and fade."

"Despite this there is little evidence to show that any of this has worked, even by the reformers' criteria for success in testing and evaluation methods such as,  “valued added measures” and standardized tests scores. In fact, years of these “disruptive innovations” have resulted in a situation today of poor job satisfaction for teachers."

So, whom do you trust with your child? Teachers or  business investors?