By any standard, the role of the federal government in guiding education policy has grown over the past century.  This ballooning has particularly affected the last two decades as more and more control is exerted.  Dollars get tied to the dictates of the Department of Education, as our reading reflects.

I’m reminded of an indirect quote from a previous text I used, entitled Introduction to Teaching Becoming a Professional.  Here it is.  Noted researcher Diane Ravitch notes: “The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores” (as cited in Kauchak & Eggen, 2014, p. 291).

This is a powerful quote and worth thinking through.  What gets squeezed out of the teaching day may be variety, chance taking, and anything that cannot be directly tied (business-fashion) to that “bottom line.”  My commentary on this isn’t new. . .  the general shift has been toward a top-down business model.  For instance, in an area such as English, the push is to quantify writing—a necessarily qualitative process.  We get pressured even here at Jefferson to try and turn our rubrics from expectations to numbers (so that a shady area like style or integration would count for X number of points on the essay).

Still, a lot of this does tie back to the growing federal role and how money in tough times can exert increasing influences toward centralization.