Learning Experience Mechanized By Corporate Educational Reform

The experience of standardized, data driven learning experience is dehumanizing. The process tends to dull the mind and debilitate the natural desire to learn. Consequently, children often disengage from their learning experiences as chronicled in the High School Survey of Student Engagement.

Before 2001, significant numbers of American teachers were on track to utilize the latest advances in neuro-cognitive research to augment their curriculum and instruction efforts. Developing personal and socially profound learning experiences within sensory stimulating learning environments and augmenting the psycho-emotional-kinesthetic realm is a critical aspect of profound, meaningful, transformative learning experience. That idea all changed after the United States Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act and George W. Bush signed it into law. Now teachers must focus their instructional efforts on high stakes testing, test prep and data outputs. The end result of NCLB is the micro managing of learning experience in the classroom through mandated high stakes selected and response assessments of which teachers must prepare their students to do well. Students who do not perform well on this narrow form of assessment run the risk of labeling their teachers and their schools as inadequate as state governments now rate teachers and schools based on how well students do on standardized tests. This result does not bode well for the future of the U.S. as 66 percent of the 400,000 participants of the High School Survey of Student Engagement, reveal they are disengaged by their learning experience. What does that mean? It means the prescription for educational experience mandated by Washington politicians and their corporate billionaire education reform cohorts is a failure.

As a result of NCLB and the Obama Administration's high stakes testing initiative, Race to the Top, at no other time in our nations history have teachers become more dissatisfied with their profession .

Actions speak louder than words. What does the U.S. government and their corporate education reform cohorts value? Do they value an educational experience where children's imaginative capacities are expanded  through experiences centered on children's strengths, interests and passions?  Or an experience where learners are directed to become compliant data processors whose schooling experiences are basically based on seated clerical work activities?

We are entering a period of immense educational upheaval. Concerned? You can contact your elected officials responsible for the crisis in education here: Tell them to stop micro managing educational experience in our schools and stop forcing American children to take high stakes tests. Children's learning experience should be a joyful adventure and it is anything but that since politicians and billionaires have covertly declared war on American Public Schools.