Expelling Care from the Teacher-Child Relation
Published at Common Dreams:
Expelling Care from the Teacher-Child Relation
by Jim Horn and Rachel Squires Bloom
The social impact of high stakes testing in poor urban schools has grown particularly acute over the past 10 years. For beyond the shrinkage of school curriculums to fit the narrow boundaries of annual tests, along with the disappearance of recess and play, research in poorer schools has uncovered another most tragic outcome to high stakes testing: the effective elimination of care as the ethos that has bound together teacher and child for longer than there have been schools in America. Sadly, many of the teachers 10 years ago who were the protectors of and the advocates for children, who often served to help children bear their burdens that result from poverty, neglect, and racism, have left the field or have since suffered a relentless erosion of that close teacher-student bond that historically characterized the relation between educators and children in urban elementary schools.Ironically, that erosion has been due to a desperate effort among teachers to emphasize the positive and to avoid the negative in the face of the ever-present threat of failure and the reality of failure to make Adequate Yearly