All of the controversy about teacher evaluation is driven by the federally mandated Race To The Top. Unfortunately nowhere is the “top” precisely defined and the educrats who conceived and established the Race To The Top forgot that any race to the top begins at the bottom and they neglected to identify the “bottom” from which we are supposed to race to the “top.”

If the Race To The Top were nothing more than a children’s story based on logical paradoxes of the kind that Reverend Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) entertained Alice with, we could all laugh about the amusing logical inconsistencies. However, the Race To The Top is no whimsical children’s tale, it is a carefully orchestrated attack on the American Public School System and with it the American Free Enterprise System. Race To The Top is a thinly veiled, yet well-organized, effort to make peons, serfs and indentured servants of classroom teachers while destroying intellectual growth and creativity among children in our public schools.

The tools of this attack on the heart and soul of American Democracy are standardized tests and Value-added Models for evaluating teacher “effectiveness”.

The unaccountable educrats learned from their initial success with No Child Left Behind that they could terrorize classroom teachers and building principals and drive them away from any hope of a meaningful and fulfilling career teaching children in the classrooms of our public schools by oppressive regulations and micromanagement from afar.

Many of those same unaccountable educrats took their agenda to the new administration, updated their game plan, and brought us the Race To The Top. The purpose and the effect if they are successful is the same: destruction of the American public school system which was the heart and core of American economic success and the engine of the American Free Enterprise System.

It is time for classroom teachers and their building principals to attack all of these programs directly and show the American people how they are being duped.

It is time to call out the educrats and their political supporters and demand precise meaningful answers to simple questions. What are the declared national goals for excellence in education? What will be done to assure that every child entering the public school system has the basic preparation for learning? What will be done to assure that the public school classroom is an environment for learning, an island of peace and equanimity in an otherwise hostile and tumultuous sea of economic, social and political forces? What will be done to assure that classroom teachers in our public schools have the support and resources they need to do their job—teach our children?