Chapter 9: From Pact to Pearson: Teacher Performance Assessment and the Corporatization of Teacher Education

Though often unrecognized, power is always operating locally, residing in and circulating through the capillaries of our daily lives (Foucault, 1988). The effects of the high-stakes standardized teacher performance assessment upon ourselves, our colleagues, our departments and our students are the focus of this chapter. In this chapter, we tell stories from the inside that illuminate how, under extreme capitalism, particular microexperiences flowing from the imposition of a particular system of assessment reproduce the injustices of corporatocracy, damaging our souls, our communities, our relationships with colleagues and students and our futures.

We write personal narratives because we believe stories embodying the impact of policies and protocols on the people who are subject to them too often go untold and unrecognized, making invisible macro-micro connections, blinding us to the power relationships they encapsulate, and allowing oppressive policies to be denied and covered up. We tell these stories in the spirit of inciting others to know, claim and tell their stories (Alexander, 2004) and to recognize how the macro forces of the corporatocracy are manifest in them. In doing so we join those other storytellers whose stories disrupt taken for granted notions of neoliberal thought. As well, we tell these stories as positioned and embodied, with the hope that the telling of stories is itself an act of resistance within the dehumanizing and technocratic oppression of neoliberalism (Denzin, 2005).