By Michelle Strater Gunderson.

I recently had an epiphany while listening to Melissa Katz, a wonderful student activist from New Jersey, talk about corporate education reform on the radio. When speaking about the swift and drastic changes in education based on implementation of Common Core and aligned tests she used the word upheaval.

Upheaval. Think about it. Is this what you are experiencing in your school setting?

The roll out of Common Core standards, aligned tests such as PARCC and Smarter Balance, and new punitive evaluations has produced what I call the Triumvirate of Upheaval. The combination of all three has disrupted almost every school in our country.

The changes have been full speed ahead, and this should concern us all. This is my 28^th year of teaching, and in my experience change in education happens slowly. It should. The ways in which we approach student learning should never be adjusted on a whim and teachers should hold on to what they know works with children. Yet, with the onset of Common Core standards we are being asked to practically throw everything we know aside and form completely new curricula. Concurrently, the textbook publishers saw an opportunity for profit and a boatload of poorly developed and un-piloted materials were rushed into the education marketplace.

My school is a case in point. It is a high-performing arts magnet school in Chicago. By anyone’s measure – school climate, test scores, educational level of faculty, parent/teacher relationships, and student satisfaction – we are an exceptional school community. Yet, this year my first grade team was asked to completely toss aside our teacher created curriculum and teach with “fidelity” the newly purchased Common Core aligned Math curriculum.

Now, to be honest, all of the lessons in the new Common Core Math curriculum are not universally horrid, but what I was teaching in Math before was amazingly good. There was no reason to completely overhaul my entire Math programming. And this is happening in classroom upon classroom around the country. Teachers are being asked to scrap what they know about teaching and children and start from scratch with really bad materials. This means throwing out volumes of craft knowledge that these teacher collectively hold and doing so for no good reason.

Why would you make teachers who are doing amazing work completely change what happens in their classrooms? This is the short answer – tests and money.

And that is not the end of it. When I looked over the textbook Common Core math lesson for the day I was scheduled for evaluation and compared it to the Danielson evaluation framework rubric, there is no way that I would be rated “distinguished” (my usual rating) if I had conducted the lesson from the teachers’ guide. There was absolutely nothing “distinguished” about that lesson – it was cut and dry. Now, there will be some readers who contend that teaching should never happen strictly from the textbook materials, and I agree. But let us think about the situation of many teachers who are working in top-down managed schools where adherence to the published curriculum in mandated, and they have no choice.

So here is the logical conclusion: If forced to teach from poorly produced Common Core aligned materials it would be almost impossible for teachers to receive high scores on their evaluations.

This is where we enter the Triumvirate of Upheaval – teachers scrambling to align classroom teaching to standards that will be tested and with which they will be evaluated. Jobs are at stake. Backing teachers into a corner and threatening them with their livelihoods is how the change, upheaval, has happened so fast.

I realize that it is very hard for teachers to publicly speak about evaluation. Teachers have been vilified as lazy public sector workers who refuse to do their jobs, and talking about the harshness of our current evaluations plays into some of the rhetoric that as workers teachers do not want to be accountable. But for the sake of our students, our profession, and the future of public schooling, teachers need to be speaking out about their personal experiences with punitive evaluations.

In the fight against the upheaval we are experiencing in our schools, this might be the most personal and difficult stance to take. Sharing your evaluation is like baring your soul. The Chicago Teachers Union has arranged for members to share their evaluations with the union so they can analyze trends and abuses. I have shared mine. I realize that my union’s organizational skills and strengths are different than other locals, but I can envision groups of teachers doing the same whether at their school site or through union caucus work.

The graphic I created for the Triumvirate of Upheaval is cyclical. I made it with Smart Art to purposefully look like to graphics many of us experience at the interminable professional development we sit through.   It is a never ending circle with Common Core, PARCC, and teacher evaluation sharing equal space.

It is my hope that we can gather the strength and courage to stand against the upheaval and stop running around in circles.

Michelle Strater Gunderson is a 28 year teaching veteran who teaches first grade in the Chicago Public Schools. She is a doctoral student at Loyola University in Curriculum and Instruction.