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teachers are increasingly removed from dealing with children as part of a broader historical, social and cultural context.

Removed from the normative and pedagogical framing of classroom life, teachers no longer have the option to think outside of the box, to experiment, be poetic or inspire joy in their students. School has become a form of dead time, designed to kill the imagination of both teachers and students

Under this bill, the quality of teaching and the worth of a teacher are solely determined by student test scores on standardized tests.

Moreover, advanced degrees and professional credentials would now become meaningless in determining a teacher's salary.

In other words, teaching was always directive in its attempt to shape students as particular agents and offer them a particular understanding of the present and the future.

Rather than viewed as disinterested technicians, teachers should be viewed as engaged intellectuals, willing to construct the classroom conditions that provide the knowledge, skills and culture of questioning necessary for students to participate in critical dialogue with the past, question authority, struggle with ongoing relations of power and prepare themselves for what it means to be active and engaged citizens in the interrelated local, national and global public spheres.

fosters rather than mandates

respects the time and conditions teachers need to prepare lessons, research, cooperate with each other and engage valuable community resources.

In part, this requires pedagogical practices that connect the space of language, culture and identity to their deployment in larger physical and social spaces. Such pedagogical practices are based on the presupposition that it is not enough to teach students how to read the word and knowledge critically. They most also learn how to act on their beliefs, reflect on their role as engaged citizens and intervene in the world as part of the obligation of what it means to be a socially responsible agent.

As the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, the "power of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual - lying in the realm of beliefs," and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm