Teachers' Work in the Global Culture of Performance

Abstract

Increasingly teachers find themselves working in the rarefied atmosphere of high-stakes testing. In Alberta, as in the rest of the industrialized world, the impulse to increase the monitoring and surveillance of student performance grows unabated. What are the impacts on teachers' work amid the growth of this culture of performance? Although internationally there are many debates around the issue of high-stakes testing, relatively little has been written about the lived experiences of teachers in this area. Drawing on a general review of the literature on teachers' classroom responses to high-stakes testing, this article argues that it is time to develop a framework for understanding the particular localized ways that teachers respond to the global culture of performance.