Government-management and state-education-department control over ESOL across the country have delivered to ESOL teachers the kind of protocols that do not necessitate educating or learning (not exactly the same thing, but related enough for both to be achieved without contrary effects), nor do they necessitate quality or experience be present in those who are hired. Teachers are pitted against one another in program after program across America as management reminds teachers that their jobs are not secure. Good-enough will replace good which certainly has replaced great; less-than-good-enough will soon replace good-enough, and there we will have our version of the Orwellian nightmare become our dream.
Environments across America in teacher workplaces are hostile, although all impositions on teacher integrity are always with a smile and semi-polite request, variables in the intensification of fear. The classroom, but the ESOL classroom particularly, has become adjunct to other offices of the state bureaucracy. Of course, we endure and wonder why democracy is waning. We help the state undermine education and question how the power elite has become more monied and the monied elite more powerful. What then must we do? Go along to get along has been the national mantra for as long as we have been able to get half of every set of workers to screw the other half for a little more money, if that and not some other reward that makes even less sense to anyone who might be hyper-pragmatic in matters of social advance or garnering what we like to call security–although we have little idea what the word means let alone how we use that word and what contexts we place it in giving rise to connotations we can barely understand let alone articulate for others to comprehend.
The Falling Leaf Review 