Pressures from the top down

In the past week I have watched teachers and students  encounter what I am going to call evaluation anxiety. I am currently doing my student teaching at a school that has been deemed low performing. Under the last superintendent the school was labeled a promise academy. The promise academy model required longer hours, new policies and in some cases new teachers. This also meant consistent observations/walk throughs from the promise academy office to ensure the school was making progress. Recently, the promise academy office was dissolved and our school was moved into a new division. Thus, there is a new walk through team. Last week we had our first walk through with officials from the new division and I watched teachers scramble to put up student work, ensure objectives were boldly posted and make sure there lesson would hit the 7 step lesson plan that is prescribed. Conversations about the walk through buzzed in the academy offices, main offices and in the halls amongst teachers. So I was not surprised when my mentor asked me to sit in on the department meeting as they would be reviewing feedback from the walk through.  There evaluation was extremely detailed and they highlighted that teachers were not on track with the PST (state planning and scheduling timeline) and that school policies were not being enforced. In the meeting my mentor announced that we would have to move forward and get on track with the time line even if that meant completely skipping material. On the one hand I can understand their concern with making sure teachers are following some type of timeline and hitting essential topics, but on the other hand, it is beyond agitating. To have someone step into your classroom for five mins and go down a checklist with out any contextual knowledge then prescribe these quick fixes and ambiguous recommendations is a slap in the face. Who gets to decide which content is essential? and why? is it because they have a title in front of their name. So what if our kids are behaving and we are in the correct time period, if they are not getting the skills they need to be successful in the real world and situate the material conceptually it is all meaningless. This experience helped me understand how and why teachers give in to conventional ways of teaching, but what I cannot understand is why they do not stand up. Is it the culture of fear that spreads and paralyzes a person from saying what everyone is feeling? Those exerting pressure from the top down have seem to have lost the reason we do all of this (or at least I) and that is the children.